Digital Commons Network^™

The Role Of Avoidance In The Relationship Between The Impact Of Childhood Trauma And Physiological Responsivity To Fear And Reward In Adulthood, Tristan Alana Benjamin

Dissertations (1934 -)

Childhood trauma is prevalent and has been associated with deleterious physical and psychological outcomes that persist into adulthood. Extensive research on the neurobiological consequences of experiencing trauma has demonstrated an association between experiencing a traumatic event and elevated physiological arousal in response to fearful stimuli compared to healthy controls. By contrast, emerging research has found that adults who experienced a traumatic event during childhood demonstrate blunted physiological arousal responses. The physiological profile associated with childhood trauma may be related to coping strategies utilized; notably, children may be more likely to engage in avoidance to cope with the impact of trauma …

Testing A New Creighton Competency Evaluation Instrument For Pediatric Nursing, Elizabeth Anne Flasch

Dissertations (1934 -)

A descriptive multi-site correlational study design was used to test a modified instrument to determine its ability to assess students consistently across settings using a group of prelicensure pediatric students enrolled in two different pediatric clinical environments. Two participant groups were intentionally recruited including clinical instructors teaching in pediatric clinical environments and their corresponding students practicing in pediatric simulation and traditional clinical environments. Inter-rater reliability of the instrument was achieved. Prelicensure nursing students were deemed competent in the care of children across settings. No statistically significant correlations were found between environments. There was a relationship between student perception of confidence …

Inclusive Special Education: Changing Mindsets And Practices To Improve Student Achievement, Nicole S. Pechous

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Decades after federal mandates for special education services, students with disabilities (SWD) continue to lag significantly behind their peers in academic achievement and post–school outcomes. This quantitative study explores how the inclusive mindsets and collaborative practices of general and special education teachers from a medium–sized, suburban Midwestern district improved after participating in a year-long training series on inclusive practices. The study also explores the impact of increased inclusive mindsets and practices on student reading achievement, particularly for students with disabilities. Using a quantitative design, changes in inclusive mindsets and practices for participating teachers were analyzed. Findings indicated that participation in …

Family Processes As A Protective Factor Between Adverse Childhood Experiences And Adolescent Delinquency, Tessa Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores whether family processes (i.e., parental attachment and parental discipline/monitoring) serve as protective factors between the relationship of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and adolescent delinquency. Prior research has established an association between ACEs and many negative life outcomes, including delinquent behavior, while strong parental attachment and parental discipline/monitoring are linked to lower rates of delinquency. However, the interplay of these three factors has been understudied. Drawing on data from the 2024 Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey (FYSAS) (N=22,016), this study examines the relationship between ACEs, family processes, and delinquency using negative binomial regression models. Results indicate that parental …

Geology Education For Grades 3–12, Natalie J. Carroll, Theodore Leuenberger

Purdue University Press Books

Geology Education for Grades 3–12 guides and encourages youth to learn about the geological processes occurring all around them. Level 1 introduces basic terms and concepts, and is intended for youth in grades 3–5. Activities focus on understanding important topics such as the rock cycle, rock textures, and crystal formation. Designed for students in grades 6–8, Level 2 offers readers more concrete examples of advanced geological concepts, including fossilization, mineral formation, and rock classification. The exercises in Level 3, which is geared toward grades 9–12, includes additional information on the Earth’s varied landscapes, a variety of geological events, and the …

Working At The Margins In Interwar Yugoslavia, Stefano Petrungaro

Central European Studies

Prostitutes, beggars, folk healers, peddlers, wandering artists, and bear-leaders: Working at the Margins in Interwar Yugoslavia shows how work shaped their relations with the state and the rest of their world. The protagonists of the book’s story lived on the fringes of society and engaged in activities that were only partially recognized, from a legal and social point of view, as proper jobs, while some of them had no job at all. This book looks at Yugoslavia’s disciplining and social engineering practices through the lens of socially marginal workers. The analysis shows that in this period the South Slav regions …

Applied Research In Field Crop Pathology For Indiana, 2020, Darcy E. P. Telenko

Purdue University Press Books

Applied Research in Field Crop Pathology for Indiana, 2020 serves as a summary of the applied field crop pathology research trials conducted in 2020 under the direction of the Purdue Field Crop Pathology program in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University. In Indiana, there are more than 57,600 farms, 16,000 crop producers, and 900 certified crop advisers, Extension educators, and crop-protection industry representatives who manage more than 11.4 million crop-production acres with a total value of $6.3 billion annually. There are more than twenty diseases affecting corn, soybeans, and wheat that may decrease crop production and …

Rethinking Consumer Data And Behavior, Nicole J. Olynk Widmar, Michael L. Smith, Erin Robinson

Purdue University Press Books

Today’s food and agricultural consumers are driven by more than just price—they are influenced by trust, values, and perceptions that are often difficult to measure. Rethinking Consumer Data and Behavior explores what truly shapes consumer choices and how businesses can respond effectively.

This book utilizes research on loyalty, risk, sustainability, and ethical considerations, revealing how these factors influence purchasing decisions in ways traditional data often misses. It examines consumers’ willingness to pay for local and organic products, the impact of food labeling and safety messaging, and the surprising role of sensory cues such as appearance and taste. The book also …

Discovering The World Of Honey Bees And Beekeeping, Natalie J. Carroll, Greg Hunt, Krispn Given

Purdue University Press Books

You don’t have to be a scientist or a lifelong beekeeper to fall in love with the world of honey bees. Discovering the World of Honey Bees and Beekeeping is designed to take anyone, regardless of their experience, on a rewarding adventure by first exploring the fascinating biology and behavior of these insects. This book is designed to help readers see the environment from a bee’s perspective, revealing the vital role pollinators play in our food systems and local ecosystems. Whether you are a student, a backyard gardener, or a nature lover, this guide provides a clear, step-by-step roadmap for …

Understanding The Alternative Normative Concepts, Dewitt W. Spiller

Theses

Matti Eklund's challenge to normative realism in Choosing Normative Concepts (2017) turns on the possibility of "alternative normative concepts"—concepts that play the same normative role as ours but have different extensions. Eklund argues that the ardent realist cannot express what he calls “the further question” about which concepts to use without either trivializing the answer or changing the subject. I argue that this challenge rests on an unstated assumption about how normative concepts are differentiated. I call this the Fragility Assumption. What I seek to show is that this assumption is not obligatory; there are live views of normative concepts …

Comparing English-Speaking Third Through Sixth Grade Students' Performances On Spoken And Written Cloze Morphological Awareness Tasks, Victoria Henbest, Kenn Apel

Victoria S. Henbest Publications

Purpose: Morphological awareness, the ability to consciously think about morphemes, plays an important role in literacy achievement. Historically, when measuring morphological awareness, researchers primarily have administered tasks in the spoken rather than written modality and few have investigated the influence of modality on task performance. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine whether performance on cloze morphological awareness tasks would be different for English-speaking third through sixth grade students depending on whether the task was administered in the spoken or written modality. We also analyzed whether performance on a written version explained unique variance on measures of …

Horseshoe Kidneys In Transplantation: Underutilization Despite Comparable Quality And Favorable Outcomes: Unos Registry Analysis (2007-2023), Abigail W. Cheng, Samrawi Misiker, Roberto Sagaribay, Kavita Batra

School of Medicine Research Poster Showcase

Introduction: Horseshoe kidneys (HSKs) are the most common renal fusion anomaly, occurring in approximately 1 in 500 individuals and often discovered incidentally. Historically excluded from transplantation due to complex anatomy, advances in surgical techniques have made HSK transplantation increasingly feasible. Although successful procurement and transplantation have been described in case reports, national-level data comparing donor characteristics and organ utilization between HSK and non-HSK donors remain limited. This study characterizes donor demographics, clinical profiles, and organ utilization of HSK donors using the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) database.

Methods: A retrospective analysis of the UNOS kidney transplant registry was performed, …

Book Review: Gsg 9: From Munich To Mogadishu: The Birth Of Germany's Counterterrorism Force, Lester W. Grau

Parameters Bookshelf – Online Book Reviews

Author: Martin Herzog

Reviewed by: Lester W. Grau, Russian analyst, Foreign Military Studies Office

In the wake of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Germany forged GSG 9—an elite counterterrorism unit that would stun the world with its daring 1977 rescue mission in Mogadishu. Martin Herzog’s gripping account traces the unit’s evolution from humble beginnings to global renown, drawing on exclusive interviews and archival research. This book tells the untold story of how one covert force reshaped modern counterterrorism—and inspired the creation of America’s Delta Force.

Building On Common Ground: Autistic Adults' And Parents Of Young Autistic Children's Perspectives Of Early Behavioral Intervention Practices, Sophia R. D'Agostino, Naima Bhana-Lopez, Trenton J. Landon, Alyssa Roylance, Avery Briggs

Special Education and Rehabilitation Counseling Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to examine the perspectives of autistic adults and parents of autistic children regarding applied behavior analysis (ABA)-based early intervention, their beliefs about best practices in early intervention, and their recommendations for improving service delivery. A mixed-methods design was used to compare quantitative survey data from 70 participants (33 autistic adults, 37 parents) with qualitative interview responses (12 autistic adults, 12 parents), exploring perceptions of ABA and early intervention implementation. Quantitative analyses revealed significant group differences in perceptions of ABA’s benefits and side effects: parents rated ABA-based interventions more positively overall, whereas autistic adults expressed …

Lawson, Steven, Gabriella Luongo

Bronx Jewish History Project

Summarized by Gabriella Luongo

Steven Lawson, born in 1945, was raised in the Bronx, New York, in a working-class Jewish family. He grew up on Morris Avenue in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and describes his childhood as vibrant, safe, and deeply shaped by urban community life. His daily world included local public schools, neighborhood parks, and weekend dances at community centers such as the YM/YWHA, along with frequent trips to nearby movie theaters. He recalls being immersed in the popular music of the time, especially doo-wop and early rock and roll, which reflected the social and emotional atmosphere of his …

Hidinet-T: A Transformer Modeling For High-Dimensional Survival Analysis, Aashish Dhanani

Computer Science Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Anesthetic Management In Patients With Impella Devices: A Retrospective Review And Clinical Guide, Harrison Yang, Divakara Gouda, Kent B. Berg, Katherine Green, Suvan Sundaresh, Basavana Goudra

Department of Anesthesiology Faculty Papers

Background: The Impella family of percutaneous a left ventricular assist devices are increasingly used for hemodynamic support in patients with cardiogenic shock or advanced heart failure. However, guidance on anesthetic management for patients with Impella support undergoing noncardiac procedures remains sparse. This study reviews perioperative practices and outcomes to inform clinical management.

Methods: Following institutional review board approval, a retrospective analysis was performed of adult patients receiving an Impella device (2.5, CP, 5.0, or 5.5) at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia, USA, between December 2017 and October 2024. Patients, who subsequently underwent procedures involving anesthesia care were included. Demographics, procedure …

2026-04-15 Investigative Debater, Dylan Berman Is The Spectator’S Next Editor-In-Chief, Kaitlyn Delfs

The Spectator Online

No abstract provided.

Building A Coordinated Care Network For New Mexico Veterans: A Roadmap For Statewide Implementation, Nosa Akol, Zachary M. Bridgewater, Vincent R. Delsignore, Emily Graham, Mary Rachel Keville

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

With the support of the New Mexico State Legislature, the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) is leading a multi-phase project to design a coordinated care system for New Mexican service members, veterans, and their families. In the project’s first phase, the IVMF conducted a landscape assessment to understand the needs of the military-connected community and examined the viability of a coordinated care system for the state. We found that veteran-serving organizations that participated felt that a coordinated care network would be of value to New Mexico veterans, but questions on how best to implement such a network …

Decoding Immunotherapy Response Through Computational Modeling, Bingrui Li, Ruihan Luo, Kexin Huang, Jiajia Liu, Weiling Zhao, Xiaobo Zhou

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Immunotherapy has seen success in treating patients with cancer, but variable responses underscore the need for effective patient stratification and therapy planning. Computational tools integrating multi-omics, imaging and machine learning have advanced, yet reliable personalized predictions remain challenging. This review analyzes the field through four converging paradigms: classical machine learning, deep learning, graph and network modeling, and mechanistic systems biology. We examine the evolution from correlational features to representation learning, relational inference, and causal simulation of tumor-immune dynamics, highlighting the shift towards multi-modal fusion and interpretable, clinically deployable models. By providing an integrated review of these computational tools, we hope …

Dietary Manipulations Of The Undernourished Infant Microbiome, Cyrus Zhou

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Today, undernutrition affects approximately 150 million children worldwide. During the first two years of life, the healthy gut microbial community undergoes a series of predictable developmental transitions. These transitions are delayed in undernourished children resulting in microbiota “immaturity.” In a foundational study, immature gut microbial communities from undernourished children and normally developing communities from chronologically age-matched healthy children living in the same area were transplanted into groups of germ-free mice consuming the same diet – one representative of what consumed by the study population. Compared mice with a mature gut microbiome, mice with an immature gut microbiome had impaired weight …

Angkringan Names In Semarang: A Linguistic Landscape Study, Nurul Maghfiroh, Suhandano Suhandano, Aprillia Firmonasari

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

The article reveals the linguistic landscape study of angkringan names in Semarang City. It covers language preference, language inference, and language preservation on signages. Researchers collected 140 pictures of angkringan signages from 10 sub-districts of Semarang. Observation and interviews are also conducted to obtain comprehensive linguistic landscape data. Qualitative analysis indicates that there are two naming patterns: monolingual and bilingual. The monolingual analysis identifies that the most preferred language code is Javanese, followed by Indonesian, English, and Sanskrit. Meanwhile, in the bilingual pattern, the dominant language combination used is Indonesian-Javanese, followed by Javanese-English, Javanese-Indonesian, Javanese-Dutch, Sanskrit-English, and Sundanese-English. Meanwhile, angkringan …

Essays In Macroeconomics, Sihyun Kim

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation consists of two research projects in macroeconomics. The first chapter studies a topic in fiscal policy and sovereign debt. I became interested in this topic during my third year of the Ph.D. program while working as a research assistant for Professor Manuelli. He recommended several papers on debt sustainability in the U.S. and Japan. I initially struggled to reconcile the coexistence of low default risk and persistent fiscal deficits in these countries. This led me to think that, in addition to the realized fiscal path, the fiscal capacity---such as the tax base---can also play an important role in …

Essays On Empirical Research Of Education, Criminal And Decision, Hsuan-Hua Huang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays in applied microeconomics, examining how subjective beliefs, institutional designs, and policy incentives shape critical life-cycle decisions in education and public safety. The first chapter investigates how students form beliefs about their academic ability and how the misalignment between perceived and benchmark ability shapes high-stakes educational sorting. Using longitudinal data from Taiwan, I show that these ability gaps systematically predict school and track choices. By developing a model of utility maximization under perceived ability, the results highlight that subjective beliefs, rather than objective scores alone, are central to educational outcomes and potential mismatches in school …

Towards Modern Graph Learning: From Graph Neural Networks To Large Language Models, Jiarui Feng

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Graph-structured data provides a fundamental representation for modeling complex systems, from social networks to molecular interactions. Learning effective representations from such data is therefore a central problem in machine learning. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as the dominant paradigm for this task, achieving strong performance across node, edge, and graph-level predictions, they face significant limitations in expressiveness, adaptability, and generalization. Specifically, standard architectures often struggle to capture complex substructures—such as cycles and motifs—that are critical in scientific domains. Moreover, many models are tailored to specific tasks or distributions, limiting their ability to generalize across heterogeneous graph types. In …

Saltfish And Seedcake: Examining Fantasy Through Food Studies, Isabella Martins-Simonsen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Although mundane and often overlooked in reality, in fantasy, food, like all other things, is entirely symbolic. Therefore, considering food closely when analyzing a fantasy text offers unique insights into the world being developed, the characters within that world, and the author’s own understanding of both the real and “secondary” world. In this paper, I consider the foods of Earthsea, Narnia, and Middle Earth to offer various perspectives on the worldbuilding and examine the implications of different foods in these well-known settings. For example, the tea served in Narnia creates a fantasy world that is more normal than the strange …

Patriots And Protestant Dissenters: Early Religious Disestablishment In Revolutionary South Carolina, Nathan James Shull

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

In 1778, the newly independent government of South Carolina broke with more than a century of precedent and disestablished the Church of England by enacting Article XXXVIII of its State Constitution. This thesis weaves together the interconnected stories of Patriots such as William Tennent, Christopher Gadsden, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Oliver Hart, Richard Furman, and William Henry Drayton, demonstrating how they converged on disestablishment. While the historiography has focused on one or another religious or political group, this thesis asserts that an array of South Carolinians from across the political spectrum coalesced around disestablishment as a pragmatic solution to a variety …

Ftsz Forms Biomolecular Condensates In A Polar-Growing Alphaproteobacterium, Todd A Cameron, Miguel Ángel Robles-Ramos, Lorenzo Suigo, Silvia Zorrilla, William Margolin

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

The conserved tubulin homolog FtsZ assembles into GTP-dependent protofilaments that organize the bacterial cell division machinery. Purified Escherichia coli FtsZ (FtsZEc) can form biomolecular condensates in the absence of GTP in macromolecular crowding conditions, but FtsZ condensates have not yet been confirmed in vivo. FtsZ from the Alphaproteobacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens (FtsZAt) localizes to distinct polar foci during growth and contains an intrinsically disordered region much longer than FtsZEc, suggesting a greater tendency to form condensates. Here, we show that purified FtsZAt readily formed dynamic condensates in vitro under molecular crowding conditions, and the addition of GTP induced the formation …

Space-Time Coded Pcm/Fm For Aeronautical Mobile Telemetry, Zachary B. Hilton

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes the application of a space-time block code for the legacy continuous phase modulation called "PCM/FM" in the IRIG 106 standard to solve the "two-antenna problem". This problem arises when two transmit antennas are used for full spatial coverage at the cost of self-interference caused by the different delays between the transmit antennas and the ground-based antenna. The space-time block encoder is described using bit-level operations on the input data stream. The space-time decoder uses coherent combining and maximum likelihood sequence estimation to produce an estimate of the data sequence. Simulation results for zero and various non-zero differential …

Single-Nucleus Brain Transcriptomics Reveals Microglia Dysfunction In Multiple System Atrophy, Rasmus Rydbirk, Frederik Nørby Friis Sørensen, Jonas Folke, Henriette Haukedal, Andrea Asenjo Martinez, Irene Lisa Vargas, Simone Mcgarry, Oline Chantell Hollmann, Camila Gherardelli, Sofia Sepulveda, Adam T Szafran, Michael A Mancini, Sanne Simone Kaalund, Tomasz Brudek, Lisette Salvesen, Sara Bech, Justyna Okarmus, Peter Kharchenko, Morten Meyer, Claudio Soto, Kristine Freude, Abhisek Mukherjee, Susana Aznar, Konstantin Khodosevich

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Multiple system atrophy (MSA) is a rare, age-related neurodegenerative disease that shares clinical and pathological features with Parkinson's disease (PD) but presents a more devastating disease course. To elucidate the distinct cellular pathophysiology, we performed single-nucleus RNA sequencing on postmortem striatal brain tissue from 7 MSA and 12 PD patients, and 10 non-neurological cases. Here, we show significant compositional differences in astroglia and microglia subtypes, while oligodendroglia and neurons are comparable. PD brains show abundant microglia expressing MHC class II HLA haplotypes, indicative of a proinflammatory state, alongside more homeostatic astrocytes. In contrast, MSA lack activated microglia but has more …