Digital Commons Network^™

Nonprofit Youth Sports Governance Structures As Contexts For Positive Youth Development: How Usa Swimming's Local Swimming Committee Boards Provide The "Big Three" Of Positive Youth Development Settings, Emily B. Swett

All Dissertations

This study examines positive youth development (PYD) within youth sports governance, specifically USA Swimming's Local Swimming Committee (LSC) boards of directors, a context largely overlooked in PYD research, which typically focuses on on-field experiences.

Using the "Big Three" PYD framework (positive youth-adult relationships, life skill-building opportunities, and youth leadership and contribution), the study employed an explanatory mixed methods design. A quantitative survey was distributed to LSC athlete and non-athlete board members, followed by semi-structured interviews.

Survey data from 27 athletes and 157 non-athletes revealed strong levels of all "Big Three" components across both groups. Statistical analyses found no significant differences …

Monomial Quadratic Identities Of Hecke Eigenforms, Trevor Vilardi

All Dissertations

Duke and Ghate independently studied the question of when it is possible for the product of two eigenforms to be an eigenform. In this dissertation, we take up a generalization of that question, namely is it possible for the product of two eigenforms to be equal to a different product of two eigenforms? Under this formulation, the question becomes closer to one about unique factorization, i.e., how closely do eigenforms work like irreducible elements? Our conjecture is that there are only finitely many cases where the product of two eigenforms is equal to a different product of two eigenforms, and …

Versatile Exoskeleton Control Paradigms For Agile Human Locomotion: Task-Agnostic And Stability-Augmented Assistance, Miao Yu

All Dissertations

Lower-limb exoskeletons have shown great potential for assisting human locomotion, but designing controllers that provide assistance across diverse locomotor tasks and under external perturbations remains a major challenge. Many existing controllers for steady-state walking rely on pre-defined reference trajectories, which constrain voluntary human motion and limit adaptability across tasks. Moreover, they usually assume stable walking, while their performance under unstable conditions remains largely unexplored. In addition, existing gait stability augmentation controllers are often reactive rather than proactive to unstable conditions. In this dissertation, we propose control frameworks that preserve voluntary human motion while addressing two major challenges: providing task-agnostic assistance …

Learning Global Context For Sparse Activity Recognition In Lengthy Recordings With Limited Dataset Size, Zeyu Tang

All Dissertations

This dissertation describes methods to analyze lengthy recordings of data in order to detect sparsely occurring activities. The narrative below describes the progression of research that led to the development of these methods and their generalization into a unified framework. My research started with designing models for dietary monitoring, including detecting meals from day-long recordings and detecting intake gestures from meal-length recordings. Both tasks share some common characteristics: (a) the target event takes only a small portion of data recordings, and (b) there is global context within full-length data recordings that can help a model make better decisions. After finishing …

Generalizable Adaptation For Vision-Language Models, Niloufar Alipour Talemi

All Dissertations

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently emerged as powerful frameworks for learning joint representations across visual and textual modalities. These models enable a wide range of applications, including visual recognition, multimodal reasoning, and visual question answering. However, adapting large pre-trained VLMs to downstream tasks while preserving their strong generalization ability remains a significant challenge, particularly under domain shifts or limited supervision. This dissertation focuses on developing methods for generalizable adaptation of VLMs, aiming to improve robustness, efficiency, and applicability across diverse tasks and environments.

First, this work introduces novel prompt learning strategies for adapting CLIP-style …

Experimental And Computational Investigation Of The Effects Of Neck Musculature During Head Impacts In American Football, Anthony P. Marino

All Dissertations

Anthropometric test devices (ATDs) are human surrogate models used to represent the human body response in the context of compliance and safety testing. These devices are used in multiple industries, including automotive and aerospace, and have recently been incorporated into impact testing for the evaluation of helmet performance in American football. The Hybrid III 50^th percentile male ATD head and neck assembly is the most commonly used surrogate for these tests, although it was developed for automotive frontal crash scenarios that induce an inertial force on the body, leading to head and neck motion primarily in the sagittal plane. …

Towards Generalizable Representation Learning Across Domains, Hossein Kashiani

All Dissertations

Despite remarkable progress in deep learning, a major challenge remains: machine learning models often struggle to generalize to unseen domains under distribution shift. In real-world settings, data often differ from training conditions due to changes in lighting, sensor type, image resolution, and style. These differences can significantly degrade performance, highlighting the need for representations that are both robust and generalizable. This thesis addresses this challenge by developing a set of frameworks for generalization across domains in anomaly detection, deepfake detection, and vision-language image recognition. For anomaly detection, this thesis introduces ROADS, a robust prompt-driven framework for multi-class unified anomaly detection. …

Credit Accessibility In Diverse Urban Communities And The Dynamics Of Their Lending Markets: The Case Of Minority Depository Institutions, Noara Razzak

All Dissertations

In my dissertation, I study credit access in diverse urban communities, the role of the financial institutions that serve them, such as Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs) and non-MDIs. The first chapter studies the effect of bank branch closures (both MDIs and non-MDIs) on credit access in these diverse urban communities. MDIs are US community banks that are owned and operated by minority populations, such as Black-owned, Asian-owned, Hispanic-owned banks or Native-owned banks. The second chapter studies the proximity of Black-owned banks to historically segregated urban neighborhoods. More specifically I study whether surviving Black-owned banks are more likely to be present …

Quantifying The Value Of Adaptability: Bridging Real Options Analysis And Adaptable Building Design, Miranda Grice

All Dissertations

As the demands of the built environment continually evolve, buildings are expected to meet changing occupancy needs, or otherwise they become obsolete. Despite positive research on the benefits of adaptable building design, there is a knowledge gap regarding the long-term economic benefits of these designs. Practical methods are needed to determine if premium costs associated with adaptable designs are justified by the economic benefits inherent in adaptability. Therefore, this dissertation provides a discussion on the application of the financial theory of options analysis to the design of adaptable buildings. Additionally, a model and accompanying tool are presented as a solution …

Decision Making For Large-Scale Problems Under Uncertainty And Conflict, Benjamin J. Hamlin

All Dissertations

Large-scale decision-making problems appear in many areas including long-range forecasting such as energy generation forecasting. Many such problems are subject to conflicting objectives and uncertain data, and can be modeled as linear optimization problems. We study novel theoretical results and algorithms for large-scale linear decision problems under conflict and uncertainty. First, we propose a parametric Benders decomposition algorithm for solving large-scale linear optimization problems with multiple objectives or deterministically uncertain objectives. Second, we extend the parametric Benders decomposition to a multi-stage setting, developing a parametric stochastic dual dynamic programming algorithm, which enables decision-making when conflicts and uncertainty have planning impacts …

Modernizing Plastics And Composites Manufacturing Using Hybrid Modeling Techniques, Luke Shannon

All Dissertations

Plastics and composites manufacturing encompasses a broad family of processes, including injection molding, resin transfer molding, compression molding, and extrusion, that together account for the vast majority of polymer and composite component production worldwide. These processes are inherently challenging due to the multi-physics nature of polymer processing, the vast possible combinations of resins, reinforcements, and additives, and the strong dependence of final part properties on process history. Among these processes, injection molding is one of the most widely deployed, producing high-volume components across automotive, medical, consumer electronics, and packaging industries. However, accurately monitoring and predicting process behavior in injection molding …

Optimal Allocation Of Flexible Servers In Healthcare Systems, Tong Zhang

All Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the optimization of worker allocation in healthcare systems, focusing on flexible staffing models and the strategic prioritization of healthcare tasks. This research explores the dynamics among pre-operative, operative, and post-operative care units under various cost and service-rate constraints, using a series of models that represent realistic healthcare scenarios within a comprehensive framework for improving patient flow and reducing waiting costs.

In Chapter 2, we model and analyze cross-trained nurse allocation policies within an inpatient surgical system. We model the surgical system as a tandem clearing queueing system and formulate Markov decision processes under different business rules governing …

Parameterized Polynomial Systems: Monodromy, Sparse Polynomials, And Solutions, Julianne Barnhart

All Dissertations

The lift of a loop in the base space of a branched cover to the cover induces a permutation of points in a fibre. The monodromy group of the branched cover is the permutation group generated by all such permutations. When loops are restricted to a particular subset of the base space, the corresponding permutation group induced by these loops is the restricted monodromy group. Monodromy groups encode structure and symmetries of many enumerative problems. We describe the relationship between the restricted monodromy group and the monodromy group of the original branched cover. Our main result is a local-to-global property: …

Integrating Incentive Design And Spatial Prioritization For Climate-Smart Forestry Adoption In South Carolina, United States, Miah Maye Pormon

All Dissertations

Forests provide essential ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, water regulation, timber production, and habitat provision. However, increasing development pressures and land-use changes threaten forest persistence and long-run ecosystem service provision. Climate-smart forestry (CSF) practices, such as improved forest management and extended rotation, offer opportunities to enhance carbon storage, forest resilience, and economic livelihoods. The effectiveness of these practices depends on forest owners’ participation and the strategic allocation of financial resources or incentives. This dissertation develops an integrated framework that combines behavioral economic analysis and mapping to improve the design of current incentive programs. The first chapter employs the Contingent Valuation …

Galois Action And Arithmetic In Algebraic Number Fields, Jared Kettinger

All Dissertations

This dissertation explores the arithmetic of numerous algebraic objects living within an algebraic number field from submonoids of the integers up to localizations of the ring of integers. We begin with a study of factorization in proper orders using an element-theoretic approach. In Chapter 2, by defining a natural generalization of the Davenport constant, we are able to determine the elasticity of certain orders whose integral closure is a unique factorization domain. In Chapter 3, using ideal-theoretic analogues, we are able to significantly broaden the scope of our results and the literature on factorization in orders. In particular, we give …

Development Of A Mixing-Controlled Combustion Model For 0d Engine Modeling: Using High-Order Models To Guide The Formulation Of Reduced-Order Models, James Gohn

All Dissertations

Vehicles are becoming increasingly complex to comply with the increasingly stringent regulations placed on all market sectors while still maintaining performance requirements. This increased complexity leads to increases in the cost and time it takes to develop and produce these next generation vehicles. To meet demand therefore, it becomes necessary to evaluate numerous design iterations using computer models. There are multiple levels of models that may be necessary for different purposes or use cases. All levels of modeling for virtual prototyping, however, require a level of validation and predictive ability to be useful. To this end, the following thesis presents …

X-Raying The Material Surrounding Active Supermassive Black Holes, Isaiah S. Cox

All Dissertations

It is important to understand the nature of the gas and dust immediately surrounding the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in active galactic nuclei (AGN), because this material feeds the accretion disk and couples the activities going on at the AGN scale to the host galaxy. However, there remain large uncertainties on basic properties about this material such as its location and distribution. This is primarily due to the difficulties in resolving spatial information on these scales at extragalactic distances.

AGN emit a tremendous amount of radiation all across the electromagnetic spectrum, including X-rays. The X-rays come from a very small …

Effects Of Tourist Feeding On The Gut Microbiome And Ecophysiology Of Endangered Northern Bahamian Rock Iguana (Cyclura Cychlura), Erin Lucy Lewis

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

The lifespan and reproduction of an animal depends on maintaining a healthy physiology. The proportion of individuals that survive to an age at which procreation can occur is important to long-term stability of populations and contributes to species survival. Health in an animal is measured in a variety of ways, including through monitoring of the body’s physiological systems, as well as its ability to respond to invading pathogens, and through the different types of bacteria present in the gut. Relationships among those different health metrics have been discovered in recent years and have been found to play important roles in …

A Low Power Fpga Compute Array For Machine Learning And Artificial Intelligence Applications, Todd Wilson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Modern small satellites often lack the ability to analyze their data in real time, relying instead on downlinking raw measurements to Earth before any scientific interpretation can occur. This delay restricts missions that require rapid awareness of environmental or space-weather events. This thesis presents the Low-power Array for Cubesat Edge Computing Architecture, Algorithms, and Applications (LACE-C3A), a hardware platform designed to enable in-orbit data processing within the power and volume limits of CubeSat-class spacecraft. 

LACE-C3A uses a modular cluster of flash-based FPGAs, which offer low power consumption, radiation resilience, and in-flight reconfigurability. The system consists of a Controller board responsible …

Adversarial Heterogeneous Agent Learning For Robotic Systems: A Framework For Coordinated Competitive Behaviors, Christopher T. Allred

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Autonomous robot teams must move reliably, explain their actions, and work together—even in changing or adversarial settings. We present a structured, three-stage pathway that builds coordinated team behavior from strong single-robot skills. First, we develop robust legged-robot locomotion and interpretability using only internal actuator signals. From these proprioceptive cues, robots learn to classify terrain and predict short-term power use, enabling energy-aware movement without external sensors. We further analyze learned behaviors with motif discovery to reveal recurring sensor–action patterns, which clarify how agility emerges and guide reward design. Second, we compose these skills into heterogeneous teamwork using centralized training with decentralized …

Evaluating The Feasibility, Acceptability, And Preliminary Efficacy Of An Online Acceptance And Commitment Therapy Program To Improve Dietary Quality In Highly Stressed Adults, Francesca M. Knudsen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Stress can negatively affect both mental and physical health, which can increase the risk for chronic illness. When people feel stressed, they may also find it harder to make healthy food choices, which can further impact their health. Despite this, there are limited treatments designed to help people improve their dietary quality while managing stress. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an evidence-based psychological approach that helps people respond more effectively to difficult thoughts and emotions while behaving in ways that are aligned with their personal values. This study tested whether a brief, online ACT-based program, combined with coaching phone …

Using Picturebooks In Elementary School To Support Discussion, Connection, And Community Action, Polly Parkinson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Children are in school to acquire knowledge, so the books they read are a significant influence on how they see themselves and others. School curricula often lack diverse voices, which may limit students’ views of themselves and how they relate to their communities. The research objective of this study was to examine the potential for fostering empathy in students, to encourage societal benefits of positive community behaviors, deepen understanding of history, and future contributions to an engaged democratic society.

The problem identified was that although much research exists discussing children’s literature and empathy, little explores whether that empathy leads to …

Drought-Tolerant Plants Of Great Salt Lake: Determining Dormancy Break, Germination, And Seeding Timing Requirements To Improve Restoration Under Hydrologically Extreme Conditions, Montana Horchler

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Wetlands are declining worldwide, and those in arid regions are especially vulnerable to climate change, drought, water diversions, and other human pressures. As a result, land managers increasingly rely on active revegetation to re-establish native plant communities and their associated ecosystem functions. Restoration that utilizes seeds as the propagule source is often the most cost-effective way to revegetate large areas, but in highly variable environments such as exist at Great Salt Lake, Utah, drought and flooding regularly limit plant establishment. Restoration practitioners require science-informed strategies to reach their goal of establishing diverse native plant communities with high native species cover. …

Freshwater Mussel Reintroduction And Recolonization Habitat Modeling Using Hydraulic, Sediment And Geomorphic Parameters, Megan Elizabeth Dinicola

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Freshwater mussels are an important group of aquatic animals that live within the riverbed, but their populations have been drastically reduced by habitat alteration and other anthropogenic activities. In an effort to bolster populations, river managers and biologists are using mussel reintroductions as part of their restoration efforts but there are gaps in our understanding of where to reintroduce mussels within a river to see them create self-sustaining populations. This research helps shrink this gap by better understanding the physical habitat needs and population expansion potential of subadult freshwater mussels, or the size of mussel that hatcheries grow for reintroduction, …

Evaluation Of Fertilizer Recommendation And Soil Amendment Impacts On Crop Production In The Intermountain West, Megan Baker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Fertilizers improve crop yield and quality by supplying crops with essential nutrients, but can also be a significant input cost. Determining what nutrients and rates to apply for optimal crop growth can be difficult, leading many growers to use external sources for these decisions. Land-grant universities are a common source for fertilizer recommendations, but often based on decades-old research and should be evaluated periodically to verify effectiveness and calibrated to current soil analysis methods. Current Utah State University (USU) guidelines for sulfur (S) and zinc (Zn) were tested across Utah in on-farm trials in 2021-2025. Zinc applications of 5 or …

Continuous Symmetry Discovery And Enforcement Using Vector Fields With Application To Time Series And Image Data, Benjamin D. Shaw

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Machine learning powers many technologies we use every day, from image classification in computer vision to analyzing time series data such as sensor readings or financial trends. One way to make these systems smarter and more reliable is by using symmetry, meaning patterns that remain unchanged under certain transformations, such as rotations for images or uniform changes in signal amplitude for time series. Discovering these patterns can improve understanding of data and help build models that perform well in new situations. 

Current methods for finding symmetry often rely on large neural networks and are limited to simple transformations like stretching …

Social And Institutional Factors Influencing Restoration Decisions In Sagebrush Plant Communities In The Great Basin, Carmen Calzado-Martínez

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Sagebrush landscapes of the Great Basin in the western United States have changed dramatically over the past century. Invasive grasses, repeated wildfires, and past land-use practices have made it increasingly difficult for native plant communities to recover once they are damaged. Most restoration efforts occur after disturbances such as wildfire, when ecosystems may already be severely degraded. An alternative approach is proactive restoration, which aims to strengthen ecosystems before major damage occurs. 

This dissertation examines whether proactive restoration strategies could realistically be used in sagebrush rangelands and what factors influence their adoption. The research combines three complementary approaches. First, interviews …

Characterizing Metabolic Flux Of Plant Secondary Metabolites From Diverse Animal-Source Foods To Humans, Muhammad Ahsin

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

There is a popular saying: “You are what you eat.” But does this also mean, “You are what your food eats”? This dissertation explores that question by examining how farming practices shape the nutritional quality of meat—and what, if anything, those differences mean for the people who consume it. While modern livestock production and nutrition research often emphasize protein and fat, this work tests the idea that animals function as biological mediators, linking soil and plant conditions to human diets through the chemical composition of meat and milk. To evaluate this hypothesis, we tracked health-relevant plant compounds— phytonutrients—across the soil–plant–animal–human …

Comparing Strategies For Wetland Revegetation In An Uncertain Water Future, Hailey M. Machnikowski

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Wetlands worldwide are expected to experience more frequent and intense droughts and floods due to climate change. These shifting water conditions introduce challenges to restoring wetland plants, especially using direct seeding. Seeding is cost and labor-efficient compared to planting, but seeds and seedlings are highly vulnerable to water stress, so restoration efforts often fail when conditions are too wet or dry. Understanding how to improve seed-based revegetation under these conditions is increasingly important. Therefore, we sought to understand the response, measured by percent canopy cover or dry biomass weights, of native plants to different durations of drought in greenhouse experiments, …

Does Psychosocial Stress Moderate The Association Between Indicators Of Vascular Health And Cognitive Performance: An Examination In Native Hawaiian - Pacific Islander And Non-Nhpi Older Adults, Maddy Mills

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Late-life cognitive decline and dementia that are unrelated to normal aging are a source of major global health concerns. Vascular risk factors, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes, along with psychosocial stress, are well-established risk factors for cognitive decline. However, no research has explored how these variables interact to influence cognitive performance in older adults. Native Hawaiian-Pacific Islanders (NHPI) face disproportionate rates of vascular risk factors linked to cognitive decline, yet this population has been historically underrepresented in health research. As a result, limited evidence exists regarding how these factors collectively impact cognitive performance in this population. This …