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Increasing Adherence Of Chg Bathing: An Evidence-Based Practice Quality Improvement Project, Melissa Benedetto

DNP Projects

Introduction

Patients admitted to hospitals are at risk for developing Healthcare-acquired Infections (HAIs). Evidence suggests that these infections, including Central Line Associated Infections (CLABSIs), increase the cost of patient care and have a negative impact on patient outcomes. Daily chlorhexidine (CHG) bathing has been identified to help decrease HAIs in the hospital for patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), those with Multi-drug Resistant Organisms (MDROs), and/or patients with a Central Venous Catheter (CVC).

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to implement an intervention to assess and improve CHG bathing adherence for hospitalized patients. Patients targeted include those at …

Their Pain Is Our Pain: The Intersectionality Of Identity Formation, Socioeconomic Status (Ses), And Transgenerational Trauma In Latine Youth, Fernanda Alcantara

Political Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis will explore the intersectionality of identity formation, socioeconomic status (SES) and transgenerational trauma in Latine youth. There is extensive research in the Hispanic identity formation and the factors that influence it. However, there is little to no research that focuses on the role SES and transgenerational trauma from growing up in a Hispanic household with adversities specific to the immigrant experience and how they influence identity formation during the pre- adolescent and adolescent years. As well as how the Hispanic identity they form influences the adversities they face and SES they shift to or stay in. This research …

Trauma And Academic Impact: Stories From At-Risk Youth, Brenda Morton, Edd.

Faculty Publications - College of Education

Youth continue to leave school prior to earning a high school diploma, despite focused attention and resources on this population of students (Porche, et al., 2011), leaving unanswered questions as to what support this group of students need. Researchers identified attendance, disciplinary issues, and low grade point average, as prevalent in dropouts, but few have explored the story behind the statistics. This study sought to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the role of trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in the lives of students at risk for academic failure, by examining their lived experiences. To that end, …

Nursing Students’ Cultural Awareness And High-Fidelity Simulation Skills, Shorok Hamed M Alahmedi

Nursing Dissertations - Archive

Cultural awareness is learning to be self-aware of other cultures and even an individual’s own culture. Nursing students learn about influences of values and beliefs, and the impacts of culture as they consider how to care for patients of other cultures. However, as students are learning cultural awareness for patient care they may struggle with some of their own cultural values and beliefs that may affect them in ways that they are not aware. This descriptive correlational study involved two research questions that examined undergraduate nursing students’ (n = 51) cultural awareness, and the association between undergraduate nursing students’ cultural …

Earnings Management In Response To Fair Treatment: The Roles Of Organizational Identity And Moral Identity, Kimberly M. Bates

Management Dissertations - Archive

Fraud continues to be an issue that organizations face globally, losing an estimated 5% of annual revenue for a total of $4.5 trillion globally. However, fraudulent behavior is difficult to study due to the unacceptable nature of it. I provide researchers with an adapted measure of earnings management that mitigates the socially undesirable act of earnings management which can suppress findings in self-reported studies. Additionally, based on the target similarity model, my dissertation considers accountants’ perception of fair treatment by the organization on willingness to engage in earnings management benefiting the organization. I survey 123 financial and managerial accountants to …

Intersections Between Social Work And Public Administration: A Case Study Of Urban Water Poverty, Katherine M. Lindsey

Social Work Theses - Archive

Despite infrastructure advances, water testing, and environmental policies, there are still areas in the United States that lack clean water. Some communities are negatively impacted by policies, location, socioeconomic status, water obtainment methods, and racial, ethnic, or cultural differences. Social workers desiring to intervene may not know where to begin. To identify potential interventions, this case study examines how the community of Green Tree Estates gained access to clean water through advocacy efforts and community organizing. This community, located within a large city in Texas, is a previously annexed, small mobile home community consisting of a Hispanic, Spanish speaking population …

Challenges Experienced By Rural Informal Caregivers Of Older Adults: A Scoping Review, Jon Shuffler

Social Work Theses - Archive

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to document the state of the literature regarding the challenges experienced by rural informal caregivers of older adults in the United States. Methods: A scoping review of peer-reviewed academic articles published through December 1, 2021, was conducted, utilizing the scoping review framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005). The initial search resulted in 1,255 articles for review, of which 12 studies were included for the final review. Results: Thematic content analysis was utilized to identify emerging themes of challenges experienced by rural informal caregivers of older adults. The identified themes of challenges include a …

I Kissed Shaming Goodbye: Mental Health Implications Of Christian Purity Culture, Danielle Miriam Stillman

Social Work Theses - Archive

This study investigates the impact of Christian “purity culture,” a particular variety of shame and guilt-based approach to sexual development, on the millennial generation. An emerging body of personal reminiscences and essays have been written about the experience of growing up as part of this culture and the damage that has resulted from the teachings impressed upon those born from 1981-1996 during their adolescence. The research introduces social work theory and recommendations for working with the population’s mental health treatment into the body of literature. Data was collected through qualitative methods of research in personal interviews conducted with the researcher …

Autonomous Aerial Vehicles Distributed Control And Interactive Games, Yusuf Kartal

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

As the number of quadrotors and other Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) increases in industrial and urban areas, the development of reliable engineering methods to control their behavior as they interact with each other becomes of central interest in control research. With the increase in demand for UAVs to work together, several real-life challenges need to be addressed that include the implementation, test, and validation of the control algorithms in flight test experiments. On the one hand, the interests of UAVs may be in harmony to perform certain tasks such as transportation, surveillance and reconnaissance. On the other hand, the interests …

The Latina Experience: Ethnic Markers & Identity Building At An Hispanic Serving Institution, Tatiana Marie Rivera

Sociology & Anthropology Theses - Archive

This study addresses the identity reconstruction process and ethnic marker development of 2nd generation Latina undergraduates attending a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). A qualitative study consisting of 12 individual interviews and a focus group consisting of two new respondents and two old ones (N=14) were conducted virtually to understand how identity was reconstructed, and which ethnic markers this new generation uses to identify other Latinx. To understand the identity reconstruction process and ethnic marker identification, borderlands theory with a focus on the mestiza consciousness was employed. Results show that not all Latinas reconstruct their identity once they start attending an …

Synthesis And Function Of Ion-Selective Single-Molecule Fluorescent Imaging Molecules And Materials, Alena A. Denisenko

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations - Archive

Neutrinos are fermion subatomic particles that interact only by weak subatomic forces—making them almost impossible to detect. However, they can be produced in specific radioactive decay reactions, such as beta decay. We hypothesize the detection of double beta decay through the tagging of the Ba2+ daughter ion from 136Xe (136Xe —136Ba2+ + 2ν + 2β). The proposal is to develop single-molecule fluorescence imaging (SFMI) technology to investigate gaseous chemical constituents in high-pressure gases (ca. 30-150 psi) at gas-solid interfaces. To achieve proper SMFI, heterogenous self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) containing fluorophores that operate under dry conditions and are turned on when a …

Asset Management Of Wastewater Interceptors Adjacent To Bodies Of Water, Mohammad Bani Fawwaz

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation presents the viability of managing a pipeline network adjacent to bodies of water to maximize asset life by evaluating the significant factors that affect the condition levels of pipeline assets. Pipeline asset management derives from pipelines’ physical conditions, condition rating, and serviceability through testing, monitoring, and analyzing rupture history. The remaining asset life and structural condition of the pipeline network running near and under bodies of water are often hard to predict. In case of pipeline failure, exuberant damages will occur to the surrounding environment, adding up to disruption in service and repairing costs. This research develops Multinomial …

Photonic Crystal Surface Emitting Lasers, Akhil Raj Kumar Kalapala

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

ABSTRACT: Since the initial proposal in 1999 by Noda et al., photonic crystal surface emitting lasers (PCSELs) have proven to achieve large area, coherent lasing with a narrow, single mode beam. Owing to their unique orthogonal electrical/optical cavity scheme, PCSELs have emerged as one of the most promising platforms for high power diode lasers. The evanescent coupling of the optical mode in the active region with the photonic crystal layer enables large area two dimensional in-plane lasing mode in the photonic crystal cavity due to bandedge effect. Bragg’s multi-order diffraction provides the necessary feedback for the lasing and enhances surface …

Robust Noise-Based Attacks Against Audio Event Detection Systems, Rodrigo Augusto Silva Dos Santos

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The massive advances on the field of deep neural networks in the 2000 and 2010 decades led to an overwhelming adoption of these algorithms on all sorts of domains and applications. Under this widespread adoption scenario, it is natural that these neural networks have also been employed on safety-related use cases, bringing substantial improvements to the performance of existing as well as novel systems. Examples of these safety-inclined applications include scene recognition, object detection and tracking, speech recognition, audio event detection and classification, just to cite a few ones. Unfortunately, these neural network algorithms have been shown to be vulnerable …

Designing Large-Scale Key-Value Systems On High-Speed Storage Devices, Xingsheng Zhao

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

With the evolution of new technologies, such as edge computing, full self-driving, virtual reality, and multi-media streaming, the volume of data is growing at an accelerated speed. The global data volume could achieve 175~zettabytes by 2025. With this huge amount of data, the focus of data management has been shifted from traditional SQL databases to NoSQL databases, which provide higher performance and better scalability. Key-value (KV) stores are a common type of NoSQL database and are becoming a major storage infrastructure in various application domains. With the development of high-speed storage devices, such as NVMe SSD, Open-channel SSD, and non-volatile …

Efficient Algorithms And Human-In-The-Loop Approaches For Attribute Design And Selection, Md Abdus Salam

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Feature engineering and feature selection are two important aspects of data science pipeline. Due to the advancement of data collection techniques in recent years, huge amount of data is becoming available in different industries. Consequently, the importance of data science is increasing for business analytic purpose. Different tools and techniques are being developed to assist data scientists to complete their tasks efficiently. One of the main human involvements in the data science task is for feature engineering and selection. These pre-processing steps will prepare the data in the format desired to be fed into various machine learning algorithms to accomplish …

Working For Peanuts: Labor, Geography, And Class Composition In The American Circus Industry, 1872-1938, William James Hansard

History Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation focuses on class composition in the traveling circus in the Gilded Age (1870s-1900s), the Progressive Era (1890s-1910s), and the New Era (1920s-1930s). American circuses became industrial operations beginning in the 1870s under the leadership of P.T. Barnum and his business partners, and within a few years, they had become the most important form of entertainment in the United States. By the turn of the twentieth century, the major industrial circuses employed around 1,200 people each and traveled the country in what amounted to a mobile factory town. However, up to this point, collective action by circus workers was …

Pif Transposable Elements Domestication And Genetic Novelty In Insects, Fatema Ruma

Biology Dissertations - Archive

Transposable elements or TEs, are selfish genetic elements that represent a major component of a eukaryotic genome. They are genetic units that can move and amplify within a host genome. Mobilization of these TEs can be harmful to the host genome as they can transpose to new locations and can be a source of disruptions to the genetic information, DNA breakage and ectopic recombination. It has been shown, however, that TE proteins can be domesticated/co-opted and supply functions for major adaptations. There are two broad classes of TEs: Class I or retro-transposable elements and Class II or DNA elements. It …

Optimizing The Performance Of Analytical Chemistry Instrumentation, Srividya Sekar

Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Surrogate Optimization and Global Optimization approaches to optimize underlying functions have been studied and used extensively in the field of Operations Research. However, there are very few instances where these approaches have been applied and tested in applications with uncertainty. Additionally, extensive focus and effort have been put into developing highly complex metamodels rather than globally optimizing these metamodels. In this study, we propose a Mixed Integer Quadratically Constrained Program (MIQCP) based approach that globally optimizes a Quintic Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (QMARS) metamodel. The QMARS-MIQCP based optimization is applied to a global optimization framework called QMARS-MIQCP-OPT to optimize several …

A Necessary And Sufficient Condition For The Asymptotic Normality Of The Quantile Estimator In The Deconvolution Problem, Jeremy R. Valdez

Mathematics Dissertations - Archive

In this study, we examine the estimation of a quantile function when we have n observations coming from the convolution model contaminated by additive measurement errors. Under certain assumptions, a kernel type deconvolution quantile estimator of the unknown quantile function is proposed. Moreover, we discuss the necessary and sufficient condition on the bandwidth in order to investigate the limiting distribution of the deconvolution kernel quantile estimator when the error terms follow either an ordinary smooth or super smooth distribution. A bootstrap approach is used to select the optimal bandwidth to construct approximate distribution free confidence bands for the quantile function …

Twisting Systems And Some Quantum P³S With Point Scheme A Rank-2 Quadric, Hung Viet Tran

Mathematics Dissertations - Archive

In 1996, J. J. Zhang introduced the concept of twisting a graded algebra by a twisting system, which generalizes the concept of twisting a graded algebra by an automorphism (the latter concept having been introduced in an article by M. Artin, J. Tate and M. Van den Bergh in 1991). Twisting using a twisting system is an equivalence relation and certain important algebraic properties of the original algebra are carried over to the twisted algebra. We call a twisting system nontrivial if it is not given by an automorphism. However, there are very few known examples of nontrivial twisting systems …

Exponential Tensor Modules, Khoa Hoang Nguyen

Mathematics Dissertations - Archive

Representation theory of Lie algebra of a finite dimensional reductive Lie algebra g is a long-standing problem. The ultimate goal is to classify all representations of g. However. the only case only case when a complete classification is obtained is the case of g = sl(2). Hence, it is natural to study certain categories of representations of g for which some finiteness conditions on the action of certain elements of g is enforced. In this thesis, we introduce a class of representations T (g, V, S) of sl(n + 1) of mixed tensor type. By varying the polynomial g, the …

Pipeline To Power: A Creative Exploration Of My Journey To Black Youth Empowerment, Junichi Uehara Lockett

Educational Leadership & Policy Studies Dissertations - Archive

Through an arts-based autoethnography, I explored the influences and experiences that informed my approach to leading Black youth empowerment programming. Although there is a significant amount of scholarship on Black youth empowerment programming and its importance to Black children, there is limited literature on how one becomes a Black youth empowerment facilitator in the community. I sought to answer the following questions: (1) How did external forces and people inform my approach to leading Black youth empowerment programming? (2) How did my inner drive and consciousness inform my approach to leading Black youth empowerment programming? (3) How does a critique …

"And Still I Rise": Exploring Black Women's Joy While Aspiring To The College Presidency, Courtney E. Matthews

Educational Leadership & Policy Studies Dissertations - Archive

Despite the expansion of literature on Black women college presidents, there is an oversaturation of the struggles Black women experience once in the role that is rooted within the role of racism and sexism. This study focuses on understanding how Black joy influences Black women's aspirations to pursue university or college presidencies at historically white institutions (HWIs). The legacy of Black joy in Black communities is one of healing, resistance, and restoration. Yet, little is understood about how Black joy impacts Black women's experience in higher education. Black women’s journeys to the presidency are a unique exploration of their present-day …

Vibro-Acoustic Analysis Of A Fan Blade, Matthew Koithan

2022 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

A frequent problem with rotating machinery is vibration. Vibration in a rotating part can be caused by unequal mass distribution. A sound or acoustic wave is created by a pattern or disturbances traveling through a medium. Vibration and Acoustics can be dealt with individually, however, if they share a common source, both could be solved simultaneously. The purpose of this project is to correlate the fan noise to the rotor imbalance. The unbalanced mass can be removed by aligning the center of gravity (CG) with the axis of rotation, which eliminates any coupled moments. The vibration is measured using accelerometers …

Computational Modeling Of Post-Surgical Hypertrophic Heart For Surgical Planning, Sudhir Pandit

2022 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a clinically prevalent disease in people around the world, with potential outcomes ranging from sudden cardiac arrest and/or heart failure to the normal life expectancy of the patients. HCM is a condition where the interventricular septal wall becomes abnormally larger, making it difficult for the heart to pump blood from the left ventricle. The current gold standard for the treatment of HCM is Cardiac Myectomy, in which the overgrown tissues are resected to correct the heart and restore the blood flow. Due to the complex anatomy of the heart and anatomical differences in the internal structures …

Expanding The Interoperability Of Healthcare Record Systems, In Spite Of Personal Privacy Issues, Kabin Magar

2022 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

There has been a push to implement the tenets of the Management Information Systems (MIS) by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Broadband Plan, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which have led to continued growth in the use of the electronic healthcare record (EHR). The adoption of innovative technologies in the digitization of health records, use of telehealth solutions, and global problems, such as the pandemic, have presented MIS professionals with “big data” concerns that effect source systems, marketing, …

360 Degree Posture Detection In Mobile And Desktop Version Of Aasan, Dhruva Malik

2022 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

A lot of working people spend their time doing desk jobs. This results in various complications and problems with age. Early on development of bad posture can be fixed before it becomes a habit and. As a result, people may develop inadequate spine posture, which can cause profound implications such as back pain if not corrected at an early stage. “Aasan” the name of the application comes from a Sanskrit word meaning posture, and as the goal of it is to eliminate the wrong posture practices among the world, this name gives the app a meaningful and purpose driven feeling. …

Insurance Fraud Detection, Senior Design Enhanced Project, Nischal Rana

2022 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Insurance is a major service provided to consumers that provides some relief concerning their valuable assets in the modern world. With so many valuable objects on the market, insurance claims are at an all-time peak, and with this comes attention, both wanted and unwanted. Insurance Fraud Detection is a sophisticated web application integrated with various modules that help insurance agents determine whether a claim by a client is fraudulent or not. Insurance agents can utilize this application to web scrape the internet for clues about the item in question to determine if it is still in the original owner's possession. …

Impact Of Stability And Control On Vehicle Geometry And Performance: A Design Study On Traditional Hypersonic Vehicles Vs Controlled Configured Hypersonic Vehicles, Juan Camilo Buritica Yate

2022 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Hypersonic vehicles have been in development for over 60 years, yet a control-configure-vehicle has yet to be designed to understand the possible improvements over statically stable configurations. This paper studies the effect of stability and control on aircraft geometry and performance by comparing traditional vehicles versus control configured vehicles (CCV) that operate at subsonic and supersonic speeds and extrapolates this analysis to predict these effects on hypersonic vehicles. Data related to geometry, aerodynamic performance, and stability from various vehicles were collected and used to find trends by comparing aircraft design parameters to stability criteria. The results showed that by decreasing …