Digital Commons Network^™

Andre Boyer V. City Of Philadelphia

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Meaning Of Mentoring For Puerto Rican Diaspora Professionals Seeking Career Advancement, Coralys M. Cedó Negrón

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Hispanic/Latino professionals remain underrepresented in senior leadership positions across industries in the United States. Organizational leaders need to understand this concern as a critical indicator of factors that may shape leadership development and career advancement among underrepresented professionals. Grounded in the mentoring model, the purpose of this qualitative interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study was to understand the meaning of mentoring for Puerto Rican diaspora professionals seeking career advancement in the United States. The participants comprised 10 Puerto Rican professionals living and working in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area who had participated in formal or informal mentoring relationships. Data were collected …

Tony Yew V. Attorney General New Jersey

2026 Decisions

USDC for the District of New Jersey

Hydrogels For Local Drug Delivery In Biofilm-Associated Periprosthetic Joint Infection: Current Progress And Future Directions, Karolina Kraus, Pawel Mikziński, Bindu Subhadra, Emil Paluch

Faculty Publications - Biological Sciences

Periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) remains one of the most serious complications of arthroplasty, largely due to the formation of microbial biofilms on implant surfaces. Biofilm-associated infections exhibit increased tolerance to antimicrobial therapy and host immune responses, making eradication difficult and often requiring repeated surgical interventions. Consequently, there is a growing need for effective local therapeutic strategies capable of delivering high concentrations of antimicrobial agents directly to the site of infection while minimizing systemic toxicity. Hydrogels have emerged as promising drug delivery platforms for the management of biofilm-associated PJI. Their biocompatibility, injectability, high water content, and tunable physicochemical properties enable controlled …

Advanced Ai Deployment On Smallsats: A Mixed Precision Approach To Onboard Perception And Fpga-Gated Inference, Margaret Michelsen, Jackson Gardner, Shawn Jones, Jackson Kulik, Mario Harper

Small Satellite Conference

MOTIVATION:

SmallSats are asked to make time-sensitive calls (vessel detection, cloud filtering, debris tracking) but CubeSat-class compute is starved for power, memory, and radiation-tolerant silicon.

Most missions still downlink raw imagery for ground processing, costing hours-to-days of latency and scarce bandwidth. Running inference onboard means solving two separate problems:

• When to run inference: compute and power budgets can’t tolerate a neural network firing on every frame.
• Whether it fits when it does run: the model has to live inside a memory and compute envelope measured in megabytes, not gigabytes.

Toward Plug-And-Play Sensor Integration: A Multi-Protocol Hardware Bridge For Nanosatellites, Pawan Kumar, Moritz P. Heimbach, Shayarrn Khatiwada, Jiten Thapa, Marco Schmidt

Small Satellite Conference

COTS sensors speak many protocols; but the satellite bus understands only a few. An FPGA hardware bridge board reroutes heterogeneous sensor protocols (UART, SPI, RS-422, RS-485) to the single communication channel with minimum latency supporting plug-and-play with no bus redesign.

India's New Urban Development Regime And The Mirage Of Inclusion: The Urban Challenge Fund And City Economic Regions, Mathew Idiculla

Journal of Law and Public Policy

This paper examines two recent additions to India’s urban development paradigm—the Urban Challenge Fund (UCF) and City Economic Regions (CERs). The Union Budget 2025–26 introduced the UCF, with a ₹1 lakh crore corpus to position cities as growth hubs, followed by CER, offering seven city clusters ₹5,000 crore each over five years through a reform and results-based ‘challenge mode’ financing mechanism. This paper examines the policy frameworks of the UCF and CER and evaluates how they fit into broader trends in India’s urban development policy and engage with questions of social and democratic inclusion. It traces UCF and CER against …

Design Of A Passive Magnetic Bearing Reaction Wheel For Smallsats And Its Micro-Vibration Performance, Mante Baekeland, Konstantinos Gryllias, Dirk Vandepitte, Cedric Cuypers, Niel Deckers, Tjorven Delabie, René Seiler

Small Satellite Conference

Reaction wheels are a primary source of micro-vibrations aboard satellite platforms, limiting the fine-pointing capability of spacecraft. This paper presents a novel passive magnetic bearing reaction wheel featuring a magnetic–mechanical suspension to reduce operational vibration emissions compared with conventional ball bearing systems. The proposed suspension architecture combines radial permanent magnetic bearings with an axial single-point-contact ball pivot bearing, resulting in a compact, fully passive solution tailored for the SmallSat market. To demonstrate the feasibility of the concept, a hardware prototype was manufactured and tested. Stable operation is achieved across the full operational range up to 4800 rpm. The experimental campaign …

Flight Path: A Microservices Message-Passing Flight Software Architecture For Cesiumastro Element One Satellite, Dylan Pfeifer, Russell Gleason, Nick Bourdon, David Gholami, Daniel Zilavy, Dan Barrera, John Storey

Small Satellite Conference

The CesiumAstro Element One Satellite, designed for multi-band phased array communications in Low Earth Orbit, required a new approach to satellite flight software. The variety of new devices on the satellite bus, fast-paced development schedule, and combination of in-house and purchased subsystems required flight software to incorporate a mixture of programming languages, a mixture of open source and proprietary software, and a pairing of high Technology Readiness Level (TRL) frameworks with new, first-flight software. To achieve integration, assembly, and test on compressed schedule, the flight software paradigm focused on microservices-brokered access to hardware and a message-passing based coordination between software …

Mirzo Ulugbek 6u Cubesat: Modular Structural Design, Analysis, And Ait For Earth Observation Mission Deployment, Hery Steven Mindarno, Louis Alferd Gauvain Lefort, Khabibullokh Olimjon Ugli Azimjonov, Iwase Tomoya, Aashish Sarode, Chinathip Narongphun, Reynel Josue Galindo Rosales, Mehmet Esit, Hanadi Abdalla, Kaito Hamada, Victor Schulz, Jose Rodrigo Cordova Alarcon, Hirokazu Masui, Takashi Yamauchi, Necmi Cihan Orger, Kentaro Kitamura, Mengu Cho

Small Satellite Conference

The Mirzo Ulugbek satellite is a 6U CubeSat designed for Earth Observation (EO) and equipped with a high-resolution camera system. Developed in collaboration between the Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech) and the Uzbekistan Space Agency, Mirzo Ulugbek will be deployed directly from a launch vehicle into a Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) to enable continuous Earth observation. This paper presents the modular structural design, analysis, and Assembly, Integration, and Testing (AIT) processes that ensure the satellite’s robustness during launch and reliable operation in orbit. The modular design allows efficient integration, disassembly, and reassembly of subsystems, enhancing flexibility during testing. This design approach …

Operating The Sparcs Space Telescope, Kaitlyn Ashcroft, Daniel Jacobs, Evgenya Shkolnik, Judd Bowman, Matthew Kolopanis, Tahina Ramiaramanantsoa, Joe Dubois, Titu Samson, Maria C. Ladwig, Joshua Sink, Ella Greetis, Paulo Gonzalez Soto, Ysabella Mcauliffe, Lilian Prigge, Aaron Boumias, Ishi Shah, Hetvi Patel, Joseph Dukowitz, David R. Ardila, April Jewell, Mark Swain, Shouleh Nikzad, Christophe Basset, Joe Llama, Paul Scowen, Sarah Peacock, Dawn Gregory, Nathaniel Streubel, Logan Jensen, Johnathan Gamaunt, Travis Barman, Victoria Meadows

Small Satellite Conference

Star-Planet Research CubeSat (SPARCS) is a 6U space telescope dedicated to monitoring flares from low-mass stars in the ultraviolet (UV). SPARCS observations of flares across 20 solar systems will be used to better understand the atmospheric evolution, chemistry, and potential habitability of the most common type of exoplanets. SPARCS’ camera uses delta-doped CCD detectors, which are several times more sensitive in the UV than previous detectors. This is technology necessary for future studies of habitable-worlds and star–planet interactions by future missions, such as NASA’s flagship mission, the Habitable Worlds Observatory. SPARCS orbits in the “6am terminator” orbit, which provides a …

Multi-Modal Detection And Attribution Algorithm For Low Power Edge Compute Hardware, Margaret Michelsen, Jackson Gardner, Shawn Jones, Jackson Kulik, Mario Harper

Small Satellite Conference

We present a multi-modal detection and attribution algorithm for maritime domain awareness designed to execute on low-power FPGA-based edge compute hardware. Spaceborne hyperspectral sensors generate data volumes far exceeding practical downlink capacity, yet the onboard compute platforms available for real-time processing operate within strict power, memory, and radiation constraints. The proposed algorithm fuses RX anomaly scoring, ACE matched filtering, multi-spectral index evaluation, wake-aware spatial scoring, and spectral glint cancellation in a five-stage pipeline designed for hardware-efficient execution. Mixed-precision quantization assigns FP16 arithmetic to covariance-sensitive stages and INT8 to threshold-based spectral computations, achieving a 12.4× model size reduction and 6.1× compute …

R5 Spacecraft 7, 9, And 10: Proximity Operations, Optical Comm, And Edge Compute, Sam Pedrotty, James Berck, Jack Wisbiski, Kelly Mann, Andrzej Jackowski, Jacob Nunez-Kearny, Robin Onsay, Faheem Quazi, Thomas Kirven, Rob Stoddard, Jordan Fogg, Roger Hunter, Anup Parikh, Alex Bongiovanni, Shrusti Jain, Cassidy Kuehl, Kyle Merry, Luke Duffield

Small Satellite Conference

The Realizing Rapid, Reduced-cost high-Risk Research (R5) project has designed, assembled, integrated, tested, delivered, and launched three spacecraft with three unique missions in fiscal year 2026. Each spacecraft has applied lessons learned from the prior to enhance the cost and schedule reductions of the R5 process while reducing risk and maximizing spacecraft capabilities. Spacecraft 7 (R5-S7) completed suborbital proximity operations around a Falcon 9 upper stage in November of 2025 using an industrial LiDAR for relative navigation. Spacecraft 10 (R5-S10) launched on Transporter 16 and is intended to build on R5-S7’s mission by completing proximity operations in orbit around a …

Advancing Wavelet-Adaptive Interference Cancellation To Enable Cubesat Constellations For High-Fidelity Ac Magnetometry, Surya S. Kalluri, Alex P. Hoffmann, Mark B. Moldwin, James W. Cutler, Yethinder Ragav Lakshmi Kumar, Lauro V. Ojeda

Small Satellite Conference

Dense CubeSat constellations equipped with science-grade AC magnetometers offer a transformative path toward high spatial and temporal resolution of several magnetospheric phenomena that large spacecraft missions cannot resolve. Realizing this vision demands boomless magnetometry– due to deployment risks and resource constraints on nano/micro satellite platforms in large scale –capable of operating in the presence of intense spacecraft-generated electromagnetic interference without the spatial separation that conventional booms provide. This paper advances the characterization of the Wavelet-Adaptive Interference Cancellation for Underdetermined Platforms (WAIC-UP) algorithm across different frequency regimes and two distinct classes of test data. In the 50 Hz to 30 kHz …

The Ecological Impacts Of Un-Protecting Forests: The Case Of Gold Mining In Ghana, Tate Alexander Barend

Master's Theses

This paper estimates the causal effect of Ghana’s Legislative Instrument 2462 (L.I. 2462) on deforestation in protected areas. The policy redefined the regulatory regime governing small-scale gold mining in protected areas, moving from prohibition to discretionary permitting. I exploit the implementation of L.I. 2462 as a policy shock and apply a difference-in-differences event-study framework to a propensity score–matched sample of pixels derived from high-resolution satellite images. Contrary to widespread concerns that the policy would accelerate deforestation, the results provide no evidence of large-scale vegetation loss in exposed protected areas following the policy change. Instead, protected area pixels located within 5 …

The Dual Impact Of Professional And Community Interventions On Recidivism, Anjelika M. Dillard

Master of Arts in Human Services

This capstone project evaluates the effectiveness of professional and community interventions in reducing criminal recidivism and facilitating successful community reintegration for justice-involved individuals. Grounded in the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) model, Desistance Theory, and Trauma-Informed Care frameworks, this study synthesizes contemporary behavioral health and criminological literature to examine how institutional programming and post-release community support interact to foster long-term behavioral change. The findings demonstrate that while evidence-based institutional treatments—such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and targeted vocational training—provide essential foundations for cognitive restructuring and skill acquisition, institutional programming alone is insufficient to prevent re-offending. Long-term desistance depends on an …

The Etsu Historian, Tyla Melkonyan

The ETSU Historian

No abstract provided.

Impact Of Sleep On Glucose Metabolism In Individuals With Overweight Or Obesity: A Systematic Review, Trudy Abla Sitsofe Accorley, Patricia Casas-Agustench, Gail Rees, Kathy Redfern

School of Biomedical Sciences

INTRODUCTION: The obesity epidemic has coincided with chronic sleep deprivation. Sleep disturbances may contribute to metabolic dysfunction in individuals with BMI ≥ 25 kg/m 2. This review investigates associations between sleep patterns and glucose metabolism in this population.

METHODS: A PRISMA-guided search across five databases (PubMed, Embase, Cochrane, CINAHL, and MEDLINE) was conducted through January 2026. Studies examined sleep patterns and glucose metabolism in adults with BMI ≥ 25 kg/m 2. Quality was assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool 2.0 and Newcastle-Ottawa Scale.

RESULTS: Eighteen studies (7715 adults) were included from 2993 records: crossover trials (n = 7), …

In-Transit Debris Remediation: Dual-Use Logistics For Sustainable Cislunar Smallsat Constellations, Wanjiku Chebet Kanjumba

Small Satellite Conference

A Debris Crisis Meets A Logistics Boom: Low- and high-Earth orbit keep accumulating debris faster than the atmosphere can clear it, even as NASA's Artemis and CLPS programs establish routine trans-lunar traffic. The 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision and later anti-satellite tests proved that single fragmentation events can irreversibly degrade critical orbital shells, raising the specter of Kessler Syndrome. 

• 46,600+ objects tracked on orbit today, with ~130 million sub-cm fragments (ESA, 2025)
• $500K-$2M cost per kilogram for dedicated ADR, fiscally intractable at system scale
• 5-10 / yr large objects must be removed to stabilize LEO (Liou & Johnson)

The Unit-Economics Problem: Purpose-built …

Artificial Intelligence (Ai) As A Communication Pedagogy Mega-Risk, Deanna Sellnow

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

With the ever-expanding capabilities offered by artificial intelligence (AI), communication teachers, scholars, and practitioners are currently in the midst of heated debates about whether and how to use AI both in our classrooms and in our research. This essay contextualizes the debate by describing generative AI as a technological mega-risk that, if left unchecked, may manifest into a mega-crisis impacting people and planet in extraordinarily harmful ways. Consequently, I argue that it is our responsibility as instructional communication scholars, communication education teachers, and communication pedagogy experts to discover strategies for harnessing its power to manage the potential threats posed by …

Teaching Ai Through Communication: Rethinking Evidence, Interaction, And Learning, Chad Edwards, Matthew J. A. Craig, Varun Rijhwani, Habeeb Abdulrauf

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

This conceptual essay advances a central claim: Communication pedagogy is increasingly engaged in teaching AI through communicative interaction. Moving beyond the familiar distinctions between teaching with AI and teaching about AI, it argues that classrooms function as sites where AI communication is shaped through prompting, critique, revision, and ethical evaluation. Drawing on human–machine communication scholarship, the essay reconceptualizes evidence of learning as visible in students’ reasoning, justification, and contextual adaptation rather than in polished outputs. By foregrounding relational engagement, transparency, and communicative judgment, it positions teaching AI as a defining pedagogical task in AI-mediated educational environments.

How To Blow Up An Ai Data Center, Tyler Rife

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

This essay advocates a critical pedagogical orientation to AI guided by a politics of refusal. I pursue this advocacy by, first, showing how the social and environmental harms of AI technology outweigh any promises to its social good and then, second, locating resonances between our contemporary technological situation and similar inflection points in the histories of labor organizing and environmental justice activism. Together, these material implications of the emergent technology help form a pedagogical framework for how communication educators can advance critical literacy about AI in the classroom as a constructive counterpoint to its uncritical adoption in the learning process. …

Ai And Agency: Policy As Problem Posing In The Introductory Communication Studies Classroom, Deanna L. Fassett, Nancy Park

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

This forum essay examines artificial-intelligence policy in introductory communication courses through the lens of critical communication pedagogy. It identifies a tension between institutional pressures for readily enforceable, surveillance-oriented AI policies and relational approaches that support instructors’ and students’ long-term agency. Drawing on problem-posing pedagogy, the authors argue that prepackaged policies can position teaching assistants as policy enforcers rather than reflective educators. They propose collaborative policy development as a means of fostering dialogue, ethical discernment, human connection, and critical engagement with AI’s role in communication education.

Speaking In Color: Code-Meshing Against Standard Language Ideology In The Public Speaking Classroom, Darrion A. Walker

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Public speaking courses do more than teach presentation skills; they also teach students which voices count as credible. In Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), instructional norms tied to standard language ideology position standardized English as the unmarked benchmark of professional communication. For students who speak African American Language (AAL) or other culturally informed language varieties, this creates a double bind: conform linguistically or risk being penalized for rhetorical authenticity. This reflective essay identifies the double bind as an underexamined problem in communication pedagogy and suggests that code-meshing—the intentional blending of multiple language varieties within a single communicative act—offers a more equitable, …

Decolonizing Communication Pedagogy: Toward An Afro-Rhetorical Framework, Lionnell Smith

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

This essay introduces Afro-rhetorical pedagogy as a decolonial framework for communication pedagogy. Building on Adam Key’s 2022 call for an Applied Africana Studies framework for public speaking pedagogy, this essay conceptualizes Afro-rhetorical pedagogy grounded in Afrocentric thought and African communication theory. Through a close reading of Molefi Kete Asante’s 2011 address on African curriculum, this essay establishes three foundational principles for Afro-rhetorical pedagogy: (a) epistemological agency, (b) decolonized knowledge production, and (c) institutional reconstruction. This pedagogical framework addresses communication education’s reproduction of white cultural hegemony by promoting African-centered principles, practices, and precepts that reposition communication pedagogy as a more liberatory …

Community Problems Need Community Solutions: Feminist Collaboration Across Campuses To Create Transformative Outcomes Through Community Engaged Learning, Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson, Jasmine R. Linabary, Ziyu Long, Kylie J. Johnson

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

This study presents a multi-institutional engaged pedagogy project responding to college food insecurity that involved partnerships among students, instructors, and campus food pantries from three U.S. universities. Through analysis of pre- and post-class surveys, class assignments, and instructor and community partner reflections, we argue that our feminist collaborative approach resulted in transformative outcomes in three areas: (a) heads, as the collaboration enabled critical understandings of food insecurity and how to combat it; (b) hearts, as the collaboration fostered a culture of care and (re)ignited shared passion in doing change work, and (c) hands, as the collaboration inspired actions to address …

The Co-Educators Framework: An Illustrative Account Of Shared Pedagogical Practice And Inclusive Teaching In A Large-Enrollment Communication Course, Divya S, Man Luo, Jisha Jacob, Shahla Shahnaz Dyuti, Victoria Michelle Main

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

Large-enrollment courses present structural challenges to inclusive and relational pedagogy, particularly when instructional labor is shared across teaching teams that include graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). This study examines inclusive teaching as a communicative and practical process enacted through co-education, the coordinated instructional work of faculty and GTAs. Using a diary-based reflexive design, four doctoral GTAs contributed teaching journals across one semester of an undergraduate Communication Theory course. Reflexive thematic analysis identified four themes: collaborative course design, communication as pedagogical infrastructure, equitable assessment, and reflexive care. The study offers the Co-Educators Framework as an illustrative account of how shared, communicative pedagogical …

Msw Portfolio, Aspen Widdicombe

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This portfolio was written by an MSW student where they talk about their practicum experience and how this relates to the MSW Competencies.

Roots And Systems: A Portfolio Of Clinical Growth, Trauma-Informed Care, And Culturally Centered Practice, Sarah Rice

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Promoting Developmentally Informed Justice: A Developmental Assessment Referral Framework For Juvenile Transfer Decisions, Carly F. Colman

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

The transfer of youth between juvenile courts and adult courts is one of the most consequential decisions made in the American legal system, as it will influence the youth’s legal outcomes, developmental trajectories, and long-term well-being. Advances in adolescent brain science show that there are many factors associated with youthful offending, including developmental immaturity, susceptibility to external influences, and ongoing neurobiological development—all of which are related to age, rather than being fixed criminal traits. Despite this growing body of evidence, legal decision-making in juvenile transfer and sentencing does not consistently incorporate individualized developmental data. This paper examines the important role …