Digital Commons Network^™

Herding Cats: The Behavioral Foundations Of Successful Multi-Sector Partnerships, Paul B. Olsen

School of Public Service Theses & Dissertations

Multi-sector partnerships (MSPs) are problem-solving groups composed of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, private firms, community groups, and individuals. These partnerships have often struggled to achieve consistent success, with performance rates estimated at 30%–50%, largely because MSPs are tailored to the specific interests, resources, and implementation contexts of the constellation of stakeholders involved in each project. This situation raised important questions regarding how MSP performance can be predicted and whether the likelihood of success can be enhanced during the early planning stages of partnership formation.

Social value orientation (SVO) is a behavioral public administration theory that may help explain variation in …

The Role Of Autonomy And Motivation On Teacher Retention: A Mixed Methods Study, Jordan Overton

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

Teacher retention remains a persistent concern in the United States, with nearly 13% of classrooms unfilled by licensed teachers. Grounded in self-determination theory and basic psychological needs theory, this mixed methods sequential explanatory study examined the relationship between teacher autonomy, motivation, and intentions to leave, while also exploring the contextual factors that shaped teachers’ perceptions of autonomy within their work environments.

In the quantitative phase, survey data were collected from 123 elementary and middle school teachers across three school divisions in Southeastern Virginia. Measures included teacher autonomy, work motivation, and intentions to leave one’s school or division and the teaching …

A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Community College Presidential Job Announcements And The American Association Of Community Colleges Competencies For Community College Leaders, Leslie M. Boon

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

Women are overrepresented as students and employees of community college, yet they are underrepresented in presidential leadership roles. Prior research has examined the career trajectories and experiences of women aspiring to community college presidencies; however, less research has examined how discourse shapes expectations of leadership. Because community colleges have been described as gendered, the language used to describe leadership competencies may reinforce gendered assumptions about effective leadership. The purpose of this study was to examine the discourse of community college presidential job announcements and the American Association of Community Colleges’ (AACC) Competencies for Community College Leaders (4th edition) to examine …

Bridging Mission And Execution: Integrating Participatory Design In Early-Phase Mission Engineering For Stakeholder Alignment And Mission Clarity, Rafi Soule

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation develops and evaluates an integration-centered approach to early-phase Mission Engineering that improves mission clarity under ambiguity. Stakeholder interpretations diverge, and interoperability constraints are not surfaced early. These conditions reduce mission clarity and weaken mission-to-system mapping readiness. The dissertation proposes an integration-centered approach that strengthens early mission framing through two complementary mechanisms: (1) a participatory design-inspired, artifact-first workflow that surfaces and repairs interpretation divergence, and (2) closed-corpus, RAG-enabled retrieval that grounds mission-to-system mapping in traceable evidence. The study was organized around a construct spine linking shared understanding, stakeholder alignment, and interoperability feasibility to mission clarity. A three phase mixed-methods …

Voices | Risd Mfa Illustration Anthology 2026, Illustration Department, Illustration Mfa, Jaleen Grove, Minglu Du, Manuela Guzman, Rhea Hu, Faith Huang, Burcu Koleli, Airien Ludin, Ranran Ma, Mervin Miao, Nayyab Naveed, Rhea Pradeep, Pingfan Que, Mot Tuman, Skye Wang

Illustration MFA Anthologies

Illustration has often been dismissed as just a mechanical art, concerned with technique more than intellect. In fact, illustration is a theory of something’s essence, expressed and communicated visually. Craftsmanship – or a playful, mindful lack of it – is always in service to a concept and a purpose. The Masters theses summarized in this book are the result of struggles to give form to more than the tangible world. As writers and visualizers our students picture new meanings and refreshed experiences for the familiar; they define things previously unnamed.

Glioblastoma Multiforme: A Pathologic Breakdown Of One Of Neuro-Oncology's Greatest Challenges, Rosemary Westphal, Ms

Student Papers, Posters & Projects

Glioblastoma multiforme is the most common adult primary tumor with a grim median survival time of 14.6 months. It is characterized by rapid progression, diffuse infiltration, and rather poor clinical outcomes. The WHO classifies GBM as a grade 4 diffuse astrocytic tumor with distinctive histopathological features including high mitotic activity, marked cellular atypia, microvascular proliferation, and necrosis. Advances in molecular diagnostics have further classified GMB into IDH-wild type and IDH-mutant subtypes, with important therapeutic and prognostic implications. Key genetic alterations, such as EGFR amplification, PTEN loss, TP53 mutations, TERT promoter mutations, and MGMT methylations, have been identified as contributing to …

Biocrude From Organic Waste And Its Conversion To Hard Carbon: Experimental And Modeling Study, Isamu Umeda

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This study establishes a technical and theoretical foundation for the efficient conversion of organic waste into biocrude and high-value carbon materials, aiming to facilitate the industrialization of hydrothermal and solvothermal liquefaction. The dissertation research is structured as follows:

Chapter 2 developed a novel chemical kinetic model for the HTL of corn stover based on elemental balances (C, H, N, and O). By incorporating temperature, residence time, solid loading as an independent variable, the model successfully predicted product yields and properties, revealing that there was non-pseudo-first-order reaction pathways in the conversion of water soluble organics in aqueous phase (AP) to hydrochar. …

A Tilly Comparative Study On State-Building In South Vietnam And Afghanistan, Hoang Trung "Alex" Vu, P.S. Sam Tran

Journal of Strategic Security

The 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was often compared to the 1975 fall of South Vietnam as two strategic failures by the United States in attempting to establish a Western-friendly, democratic government in their regions. While superficial similarities could be observed between the two cases, this research provides a further comparative analysis of state-building efforts in South Vietnam and Afghanistan to uncover critical lessons in regime-sustaining and the politics of American intervention. The article uses Charles Tilly’s "war makes state" concept to examine war-making, state-making, protection, and extraction as core elements of state-building. The research utilizes comparative historical analysis to …

Defining Her2 Associated Proteogenomic Features In Breast Cancer And Extending To Gynecologic Cancers, Maya Anand

Theses

HER2 amplification is a well-established driver of breast cancer and serves as the primary basis for clinical classification and treatment selection. However, this framework assumes that HER2-driven tumor biology is defined solely by ERBB2 amplification or overexpression. The goal of this study was to evaluate whether HER2-associated signaling is represented as a pathway-level activation state and whether this framework could help identify tumors with clinically relevant HER2 activity beyond current routine classification methods. HER2-associated transcriptional programs were identified across three independent breast cancer cohorts, resulting in conserved gene sets (P76 and P25). Amplification-independent HER2 activation was assessed using the HER2 …

Optimizing Urban Commute Quality Through Traffic Congestion Analysis And Predictive Modeling, Obaid Almansoori

Theses

Urban traffic congestion imposes significant economic, environmental, and social costs on rapidly growing cities worldwide. This research investigates how predictive analytics and machine  learning can be leveraged to classify and forecast traffic congestion severity in real time,  enabling data-driven decision-making for transportation planning, signal optimization, and  congestion management. A real-world traffic monitoring dataset comprising 5,952 observations collected over two months via  computer vision sensors at an urban intersection was analysed under the CRISP-DM frame- work. The  dataset records counts of four vehicle classes including cars, bikes, buses, and trucks at  15-minute intervals, alongside temporal variables such as time of day, …

Sampling And Counting Graph Structures With Triangle Motifs, Sherry Robinson

Theses

Understanding the structure of real-world networks often relies on identifying significant (i.e., occurring significantly more frequently than random) subgraph patterns, or motifs, such as triangles. To assess their significance, null models generate random samples from a constrained distribution of graphs, preserving selected properties while randomizing others. These models may either generate random graphs or sample structures from a fixed input graph. This thesis focuses on the latter, specifically the problem of sampling and counting graph structures that incorporate triangle motifs. While efficient algorithms exist for sampling classical structures such as matchings, extending these methods to higher-order motifs remains an important …

In-Context Retrieval For Molecules And Chemical Synthesis Pathways, Abhisek Dey

Theses

Contrastive learning methods require well-defined positive pairs, limiting their applicability to domains where complete, high-fidelity pairings are available. In practice, large-scale scientific corpora --including patents, publications, and web-scale data -- contain vast quantities of contextually relevant but incompletely paired samples that are discarded under standard training paradigms. In this work, we demonstrate that hard negative mining can be leveraged to construct pseudo-positive supervision signals from unpaired or partially paired data, enabling contrastive learning to exploit the full breadth of available corpora without sacrificing representational quality. Using a large-scale chemical drug patent corpus as a testbed, we train a cross-modal contrastive …

Nlp Crowdsourcing For Predominantly Oral Languages: The Case Of Bambara, Allahsera Auguste Tapo

Theses

Predominantly oral languages (POLs) face a significant "digital divide," as they are often excluded from the benefits of modern natural language processing (NLP) technologies, due to a lack of extensive, readily available machine learning (ML) datasets. We investigate methods to overcome this data scarcity for Bambara, a Manding language, spoken primarily in Mali, with a rich oral tradition but limited digital presence.     The research leverages crowdsourcing and community engagement to build high-quality ML ready dataset resources. Key contributions include methods for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) dataset collection and curation and for educational resource creation.      Our findings …

Alternative Color Mode Design: Supporting Mobile App Creators With Evidence-Based Guidelines, Sarah Andrew

Theses

Alternative color modes, such as light, dark, dim, and high contrast modes, in mobile apps can improve accessibility for people with vision impairments and usability for people without vision impairments across situational contexts. However, current mobile apps exhibit inconsistent color implementations for UI elements (e.g., background, text, buttons, images, and non-selectable icons), leaving users with limited accessible options. My dissertation addresses a central question in human-computer interaction and accessibility: How can mobile app designers be supported to implement alternative color modes that meet the accessibility and usability needs of people with and without vision impairments? Through an eight-study mixed-methods investigation, …

Intelligent Deep Learning-Based Sign Language Translation System, Nada Rasem Shahin

Dissertations

The Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) community uses sign language as a primary means of communication. However, the shortage of sign language interpreters and the existence of hundreds of sign languages limit accessibility and inclusion. Sign Language Machine Translation (SLMT) systems present a promising solution for bridging the communication gap between the DHH and the hearing individuals, supporting inclusive societies. In smart cities, such systems play an essential role in improving the quality of life on a community level. In particular, as the population’s well-being is critical, developing intelligent assistive technologies, such as SLMT systems, is necessary to provide …

Efficient Energy Management In Networked Microgrids Using Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning In The Presence Of Uncertainties, Ayodele Benjamin Chukwuyem

Dissertations

Microgrid technology is essential in facilitating the transition to smart energy grids in developed countries and mitigating energy poverty in developing countries, particularly in areas where grid extensions are not feasible. Recently, the concept of networked microgrids (NMGs) has garnered tremendous attention due to the plausibility of interactions among interconnected microgrids leading to power networks that are more resilient, reliable, and stable. However, because each microgrid has diverse distributed generation resources (renewables and controllable generators) and each microgrid operator (MO) has different objectives, coordinated energy management is required to satisfy local and system-wide goals under conditions with significant uncertainty. Existing …

Child Support Factory: Racist History, Harm, And Unconstitutionality Of The Child Support System's Contractual Operations, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

Within America’s justice institutions, the child support system has become a business. The intended mission of aid has been traded and abdicated through contractual deals to churn vulnerable families into factory-like revenue operations. Juvenile and family courts across the country have partnered through countless intertwined interagency contracts with human service agencies, prosecutors, attorneys general’s offices, probation departments, and policing offices—all aimed at generating revenue from impoverished children and parents rather than serving their best interests. The resulting child support factory is vast, harmful, unconstitutional, unethical, and grew from a racist history that devastated Black families, and still operates with starkly …

Code And Consequences: How Fraud Detection Algorithms Criminalize Welfare, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article investigates the growing use of automated fraud detection systems in public benefits programs, focusing on how these technologies have intensified the surveillance and criminalization of low-income individuals. Across the globe, government agencies deploying fraud detection algorithms have wrongfully accused thousands of people of committing fraud, with devastating consequences, including bankruptcy, job loss, and psychological trauma. These algorithmic systems operate as opaque “black boxes,” fueled by historical biases against the poor and largely unaccountable to the individuals they affect. Meanwhile, the private vendors that develop the algorithms reap massive profits from unfulfilled promises of efficiency and cost savings.

The …

(Mis)Judging Suspicion, Sherri Lee Keene

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Twenty-five years ago, the Supreme Court decided Illinois v. Wardlow, a Fourth Amendment case that allowed the high-crime nature of a location to be considered in determinations of whether there was reasonable suspicion to support a police stop. In making these determinations, courts rarely acknowledge the role that race can play in decisions that factor in the nature of a location as context. Yet even when the race of a defendant is not mentioned, high-crime area designations can act as a proxy for race inviting racial bias into courts’ analyses. Reasonable suspicion analysis involves the interpretation of a suspect’s …

Dental Offices Subject To New Legal Mandates, Lance Plunkett Jd, Llm

The New York State Dental Journal

Several new workplace laws, applicable to dental practices, have been enacted, as New York continues its aggressive push in the employment law arena.

Restoration Of Dental Implants With Screw-Retained Crowns: Optimizing Contact Area Geometry To Prevent Food Impaction, John S. Mamoun D.M.D.

The New York State Dental Journal

A single-unit, screw-retained fixed partial denture or crown, made for a dental implant, may show food impaction between the screw-retained crown and an inter-proximal tooth surface. This restorative error may be due to an open contact or a large interproximal embrasure space volume between the screw-retained prosthesis and an interproximal tooth surface. Food impaction may also occur due to the contact plane of the restoration being parallel with the contact plane of the neighboring tooth instead of a more correct contact plane geometry where both interproximal contact planes converge slightly towards each other to form a “triangular” embrasure space. These …

Mda5-Mavs And Interferon-Lambda Signaling In The Intestinal Epithelium Limit Murine Astrovirus Infection, Heyde Makimaa, Harshad Ingle, Leran Wang, Somya Aggarwal, Hongju Deng, Elizabeth A Kennedy, Lynne Foster, Yuhao Li, Megan T Baldridge

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Human astroviruses (HAstVs) are a global cause of pediatric gastroenteritis and can cause disseminated infection in immunocompromised hosts. Murine astrovirus (muAstV) causes acute asymptomatic infections in immunocompetent mice and chronic infection in immunodeficient models and has provided important insights into AstV pathogenesis in vivo. MuAstV can protect immunodeficient mice from other enteric viruses via robust induction of antiviral cytokine interferon-lambda (IFN-λ), with recent findings implicating goblet cells and enterocytes as both cell types infected by muAstV as well as potential sources of IFN-λ in vivo. However, the viral sensing pathways that regulate induction of IFN-λ, as well as the specific …

Unwelcomeness Reconsidered: Adapting Sexual Harassment Law In The Long Wake Of #Metoo, Collin Christner

Michigan Law Review

The federal cause of action for sexual harassment in employment grew out of Title VII’s prohibition of workplace sex discrimination. In many circuits, for sexual harassment claims to be actionable, the plaintiff must show they found the referenced conduct “unwelcome.” Commentators have criticized that requirement since its inception; nonetheless, it has been wielded by courts that are either resistant or reluctant to abandon it. “Unwelcomeness” (or lack of evidence thereof) has been used to permit swaths of inappropriate workplace conduct— enshrining old, sexist stereotypes into America’s employment regulations. This Note evaluates the current approach to the unwelcomeness requirement and proposes …

The Territorial Continuum: American Samoa, Criminal Adjudication, And Territorial Administration, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud

Faculty Scholarship

The standard account of American territorial expansion posits that territorial acquisition moved along a spectrum of sovereignty. The federal government acquired new inhabited land through conquest or purchase, and the Constitution tasked Congress with organizing and administering the new territories until they were ready to become states. That pattern came to an abrupt halt in 1898 when, at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the Supreme Court, fearing the extension of citizenship to, and the permanent integration of, non-White populations into the American polity, suddenly pronounced that the Constitution authorized the holding of colonies. The Court thus sentenced new territories, …

Phenome-Wide Analysis Of Copy Number Variants In 470,727 Uk Biobank Genomes, Xueqing Zoe Zou, Fengyuan Hu, Haiyi Lou, Oliver S Burren, Xiaoyin Li, Karyn Megy, Eleanor Wheeler, Qiang Wu, Santosh S Atanur, Marcin Karpinski, Douglas Loesch, Zammy Fairhurst-Hunter, Sri V V Deevi, Erin Oerton, Sean Wen, Xiao Jiang, Cecilia Salvoro, Jonathan Mitchell, Abhishek Nag, Ben Hollis, Amanda O'Neill, Jen Harrow, Stewart Macarthur, Sebastian Wasilewski, Sean O'Dell, Lifeng Tian, Katherine R Smith, Guillermo Del Angel, Margarete Fabre, Ryan S Dhindsa, Quanli Wang, Slavé Petrovski, Keren Carss

Duncan NRI Faculty and Staff Publications

Copy number variants (CNVs) are key drivers of human diversity and disease risk1. Here we evaluate the role of CNVs across a broad range of human phenotypes and diseases by analysing CNVs from 470,727 UK Biobank whole-genome sequences and conducting a variant- and gene-level phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) with 2,941 plasma protein abundance measurements, 13,336 binary clinical phenotypes and 1,911 quantitative traits. Proteomic analyses validated functional associations of CNVs with nearby genes (cis-protein quantitative trait loci; cis-pQTLs)—with deletions and duplications typically associated with reduced and increased protein levels, respectively—and uncovered previously unknown protein–protein interactions …

Disseminated Tuberculosis Presenting With A Nodo-Colonic Fistula In A Newly Diagnosed Hiv-Positive Patient: A Case Report From Tanzania, Samina Somji, Salim Surani, Joshua Ngimbwa, Tevin Kahwa, Frank Swai, Fatema Tayabali, Bishoy Rofaeil

Population Health, East Africa

We present the case of a 35-year-old male with no known comorbidities who presented with chronic gastrointestinal (GI) and constitutional symptoms and was empirically treated with several antibiotics during multiple clinic visits at different health facilities. The laboratory test sent included a stool GeneXpert, which was positive for Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB). CT imaging revealed multiple necrotic abdominal and retroperitoneal lymph nodes, hypoenhancing splenic lesions, a nodo-colonic fistula between the necrotic retroperitoneal lymph nodes and the adjacent colon, and a mild left-sided pleural effusion. Colonoscopy demonstrated caseating discharge from the fistulous tract 40 cm from the anal verge, and histology showed …

Library 5.0 And Predictive Intelligence: A Conceptual Literature Review, Shrikant Ramteke

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract

Purpose In this paper, the author will explore the nature of predictive intelligence developed in modern libraries as part of the overall progression of libraries toward Library 5.0. It aims to give a conceptual clarity of what predictive services are, how they have been influenced by technology and ethics, and how they fit into existing traditions of librarianship.

Design/methodology/approach This paper utilizes a qualitative, conceptual literature review method as a scholarly inquiry. Approximately 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and institutional reports published after 2018 and before 2025 were purposively sampled from leading databases in library and information science and information …

Artificial Intelligence And Chatgpt In Libraries: A Bibliometric Analysis Of Social Science Research (2022–2026), Shrikant W. Ramteke, Yogesh B. Daphal

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Purpose

This paper will map the world of research on artificial intelligence and chatbots in libraries systematically by analysing the trends in publications, intellectual organization, pattern of collaboration, and the way the Social Science literature has evolved with the theme of artificial intelligence and chatbots published between 2022 and 2026.

Design/methodology/approach

We have conducted a thorough bibliometric search where we have considered 7,660 peer-reviewed journal articles found in Scopus database. The collection was compiled according to the PRISMA requirements, and later, both performance-based metrics and science mapping techniques were applied.The whole process of visualisation and analysis was carried out through …

Temporal Dynamics Of Online Shopping: A Multidimensional Clustering Approach For Optimizing Time-Specific Advertising Strategies, Hye Ra Oh, Yunjae Cheong

Asia Marketing Journal

This study clusters consumers according to their hourly online shopping consumption patterns and develops optimized advertising strategies that can be practically applied by companies. Specifically, we considered multidimensional variables related to consumers, including demographic characteristics, shopping frequency, information search and content consumption characteristics, and lifestyle traits. We explored consumer types by comparing various clustering algorithms and applying the optimal clustering method for each time period. The analysis results show significant differences in payment amounts according to payment time periods. Regarding consumer types, consumption tendencies are distinctly differentiated by payment time periods, with each cluster showing different characteristics. This study is …

Are You Ready To Embrace Ai-Generated Art? Exploring The Differential Effects Of Ai Versus Human Agents On Consumer Response, Seojin Stacey Lee, Yaeri Kim, Kiwan Park

Asia Marketing Journal

With a growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into creative domains, understanding its impact on consumer responses remains a critical area of inquiry. This research examines how agent type (AI vs. human) and art type (fine art vs. art-infused product) influences consumer purchase intention, along with the underlying psychological mechanism. Across three empirical studies, we find that consumers report higher purchase intention for art-infused products compared to fine art when created by AI. In contrast, this difference in purchase intention is diminished when the products are created by human artists. Perceived incompatibility functions as a moderated mediator in this process. …