Digital Commons Network^™

Health-Related Quality Of Life In Covid-19 Patients: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis Of Eq-5d Studies, Kidu Gidey, Yirga Legesse Niriayo, Solomon Weldegebreal Asgedom, Erica I. Lubetkin

Publications and Research

Background

COVID-19 has affected millions globally, with a significant proportion experiencing long-COVID and impaired health-related quality of life (HRQoL). This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to synthesize the existing literature on HRQoL in COVID-19 patients.

Methods

We conducted a systematic search of PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Scopus, and the Cochrane Library for studies published between December 2019 and March 2025. Eligible studies were peer-reviewed and assessed HRQoL in COVID-19 patients using the EQ-5D instrument. Study quality and risk of bias were evaluated using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Pooled health utility values were estimated using a random-effects model, and heterogeneity was …

Melting Behavior Of Direct Reduced Iron Pellets With Different Carbon Content In Molten Steel And Molten Slag, Fabian Andres Calderon Hurtado, Joseph Govro, Arezoo Emdadi, Ronald J. O'Malley

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This study investigates the melting behavior of direct reduced iron (DRI) pellets in molten slag and steel baths, focusing on how the carbon content influences the melting rate through the stirring effects of gas evolution on heat transfer. A computational model using COMSOL Multiphysics 6.1 is developed to simulate the temperature profile at the pellet's core and the gas evolution resulting from the reaction between FeO and carbon within the pellet. The model is validated using experimental data from this study as well as literature on the DRI pellet–molten slag system. Results indicate that, despite the increased enthalpy demand associated …

0894: G. W. “Jerry” Sutphin River Transportation Collection, 1832-2024, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

Gerald W. “Jerry” Sutphin was a nationally recognized river historian from Huntington. He graduated from Mullens High School and Marshall University and became an army officer. Sutphin worked for and retired from the United States Army Corps of Engineers before spending twenty years operating his own business, Visual Information Ltd. The author of Sternwheelers on the Great Kanawha River, he also wrote a number of articles and contributed to numerous publications with words and/or photographs. Sutphin provided historical presentations on the Delta Queen and other large sternwheel excursion boats and served as a consultant for several documentaries and exhibits. Sutphin …

The Parthenon, October 01, 2025, Baylee Parsons, Kaitlyn Fleming, Ashton Pack, Nate Harrah, Caden Adkins, Scott Price, Lilli Ross, Wade Sullivan

The Parthenon

No abstract provided.

Assessing Nursery Quality In Elkhorn Slough: Effects Of Hypoxia And Elevated Temperature On Two Juvenile Flatfish Species, Grace Teranishi

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Estuaries provide many important ecosystem services connecting the land and sea. For example, they act as nurseries by providing food, habitat, and refuge for juvenile fish that support economically valuable fisheries as adults. However, environmental and anthropogenic stressors, such as warming and hypoxia (i.e., low oxygen), have been linked with biodiversity loss, fish kills, and reduced fish growth, marking a major threat to the availability of high quality nurseries. This study evaluated spatial variation in environmental conditions and nursery function of distinct regions in Elkhorn Slough, a large eutrophic estuary on the Central California coast that supports juvenile flatfish populations …

Combating Obesity: Creating A Comprehensive Wellness Plan For Uninsured & Low-Income Populations, Kayla C. Berrios

Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Projects

Aim: The aim of this project was to research the specific barriers encountered by obese patients that are low-income and uninsured. The goal of this data collection was to inform the stakeholders involved in creating a comprehensive wellness plan for obese patients.

Background: The staff at Good Neighbor Clinic have struggled to support their support their obese patients with weight reduction. Many of the ailments that patients seek care for correlate to their obesity. Health promotion in this community clinic needs a more comprehensive program to support patients during their weight loss experience, providing support and resources to allow for …

Exploring Barriers To Patient Care In A South Carolina Free Clinic, Jonathan G. Green

Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Projects

Access to healthcare remains a persistent challenge for medically underserved populations who rely on free medical clinics for primary care services, particularly in non-Medicaid expansion states such as South Carolina. Free clinics serve as critical safety-net providers, yet patients frequently encounter barriers that limit access, continuity, and quality of care. The purpose of this Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) project was to explore and identify the structural, social, and interprofessional barriers to patient care within a South Carolina free medical clinic to inform targeted, evidence-based interventions. A mixed-methods needs assessment design was used, combining a retrospective chart review of forty …

Empowering Mothers: A Digital Intervention For Perinatal Mental Wellness, Morgan Edmunds

Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Projects

Aim: The aim of this project was to develop a smartphone application prototype for peripartum mental health. The goal of this application was to enhance access to education and quality mental health care.

Background: Currently, in the United States, peripartum mental health conditions are the leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality (The Joint Commission, 2023). There is a gap in education, screening, and treatment for peripartum mental health due to distrust and a lack of resources, including a lack of mental health providers (Dossette et al., 2024; Feldman & Perret, 2023). Therefore, there is a significant number of women …

A Quick Start Guide To Science Of Reading Aligned Textbooks For Literacy Instruction, Melanie R. Kuhn, Jennifer Schumaker, Catherine Mcbride

Science of Reading

Faculty in Educator Preparation Programs (EPPs) are facing the critical task of selecting appropriate textbooks and course materials as programs across the United States are realigning their curriculum for literacy instruction to reflect the evidence-based principles of the Science of Reading (SoR). This quick-start guide was developed from a collaborative discussion during The Reading League - Indiana Higher Education Collaboration’s September 2025 meeting. It offers a quick start list of foundational and supplementary texts. The guide highlights a few of the most popular comprehensive textbooks used and includes their National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) rating. While not exhaustive, this …

Dispute Resolution Tailored For Digital Assets, Michele Kallo

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

As digital asset markets continue to expand, the need for efficient and reliable dispute resolution mechanisms has grown increasingly pressing. In May 2022, alone, over 200 individual and class action lawsuits related to digital assets were filed, with cases only deepening in nuance. Traditional litigation, with its high costs, slow timelines, and jurisdictional complexities, often falls short in resolving such disputes. In reaction to these limitations, decentralized arbitration platforms have emerged as spaces for dispute resolution. While innovative, these platforms’ susceptibility to issues such as market volatility, barriers to juror diversity, and impartiality limitations raise questions about their effectiveness as …

“Vote For Woman Suffrage And Democracy At Home” Holland, Mi And The Fight For Enfranchisement, 1912-1920, Anna Stowe

Archives and Special Collections Quarterly

“Vote for Woman Suffrage and Democracy at Home” Holland, MI and the Fight for Enfranchisement, 1912-1920

Column: From the Director of Archives and Special Collections

Honors Faculty Research Talk Ml Tlachac, Ml Tlachac

Honors Programs

PowerPoint Slides of Honors Research Talk by ML Tlachac.

Mems 4110: Improving Restaurant Efficiency: Automatic Egg Peeler, Shanice Isimbi Mutabazi, Kyle Bryant Okui, Max Ari Siefert, Lani Fancesca Espinel

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Neon Greens is a salad restaurant in St. Louis, MO that focuses on serving fresh, locally sourced ingredients. One of their signature menu items includes soft and hard-boiled eggs, which are used in large quantities every day. Currently, these eggs are peeled by hand, which can be slow, inconsistent, and difficult to keep up with during busy hours. Because of this, Neon Greens needs a faster and more reliable way to peel eggs without increasing labor. Our project aims to design a device that can peel eggs automatically, reduce prep time, and stay safe and easy to clean in a …

The Effect Of Fascicular Elastin On The Mechanical And Functional Properties Of Healthy, Damaged, And Healing Tendon, Shawn Pavey

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Mechanical properties of tendon are highly influenced by structural protein composition and microscopic sub-structures. Within the largest subunit of tendon, the fascicle, the role of the elastin protein remains understudied despite impressive extensibility and fatigue resistance of its resulting elastic fibers. While previous work catalogued contributions of fascicular elastin across tendon type and species, the anticipated effects of elastin in fatigue and healing have not yet been explored. While previous knockout mouse models showed that disruption of elastic fibers led to altered mechanical properties (e.g., increased linear modulus), these models depended on heterozygous elastin deficiency or indirect knockout of proteins …

Mems 4110: Asme Challenge, Jon Cossman, Jonathan Young, Nate Nowel

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The goal of this project was to design and assemble a remote controlled device for a competition that can maneuver through a course, collect trash units from 3D-printed trash bins, and bring them to a receptacle at the end of the course. Important factors to consider in the design involved ensuring it followed traffic laws through the course, making sure it could operate multiple times, and fit within price and space constraints. Prototypes were tested against the ability to deliver 75 percent of trash units within 5 minutes, 50 percent of trash units within 5 minutes without any traffic violations, …

Mems 4110: Egg Peeler Group L1, Brian Hau, Alex Kenn Lee, Aisha Bah, Shanaelle Nabatmama

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Neon Greens is a quick-serve salad concept located in St. Louis, MO. Part hydroponic farm and
part restaurant, they focus on growing a majority of their greens in-house, and emphasize
transparency in food systems.
In recent months, they added a ‘Protein Caesar’ salad to the menu. That salad features two
‘jammy’ boiled eggs which are cut in half. Staff at Neon Greens steam eggs precisely in their
Combi oven and shock them to stop the cooking process. They then peel those eggs by hand.
On some days, they must process >100 eggs, which can take up to 1.5 hours of …

Mems 4110: Interactive Racecar Dynamics Exhibit, Leonardo Gomes, Hunter Rocker, Joseph Norris, Jack Coode

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Visitors at science museums often struggle to understand how launch speed, lane choice, and banked-curve dynamics influence a car’s trajectory. Existing educational exhibits rarely provide repeatable measurements or clear physics demonstrations. This project addresses that gap by creating an interactive racecar dynamics exhibit with a controlled launcher, 3D-printed banked track geometry, and optical timing gates. The goal is to give users measurable feedback on velocity, lane behavior, and motion through a 31° banked turn while maintaining safety, durability, and fast reset time for continuous hands-on learning.

Mems 4110: Rapid Drink Chiller, Aidan F. Moriarty, John Babineau, Levi Gingerich, Quinn Close

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The purpose of this document is to outline the purpose and function of the rapid drink chiller device. This device is designed to replace traditional portable drink cooling methods, such as traditional styrofoam coolers, fridges, etc. Traditional methods require the transport and inclusion of ice, and require overly long cooling times, with the exception traditional fridges which are non-portable. The rapid drink chiller is designed to be light and compact in order to maximize transportability, accomplished via an all foam insulation construction around a waterproof box. The box is filled with a water-ethanol solution which is cooled to extremely low …

Mems 4110: Dbf Banner, Pachie Ackerman-Bennett, Joshua Paul Laue, Nazifa Younus

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The DBFBanner is a project made for the WashU Design / Build / Fly club. After interviewing DBF club president Sarah Donner, we interpreted the club’s needs as: (1) a banner that could achieve vertical stability in flight; (2) the banner could deploy and release remotely; (3) the banner and associated components were as light as possible. We went through several design iterations, including mathematical and CAD models, mockups, prototypes, and testing apparatus. Many designs were considered, including designs based on linear motion and collapsible trusses. We arrived at a design that used a servo motor to rotate a 3D-printed …

Mems 4110: Precise Water Distribution System, Morelia R. Reyes-Perez, Jp Torack, Jakob Ayala

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This project focuses on designing and prototyping an automatic precise watering system to support plant research conducted in the Washington University greenhouse. The customer, graduate student Christina Youngpeter, needs a reliable method for delivering accurately measured water volumes to individual plants as part of a study on hydration effects. Manual watering can be time consuming, our system will provide a programmable, repeatable, and low maintenance solution.

Mems 4110: Asme Waste Collection Challenge, Leslie Alfaro, Cathy Zhao, Bari Diamond, Obike Anwisye

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

For this project, our goal was to design and build a remote-controlled wastecollection robot that could pick up trash bins and deliver their contents to a dumpsite while staying within the strict rules of the ASME challenge. The robot had to fit inside a 50 cm cube, drive through six-inch lanes, follow traffic rules, and be fully controlled by a six-channel RC controller. These constraints shaped almost every decision we made throughout the design process.

Mems 4110: N1 Precise Water Distribution System, Lillian Salter, Ye Huang, Elaine Wang, Joy Luo

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The aim of the project is to construct a precise water distribution system for anthropology graduate student Christina Youngpeter, who is studying the impact of hydration levels on the growth of quinoa plants. As her experiment grows in scale, she increasingly needs a system that can measure and distribute water for her, saving hours otherwise spent meticulously measuring water for 36 plants and counting. The system must measure water accurately and distribute it to the plants cleanly and efficiently. It should also be scalable and autonomous, requiring minimal human intervention.

Mems 4110: Dbf Deployable Banner, Julia Peppe, Danny Bruns, Sarah Donner, Michael Safier

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Create a device that stores a banner in an RC aircraft that can be remotely deployed to be towed and released upon command.

Mems 4110: Air Cannon Launcher Demo, Jackson Strauss, Avery Cohen, Wilson Gao, Jack Galloway

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

For our senior design class (MEMS 4110) at Washington University in St. Louis, we were tasked with creating a demonstration for the St. Louis Science Center that demonstrated an engineering principle or concept. The Science Center functions as a science-oriented museum and saw more than 600,000 visitors in 2024. For our demonstration, we wanted to showcase the principles of kinematic motion. Kinematic motion is study of the motion of objects without considering applied forces. Additionally, when the acceleration of an object is either zero or held constant, the trajectory path that the object follows can be described by a few …

Mems 4110: Trash-E (Terrain-Adaptive Remote Autonomous Sanitation Hauling Engineer), Jackson R. Weisbard, Raza Rabbani, Dhruv Goel, Kj Kernan

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The TRASH-E (Terrain-Adaptive Remote Autonomous Sanitation Hauling Engineer) project was created to compete in the 2025 ASME Student Design Challenge. For 2025, the ASME SDC asked for the development of a remotecontrolled robot that could collect and deposit trash from receptacles placed around a miniature city. The robot had to adhere to specific size and weight constraints, as well as obey traffic laws in the same manner as a real driver operating a motor vehicle.

Mems 4110: Parachute Snatch Force Tester, Adam Mallalieu, Ethan Riak, Jackson Shurman, Ryan Schmadtke

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

This report discusses the design, development, and testing of a parachute snatch force tester for MEMS 411 Senior Design. The device is for the WURocketry Team, and aims to measure the peak force exerted on the rocket bulkhead during parachute ejection. This peak force is known as the snatch force, and is incredibly important when it comes to maintaining safety, improving performance, and material selection during the rocket’s production process. Current methods for testing and recording this snatch force are limited, so our team aimed to create a simple and cost effective solution. Our design utilizes a vertical support that …

Mems 4110: Arduino-Controlled Precise Water Distribution System, Jack M. Williams, Joe Sieracki, Nina Woodward

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Christina Youngepeter is a Graduate Student of Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is studying an ancient plant that fell out of use after 1400 CE, whose ideal watering conditions are lost to time. To better characterize the plant, Christina is running an experiment to determine the ideal watering conditions for plant development. This involves watering sets of the plant with different volumes of water twice a day. The different volumes of water received by the groups of plants are 933 mL, 833 mL, 733 mL, 617 mL, 517 mL, and 417 mL. The acceptable percent error in …

Mems 4110: Asme Garbage Collection Challenge, Johnny F. Malley Iii, Sam R. Waggoner, Kyler R. Kosanke, Oliver N. Stitt

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The AY25-26 ASME Student Design Competition (SDC) is inspired by the global issue of recycling and waste collection management. Garbage and recycling are, in many instances, collected at the curb or roadside, where residents and/or business establishments place their garbage and recyclables in designated containers for pickup by local waste management companies or municipalities. In some areas around the world, waste collection is a challenge to establish due to variations in terrains and storage locale/capacity. In some instances, waste management companies might utilize a single vehicle that separates materials during the collection process to minimize the number of required vehicles …

Mems 4110: Asme Waste Collection Challenge, Theo A. Mass, Grant Kaplan, Emanoeel Ghabrial, Joseph Gillett

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

The Efficient Jolley Trash Grabber (EJTG) is a teleoperated vehicle adherent to the modified rules of the 2025-26 ASME Student Design Competition, hosted in MEMS 4110: Mechanical Engineering Design Project. The vehicle design was informed first by understanding the problem of waste collection. Patents, existing devices, user needs, and relevant codes and standards were reviewed to survey potential design approaches. The concept for the vehicle was generated by setting functionality, and brainstorming solutions to accomplish each goal. A mock-up vehicle was created using available materials, and four complete concepts were drawn each with a different design. Rigorous methods were used …

Mems 4110: Egg Project, Rebecca Leighann Boone, Courtney Davis, Bebel Trani

Mechanical Engineering Design Project Class

Peeling hard-boiled eggs by hand is a time-consuming and tedious task that often results in dimples and cracks in the final product. Many chefs and home cooks have tried techniques, from boiling the eggs in baking soda to slipping off egg shells using a spoon, to perfect the peeling process. However, these attempts often fall short by either altering the taste of the egg or extending the amount of time and labor. In the restaurant business, having employees peel eggs for long periods of time is costly. The local St. Louis salad restaurant, Neon Greens, is selling a new protein-dense …