Digital Commons Network^™

The History Of The Delta State University Music Department, Steven Gregory Hugley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the history of Delta State University's music department from its inception in 1925 as Delta Teachers College to the closure of the department in May 2024, just shy of the University’s centennial. The study examines the ensembles offered, student and faculty participation, and degree programs throughout the years. It also considers the department's development and the factors leading to its closure, with insights into future plans. The research provides a comprehensive overview of the music department’s evolution and impact over nearly a century.

Investigating Changes In Gait, Impact Force And Fatigue While Running At Same Relative Intensity On A Lower Body Positive Pressure Treadmill, Julia Phillilps

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Running is one of the most popular forms of physical activity in the world providing many health benefits but also leads to an increase in overuse and tendinopathy injuries. Lower body positive pressure treadmills (LBPPT) reduce body-weight (BW) impact, benefiting individuals with musculoskeletal conditions or undergoing rehabilitation. Previous research indicates LBPPT could be a potential training alternative or reintroducing exercise sooner in rehabilitation process. The purpose of this study was to examine average impact force and accumulated impact force over the course of a 5-km run at 60% of VO2peak at various % BW to examine if there is a …

"Keep Coming Back!": How Recovering Addicts Use Narcotics Anonymous For Social Rehabilitation., Taylor Leigh Ransom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the role of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) in shaping identity transformation and social reintegration among individuals in recovery. Using an ethnographic approach, including participant observation at NA meetings and semi-structured interviews with members, along with textual analysis of Narcotics Anonymous literature, this research explores how NA fosters social recovery by providing a structured yet flexible space for identity reconstruction. Through shared narratives, rituals, and peer support, members navigate the transition from an “addict” identity to one centered on personal accountability, community, and long-term abstinence from drugs.

By situating NA within broader sociological discussions of addiction recovery, social capital, …

High-Resolution And Time-Efficient Infiltration Rate Estimating Technique Using Geophysical Emi And Hydrogeological Modeling, Md Abdus Samad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Information on infiltration rates is crucial for developing climate-resilient infrastructure, optimizing irrigation in agricultural management, and tackling stormwater-related hazards. However, rapid urbanization and climate change are expected to exacerbate these risks. Therefore, proper assessment and understanding of infiltration capacity is essential for designing effective soil conservation strategies aimed at enhancing infiltration, reducing erosion, and supporting sustainable land and water management. Despite the importance, traditional methods such as single ring and double ring infiltrometer (DRI) test are limited by spatial resolution and time inefficiency, often fail to capture spatial heterogeneity across large areas.

To address these limitations, this research developed a …

Exploring Perceptions Of College Completion Obstacles Among First-Year Students With Disabilities, James Roshone Evans

Theses and Dissertations

Students with special needs encounter significant challenges that affect their development, social mobility, and ability to achieve personal and professional goals. Despite efforts to improve post-secondary education outcomes, enrollment rates among students with learning disabilities remain below average. This study examined the experiences of first-year college students with mild to moderate cognitive impairments to gain a deeper understanding of the barriers to degree completion. It examines mandatory education, California's special education laws, social support systems, and the theoretical frameworks of Tinto's theory on retention, Wahlberg's theory of academic achievement, and Astin’s scholarly roles theory. Interviews with 25 students with disabilities …

A Framework For Trauma-Informed Mediation: A Heart And Mind Approach To Conflict Resolution, Michael Saini, Raheena Lalani Dahya, Shely Polak

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Unresolved trauma histories can have both short and long-term consequences on children and parents' overall functioning. Using a trauma-informed approach to mediation, we first briefly highlight the impactofadversechildhood experiencesandunresolvedtraumasonadults. We then consider the various vulnerabilities and activations presented within mediation and the fundamental principles of trauma-informed mediation to assist parties in remaining within the "window of tolerance" during the mediation. Trauma-informed mediation is an approach that encourages mediators to be aware of potential trauma activations and to engage in compassionate practices to allow parties to engage within their own individualized "window of tolerance" to resolve disputes. We explore the unique …

Defining Arbitration, Jill I. Gross

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) does not define the term “arbitration,” the very process the one-hundred-year-old statute was enacted to promote. The absence of a definition has led to courts’ inconsistent and unpredictable application of the FAA’s regulatory benefits to agreements to resolve disputes in processes other than traditional, binding arbitration, such as appraisal, evaluation, and mediation. Additionally, with no clear definition as guidance, companies have inserted arbitration clauses into adhesive consumer and employment agreements that require “arbitration” of disputes but designate a process lacking hallmarks of due process. The Supreme Court even justified enforcing class action waivers in arbitration …

A Comparative Study Of The U.S. And Foreign Tipping Culture And How Collective Bargaining Can Eliminate Mandatory Tipping In The U.S., Matthew Zelman

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Tipping culture in the United States has gotten out of hand, but its roots go very deep. Tipping has been a part of the culture in the United States since the early 1800s, when tips were given to pirates and porters. Today, the share of workers who rely on tips as part of their wages is extraordinary, with sixty percent of service workers stating that they rely on tips for over 30 percent of their income. Many restaurants incorporate mandatory tips on customers’ bills, which has changed tipping from being voluntary.

This Note will propose that “tipped employees” across different …

Breaking The Chain: How An Alternate Dispute Resolution Process Can Be Used In The Criminal Justice System For First-Time Non-Violent Criminal Offenders, Leora Perlstein

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The criminal justice system is deeply rooted in our history. There are traditional views on how it should be run and conducted. “Founded on the concept that crimes against an individual are crimes against the state, our justice system prosecutes individuals as though they victimized all of society.” Traditionally, when individuals commit a crime, they go through the process of receiving a ticket—or if they commit a particular violent crime they will be immediately arrested—and then they go through the process of appearing in court for an arraignment in which they are “read the charges against [them]” and are either …

Designing A Victims’ Compensation System Amidst California’S Insurance Crisis: The Aftermath Of The 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires, Federica Simonelli

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This Commentary will explore critical aspects necessary for creating victims’ compensation mechanisms capable of handling claims stemming from the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires from a theoretical perspective. Drawing from the successful examples of the 2020 PG&E Fire Victim Trust, the 2023 Maui Wildfires compensation schemes, and other forms of dispute resolution (such as mediation), this Commentary will demonstrate that the challenging fallouts of environmental disasters pose increased challenges and necessitate unique dispute system design to better respond to the need for fair and equitable solutions. These systems increasingly rely on settlement funds tailored to claimants’ specific needs and have proven …

Leveraging Large-Language Models As Collaborative Reasoning Partners To Enhance Scientific Workflow, Douglas B. Craig

Wayne State University Dissertations

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed artificial intelligence, offering advanced capabilities in text generation, natural language understanding, and multi-modal interactions. However, their use as standalone tools or as perceived repositories of static knowledge has limited their potential in real-world applications, especially in critical domains like healthcare and scientific research, where transparency, explainability, and accountability are paramount. This research addresses these limitations by conceptualizing LLMs as reasoning engines within a hybrid framework that integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and case-based reasoning (CBR) within a note-taking application.

The study introduces a novel system, LmRaC, designed to enhance the reliability, explainability, …

Using Genetically Heterogenous Mice To Identify Regulators Of Immune Checkpoint Blockade Response, Justin Hackett

Wayne State University Dissertations

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors (ICI) have dramatically improved patient outcomes in metastatic lung cancer, metastatic melanoma, subtypes of renal cancer and others. However, despite the clinical success, most patients still fail to have a durable response. Understanding what determines response and predicting who will respond to therapy is essential to improving patient outcomes. To investigate genetic underpinnings of ICI response we utilized F1 crosses of C57Bl/6 with Diversity Outbred mice (DOB6F1) and multiple Collaborative Cross (CC) strains to identify and validate (respectively) genetic loci that associated with response to ICI. The genomic data suggested that the lactation and immunomodulatory peptide prolactin …

The Role Of Fruiting Bodies In Protecting A Community Of Myxococcus Xanthus Spores From The Environment, Dave Lall

Wayne State University Dissertations

Environmental microorganisms have evolved a variety of strategies to survive fluctuations in environmental conditions, including the production of biofilms and differentiation into spores. Myxococcus xanthus are ubiquitous soil bacteria that produce starvation-induced multicellular fruiting bodies filled with environmentally resistant spores (a specialized biofilm). Isolated spores have been shown to be more resistant than vegetative cells to heat, ultraviolet radiation, and desiccation. The evolutionary advantage of producing spores inside of fruiting bodies is not clear. Here, we examine a hypothesis that the fruiting body provides additional protection from environmental insults. We developed a high-throughput method to compare the recovery (outgrowth) of …

On A First Name Bias: A Bibliometric Study Of Six Writing Studies Journals, Joe Torok

Wayne State University Dissertations

On a First Name Bias: A Bibliometric Study of Six Writing Studies Journals analyzes citation, authorship, source use, and other bibliometric patterns across a small collection of peer-reviewed journals featuring research from the academic field of writing studies (also known as rhetoric and composition). The study is grounded in a small but established tradition of RAD (replicable, aggregable, data-supported) scholarship in the field and uses bibliometric methods inspired by similar, primarily historiographic research studies within the field of writing studies and by critical inquiry from scholars across disciplines who have used bibliometric analysis to interrogate troubling patterns of publishing and …

Environmental Pollution And Early-Life Metabolic Programming, Lisa Koshko

Wayne State University Dissertations

Substantial evidence demonstrates that parental pollutant exposures can induce harmful health effects in the offspring, including the predisposition to Type II Diabetes. As rates of Type II Diabetes continue to rise in younger populations, a crucial gap lies in understanding the role of parental influence in the etiology of later-life metabolic disease. Therefore, the central goal of this work was to determine how early life exposure to smoking level benzene, an endocrine-disrupting air pollutant, affects the metabolic health of offspring, and to identify potential developmental mechanisms involved in disease susceptibility. This goal was achieved using two models of early life …

The Alternative Schoolteachers Perspectives Of African American Males' Experiences In Alternative Education, Carlita Yevonne Y. Earl

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study explores how alternative educators perceive the experiences of African American male students in Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs (DAEPs). Guided by critical epistemology and grounded in Critical Race Theory, the research uses narrative inquiry to examine the ways in which disciplinary reassignment from traditional school settings affects Black male students. The study highlights the systemic issues that disproportionately affect African American males while addressing the larger context of educational inequality and its relationship to the school-to-prison pipeline. The results show that alternative teachers are aware of the critical need for equity-focused professional development, culturally sensitive practices, and …

The Category Is: Body: A Pcsim Approach To Culture-Specific Bid Healing Programming For Bgcm, Gabriel A. Delong

Wayne State University Dissertations

Black gay cismen (BGCM) are among the highest population demographics to experience body image dissatisfaction (BID) and among the least likely to seek healing programming. Culture-specific experiences such as sexual racism have been linked to body image dissatisfaction among BGCM. While the harmful experiences of sexual racism have been studied among BGCM, body image healing programming continues to address the needs of predominantly White straight ciswomen. Additionally, medical mistrust, identity preservation, and culturally incongruent healing practices have been linked to reasons BGCM are reluctant to seek healing practices. This dissertation aims to address the gap in existing literature by employing …

Improving The Robustness Of Compressed Deep Learning Models Against Class Imbalance, Baraa Saeed Ali

Wayne State University Dissertations

Deep Learning (DL) models are deployed ubiquitously, as they power a wide range of critical applications, including image classification, fraud detection, autonomous vehicles, robots, and NLP. However, their massive size and huge memory footprint (overparameterization) represent a serious challenge to the efficient deployment of such models, especially in resource-scarce environments such as wearable devices, smartphones, edge devices, and embedded systems. Therefore, model compression techniques are typically used to shrink the model size to the currently available computational and memory budget and to accelerate training and inference without sacrificing model accuracy and performance. Therefore, the DL research community considers model compression …

Passing The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act: Gun Control After 30 Years, Kory Lohrmann

Wayne State University Dissertations

In June of 2022, the United States Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) after nearly 30 years of inaction. This dissertation analyzes why after decades of status quo maintenance (lack of gun control action), Congress decided to act following the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde Texas. This research uses hypotheses generated from Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) to compare six different mass shootings to examine what set the Uvalde shooting apart from other similar shooting within the last 15 years. This study analyzes media coverage, public opinion shifts, political saliences, election cycles, and victim characteristics to break down …

Worlds Built And Borrowed: A Paracosmic Exploration Of The Metatextual Unconscious, Ryleigh Michele Roberts

Master’s Theses

This thesis explores literary phenomenology through the lens of fictional world-building and borrowing, integrating psychoanalytic play theories and reader response criticism, primarily through the works of D.W. Winnicott, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser. In applying this theoretical approach, the thesis investigates how fictional worlds function as intermediary phenomena through which creators can externalize and process their individual or collective experiences of being. Employing a comprehensive literary survey framework, the project spans a diverse range of texts, from canonical literature, such as the Brontës’ juvenilia and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, to contemporary works like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and E.L. James’ Fifty Shades …

Assessing Genetic Diversity And Population Structure In The Imperiled Aconitum Reclinatum (White Monkshood), An Endemic Wildflower Of Central Appalachia, Diamanda A. Zizis

Master’s Theses

Aconitum reclinatum, white monkshood (Ranunculaceae), is a Pennsylvania critically imperiled plant species found in five states of the Appalachian region of the United States: Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. This plant is adapted to cool, moist environments but faces threats from increasing habitat loss, deer browse, logging, and changes in rainfall and temperature associated with climate change. Comprehensive knowledge of A. reclinatum genetic population structure remains limited. To address this, we collaborated with Natural Heritage programs within the range of A. reclinatum to sample populations across the species distribution and generate a genotyping-by-sequencing data set of …

Long Term Outcomes In Pediatric Patients With Moyamoya Syndrome And Moyamoya Disease Treated With Encephaloduroarteriosynangiosis (Edas) + Pial Synangiosis: A Single Institution Experience, Matthew Jarrell, Sage Rahm, Nadine Bradley, Anastasia Smith, Jesse Jones, James M. Johnston

UAB Huntsville Research Day - All Presentations

2025 oral presentation

The Role Of Cortisol And Cortisone Levels In Atrial Fibrillation, Jacob Greer, Peng Li, Tanja Dudenbostel

UAB Huntsville Research Day - All Presentations

2025 research poster

Racial Differences In Urinary Cortisol Levels And Left Ventricular Hypertrophy In Patients With Resistant Hypertension, Soumyadeep Bag, Peng Li, Jacob Greer, Tanja Dudenbostel

UAB Huntsville Research Day - All Presentations

2025 research poster

Breaking Barriers: Improving Access To Community Resources In Primary Care, Dejah Patton, Victoria Deal, Azeline Arcenal, Meredith Lewis

UAB Huntsville Research Day - All Presentations

2025 research poster

Case Report: Moyamoya Disease In An African American Woman, Mabel Berg, Ahmed Ali, Farrah Ibrahim

UAB Huntsville Research Day - All Presentations

No abstract provided.

Testosterone Therapy For Depression In Men: High Potential, Limited Evidence, Tina Huang, Mina Takahashi, Luis Benitez, Anupama Yedla, Janaki Nimmagadda, Clinton Martin

UAB Huntsville Research Day - All Presentations

No abstract provided.

Treatment Of Histoplasmosis With Posaconazole In The Setting Of A Severe Itraconazole Hypersensitivity Reaction: A Case Report, Kinsey M. Johannemann, Megan Z. Roberts, Samir Allos, Madeline Belk, Spencer H. Durham, Jonathan Edwards

UAB Huntsville Research Day - All Presentations

No abstract provided.

Neurosarcoidosis Presenting As Isolated Hypogonadotropic Hypogonadism, Ahmed Qaedi, Hope Lackey, Kaehler Roth, Farrah Ibrahim

UAB Huntsville Research Day - All Presentations

No abstract provided.

Gone Glomeruli : A Case Of Severe Crescentic Iga Nephropathy, Aesha Patel, Hinal Rathi, Hope Lackey, Emily Custer, Alan Baggett

UAB Huntsville Research Day - All Presentations

No abstract provided.