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Healing Through Collective Memory: Exploring Psychological Trauma And Community In Toni Morrison’S Beloved And Audre Lorde’S “The Uses Of The Erotic”, Cassia Mcphilliamy '25 May 2025

Healing Through Collective Memory: Exploring Psychological Trauma And Community In Toni Morrison’S Beloved And Audre Lorde’S “The Uses Of The Erotic”, Cassia Mcphilliamy '25

Student Research

My project “Healing Through Collective Memory: Exploring Psychological Trauma and Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic”” is motivated by the traumatic images of the experience in enslavement. The symbolism that Morrison uses in Beloved through the dual role Beloved plays as both a spectator and experiencing trauma firsthand. Morrison surpasses the generic gothic tropes of the ghost through Beloved’s ghostly presence at 124 Bluestone, and later her ability to physically haunt Sethe, forcing her to confront her trauma. Beloved’s appearance collapses the past and the present, forcing Sethe to face her past in …


Behavioral And Neural Microstructures Of Dynamic Cue-Motivated Responses, Erica Townsend May 2025

Behavioral And Neural Microstructures Of Dynamic Cue-Motivated Responses, Erica Townsend

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Sign-tracking, a conditioned response in which animals are physically attracted to reward-predictive cues due to motivational value attribution, is known to be persistent but can be flexible under some circumstances. For example, during an omission paradigm, in which vigorous responses must be withheld to avoid reward cancellation, animals can quickly restructure their responses. However, sign-tracking does not cease entirely, and cue attraction persists. This dissertation explores the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying the simultaneous persistence and flexibility of sign-tracking during omission procedures. First, a novel method for behavioral analysis is introduced to accurately depict sign-tracking animals in dynamic tasks such …


Crystallization Of The Quantized Function Algebras Of Suq(N + 1), Manabendra Giri May 2025

Crystallization Of The Quantized Function Algebras Of Suq(N + 1), Manabendra Giri

Doctoral Theses

The $q$-deformation of a connected, simply connected Lie group $G$ is typically studied through two Hopf algebras associated with it: the quantized universal enveloping algebra $\mathcal{U}_q(\mathfrak{g})$ and the quantized function algebra $\mathcal{O}(G_q)$. If $G$ has a compact real form $K$, one can use the Cartan involution to give a $*$-structure on $\mathcal{O}(G_q)$. The QFA $\mathcal{O}(G_q)$ with this $*$ structure is denoted by $\mathcal{O}(K_q)$ and its $C^*$-completion by $C(K_q)$. Here we study the crystal limits of $\mathcal{O}(SU_q(n+1))$ and $C(SU_q(n+1))$ and classify all irreducible representations of the crystallized algebras. We also prove that the crystallized algebra carries a natural bialgebra structure.


Preparatory Processes Before Labquakes Conducted On Cylindrical Westerly Granite In Triaxial Experiments, Kiran Pandey May 2025

Preparatory Processes Before Labquakes Conducted On Cylindrical Westerly Granite In Triaxial Experiments, Kiran Pandey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The ability to forecast future earthquakes before they occur to minimize seismic hazards is known as earthquake prediction or forecasting. The main aim of earthquake prediction is to find the expected time of occurrence, the location of the expected rupture, and how big the earthquake will be (i.e., magnitude). Earthquake prediction and the study of the indications prior to major earthquakes (precursory signals) have been key objectives since the beginning of earthquake research. In addition, a better understanding of earthquake nucleation and how faults progress toward failure is very important for seismic hazard assessments. The occurrence of earthquakes is known …


Study On Metal-Drug Coordination And Development Of Hydrogel Drug Delivery Systems, Tamanna Ferdous May 2025

Study On Metal-Drug Coordination And Development Of Hydrogel Drug Delivery Systems, Tamanna Ferdous

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation outlines a novel triple-networked hydrogel for a hydrophobic drug delivery system. The drug Simvastatin is used as a cardiovascular medication, but it has also been reported to function as an osteoinductive agent. Therefore, to deliver the drug locally to the affected area, a mechanically stable and tunable hydrogel has been designed using modified chitosan, PEGDMA, and PLA-PEG micelles. This hydrogel exhibited a steady release of simvastatin over a long period of 14 weeks. Additionally, the hydrogel is biocompatible and biodegradable, as demonstrated by the cytotoxicity test. This dissertation presents a comprehensive exploration of a novel triple-networked hydrogel specifically …


Experiments And Modeling Of Pmu Under Gps Spoofing Attacks, Joshua Afosa-Baffoe May 2025

Experiments And Modeling Of Pmu Under Gps Spoofing Attacks, Joshua Afosa-Baffoe

Graduate Theses & Non-Theses

Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) require an accurate timing signal, which is generally broadcast once per second and communicated to the PMU. While other timing protocols exist, internal clock actively synchronized to GPS time. This GPS dependence creates a potential cybersecurity vulnerability that requires attention. In this thesis, two critical aspects of GPS Spoofing Attacks (GSAs) were investigated. First, laboratory experiments on how a commercial PMU, compliant with the IEEE C37.118 standard, responds to a variety of GSAs. This work examines the ability of PMUs to detect certain spoofing attacks, highlighting cases where detection fails. The characteristic signature of the PMU …


Snowmelt Runoff Driven Hydropower Modelling Based On Spaceborne Remotely Sensed And Ground Weather Network Data, Ninad Bhagwat May 2025

Snowmelt Runoff Driven Hydropower Modelling Based On Spaceborne Remotely Sensed And Ground Weather Network Data, Ninad Bhagwat

Graduate Theses & Non-Theses

Identification of new optimal hydropower locations provides an opportunity to improve mankind's green energy portfolio by developing new hydroelectric plants, thereby decreasing the carbon footprint. Preliminary analysis of locating the optimal hydropower sites is generally the first step towards construction of a new hydropower plant. In this dissertation, I developed a parsimonious, yet robust tool to perform the preliminary analysis to locate optimal hydropower locations in any watershed using the remotely sensed Digital Elevation Model (DEM). Simulating the snowmelt-derived streamflow is crucial for water resources management in snow-dominated watersheds. The Snowmelt Runoff Model (SRM) is a lumped-parameter, temperature-index model that …


Detection, Analysis, And Modeling Of Time-Scale Separated Modulatory Brain Dynamics: Methods And Applications In Neurocritical Care, Maren Elizabeth Loe May 2025

Detection, Analysis, And Modeling Of Time-Scale Separated Modulatory Brain Dynamics: Methods And Applications In Neurocritical Care, Maren Elizabeth Loe

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Clinical monitoring of patients with neurological disease generates large volumes of data, including electrophysiology (e.g. EEG), heart rate, blood pressure, and other physiological measures. The use of these data to generate actionable prognostic measures is a long-held goal in clinical neurophysiology. In this regard, the use of engineering theory, including signal processing methods and computational modeling paradigms, is providing new ways of interpreting neurological data and yielding new insights into brain mechanisms and disease pathophysiology. This research focuses on the analysis and modeling of aberrant brain dynamical phenomena that occur over hours-long temporal epochs. Particularly, we consider time-scale separated electrophysiological …


Effective And Efficient Graph Foundation Model, Lecheng Kong May 2025

Effective And Efficient Graph Foundation Model, Lecheng Kong

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Graph data has emerged as a central component in numerous real-world applications, spanning recommender systems, drug discovery, social networking, and traffic forecasting. While traditional and modern graph learning techniques—ranging from graph kernels to Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and graph transformers—have achieved significant success, their task-specific nature and reliance on supervised learning limit their adaptability to new, unseen tasks. This rigidity becomes especially problematic in dynamic environments where retraining for every new task is costly and often infeasible. Inspired by the transformative impact of foundation models in natural language processing, this thesis explores the feasibility of developing a graph foundation model—a …


Advancing Predictive Modeling With Deep Representation Learning On Diverse Clinical Data, Hanyang Liu May 2025

Advancing Predictive Modeling With Deep Representation Learning On Diverse Clinical Data, Hanyang Liu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Electronic health records (EHRs) provide a wealth of information crucial for enhancing clinical decisions, patient outcomes, and healthcare efficiency. However, leveraging EHR data for predictive modeling involves significant challenges, including managing imbalanced and incomplete data, effectively integrating heterogeneous data types, efficiently capturing temporal and hierarchical structures, and ensuring the interpretability and clinical reliability of predictive outcomes. This dissertation addresses these critical challenges by proposing novel deep representation learning frameworks specifically designed for clinical predictive modeling from diverse EHR data. By integrating sophisticated deep learning techniques, this research demonstrates innovative deep learning modeling approaches and delivers tangible improvements in clinical predictive …


Scaling Quantum Systems: Quantum Networks, Distributed Quantum Computing, And Security, Zebo Yang May 2025

Scaling Quantum Systems: Quantum Networks, Distributed Quantum Computing, And Security, Zebo Yang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Recent advancements in quantum computing have opened up new possibilities across various fields, offering significant potential to enhance computation, communication, cryptography, and applications in areas like sensing, medicine, and chemistry. However, the capabilities of individual quantum devices are still limited, and scaling quantum hardware monolithically presents substantial challenges. Interconnecting quantum systems offers a promising alternative by aggregating capabilities across a network, thereby enabling quantum advantages for larger and more practical problems. This interconnection is achieved through quantum networking, which links external quantum systems, and Distributed Quantum Computing (DQC), which connects quantum processors within a system, such as in quantum data …


The Crosstalk Between Muscle And Adipose Tissue In Health And Disease, Chang Gui May 2025

The Crosstalk Between Muscle And Adipose Tissue In Health And Disease, Chang Gui

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the crosstalk between adipose and muscle tissues in physiology and pathophysiology, particularly focusing on the therapeutic potential of muscle-associated adipose tissue in muscle regeneration. Adipose tissue, an endocrine organ, secretes cytokines (a.k.a. adipokines) that significantly and negatively impact muscle function in conditions like diabetes, obesity, and aging. Whether similar signals mediate communication between muscle and its adjacent adipose tissue through paracrine signaling is unknown, as is whether this communication is therapeutically modifiable. Understanding the interactions between adipose and muscle tissues could lead to novel therapeutic strategies for improving muscle regeneration and function. …


System Security Foundations For Ai-Enabled Systems, Yuhao Wu May 2025

System Security Foundations For Ai-Enabled Systems, Yuhao Wu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

AI is being deployed broadly, from conventional computing systems like IoT systems to more advanced agentic systems. It is shifting from being a specialized component responsible for specific functions to becoming the core of agentic systems, where it drives autonomous decision-making and task execution. These AI-enabled systems bring tremendous benefits. For example, large language models can interpret user intent, select appropriate tools, and access data to complete tasks with minimal human guidance. However, they also introduce new security, privacy, and safety risks. These risks arise not only from the models themselves but also from the broader system design and integration. …


Towards Secure And Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Systems, Han Liu May 2025

Towards Secure And Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Systems, Han Liu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In recent years, machine learning (ML) has advanced at an unprecedented pace, driving the widespread adoption of increasingly sophisticated models across a broad range of real-world applications, including healthcare, finance, autonomous systems, and critical infrastructure. While these models have delivered remarkable benefits and transformed numerous industries, they remain inherently vulnerable to a variety of security and privacy threats. Given their growing role in safety-critical domains, ensuring their security and privacy has become imperative. Systematically addressing these vulnerabilities requires comprehensive adversarial analyses to uncover weaknesses and inform the design of robust defenses. This dissertation systematically investigates ML vulnerabilities in adversarial settings …


Osteoarthritis As A Multi-Factorial Disease: Exploring Piezo Ion Channels And Adipose Tissue As Therapeutic Targets, Erica Valentine Ely May 2025

Osteoarthritis As A Multi-Factorial Disease: Exploring Piezo Ion Channels And Adipose Tissue As Therapeutic Targets, Erica Valentine Ely

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a complex disease involving mechanical and inflammatory factors that affect both the joint and systemic environments. Despite its prevalence as a leading cause of pain and disability worldwide, no disease-modifying OA drugs (DMOADs) are currently available. This dissertation focuses on exploring key targets and developing innovative tools to combat OA, addressing its mechanical and inflammatory drivers both independently and in combination. First, we investigated the role of mechanosensitive ion channels Piezo1 and Piezo2 in OA pathogenesis using a murine destabilization of the medial meniscus (DMM) model. Our findings demonstrated that knocking out Piezo1, Piezo2, or both in …


Trustworthy Autonomy Through Robust Control And Alignment, Junlin Wu May 2025

Trustworthy Autonomy Through Robust Control And Alignment, Junlin Wu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

As artificial intelligence systems are increasingly applied in safety critical domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, and decision making under uncertainty, ensuring their trustworthiness has become a central challenge. This dissertation addresses two major facets of trustworthy AI: reliable control through formal guarantees and alignment against adversarial manipulation. The first part of the dissertation focuses on provably stable, robust, and safe control for nonlinear systems using learning based methods. We introduce the first general framework for synthesizing neural Lyapunov controllers in discrete time systems. This method combines a sound verifier based on mixed integer linear programming with gradient based counterexample …


Understanding And Mitigating Timing Issues In Autonomous Systems, Ao Li May 2025

Understanding And Mitigating Timing Issues In Autonomous Systems, Ao Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars and drones, have become a part of our daily lives. Since these systems operate in and interact with the physical world, their correctness depends on both functional and temporal aspects. However, the increasing complexity of modern computing hardware and software often leads to unpredictable timing behavior in these systems, making temporal properties particularly challenging to ensure. This dissertation proposes novel approaches to specify and enforce temporal properties based on a comprehensive empirical study of real-world issues. The first half of this dissertation presents an empirical study that dissects the timing issues. The dissection begins …


Understanding The Behavioral Health Of Children In Child Protective Services: Prevalence, Community Context, And System Involvement Using Administrative Data, Tzu-Hsin Huang May 2025

Understanding The Behavioral Health Of Children In Child Protective Services: Prevalence, Community Context, And System Involvement Using Administrative Data, Tzu-Hsin Huang

Brown School Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the behavioral health of children involved in the U.S. child welfare system through a three-paper approach. Amid rising concerns over youth mental health, suicide rates, and ADHD diagnoses, this study explores how these issues manifest among children reported for maltreatment – a population at elevated risk and often underserved. Paper 1 estimates the prevalence of behavioral health problems using national administrative datasets (NCANDS and AFCARS), providing insight into trends over time and disparities by age, race/ethnicity, sex, geographic context (urban vs. rural), and system involvement (CPS investigation vs. foster care). Paper 2 leverages county-level data to examine …


Tanner Msw Portfolio, Shannon Tanner May 2025

Tanner Msw Portfolio, Shannon Tanner

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This is the narrative section of the MSW Portfolio for Shannon Tanner.


Intentional Action, Impactful Risk-Taking, Jill Lombardi May 2025

Intentional Action, Impactful Risk-Taking, Jill Lombardi

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.


Msw Portfolio, Katharine Ann Turpen May 2025

Msw Portfolio, Katharine Ann Turpen

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This portfolio paper showcases my development as a Master of Social Work student, highlighting personal and professional growth across the CSWE competencies and the four dimensions of practice: Knowledge, Skills, Values, and Cognitive & Affective Processes. The portfolio reflects my evolving identity as a social worker and outlines my ongoing commitment to ethical, reflective, and client-centered practice.


Steps To The Peak, Lisa Hansen May 2025

Steps To The Peak, Lisa Hansen

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

Reflective paper on my experience obtaining a Master of Social Work degree. The paper outlines the ten core competencies of social work and examples of how I learned them in my studies and gain practical experience in my practicum.


Final Portfolio, Terence G. Shelly May 2025

Final Portfolio, Terence G. Shelly

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This narrative provides a comprehensive reflection on my academic and professional development throughout the Master of Social Work (MSW) program at the University of Montana. Framed by the Advanced Integrated Practice (AIP) model and the Just Practice Framework, the paper explores the integration of theory, personal values, and experiential learning across the ten core social work competencies. Drawing from practicum experiences with the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), the Montana Safe Schools Center (MSSC), and private practice at Meadowlark, I demonstrate growth in critical self-reflection, clinical skill development, advocacy, and systems-based theory. Special emphasis is placed on the application of trauma-informed …


Who Do You Want To Become?, Taylor Greene May 2025

Who Do You Want To Become?, Taylor Greene

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.


Master’S In Social Work: Professional Portfolio, Josephine Star Lange May 2025

Master’S In Social Work: Professional Portfolio, Josephine Star Lange

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.


Discovery Of Two Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies With Unusually Bright Globular Cluster Luminosity Functions Via A Mark-Dependently Thinned Point Process (Mathpop), Dayi Li, Gwendolyn M. Eadie, Patrick E. Brown, William E. Harris, Roberto G. Abraham, Pieter Van Dokkum, Steven R. Janssens, Samantha C. Berek, Shany Danieli, Aaron J. Romanowsky, Joshua S. Speagle May 2025

Discovery Of Two Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies With Unusually Bright Globular Cluster Luminosity Functions Via A Mark-Dependently Thinned Point Process (Mathpop), Dayi Li, Gwendolyn M. Eadie, Patrick E. Brown, William E. Harris, Roberto G. Abraham, Pieter Van Dokkum, Steven R. Janssens, Samantha C. Berek, Shany Danieli, Aaron J. Romanowsky, Joshua S. Speagle

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

We present MArk-dependently THinned POint Process (Mathpop), a novel method to infer the globular cluster (GC) counts in ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) and low-surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs). Many known UDGs have a surprisingly high ratio of GC number to surface brightness. However, standard methods to infer GC counts in UDGs face various challenges, such as photometric measurement uncertainties, GC membership uncertainties, and assumptions about the GC luminosity functions (GCLFs). Mathpop tackles these challenges using the mark-dependent thinned point process, enabling joint inference of the spatial and magnitude distributions of GCs. In doing so, Mathpop allows us to infer and quantify the …


Architecture Of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Glutamyl-Trna Synthetase Defines A Subfamily Of Dimeric Class Ib Aminoacyl-Trna Synthetases, Michael K. Fenwick, Stephen J. Mayclin, Steve Seibold, Amy E. Derocher, Sandhya Subramanian, Isabelle Q. Phan, David M. Dranow, Donald D. Lorimer, Ariel B. Abramov, James M. Bullard May 2025

Architecture Of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Glutamyl-Trna Synthetase Defines A Subfamily Of Dimeric Class Ib Aminoacyl-Trna Synthetases, Michael K. Fenwick, Stephen J. Mayclin, Steve Seibold, Amy E. Derocher, Sandhya Subramanian, Isabelle Q. Phan, David M. Dranow, Donald D. Lorimer, Ariel B. Abramov, James M. Bullard

School of Integrative Biological & Chemical Sciences (Formerly Dept. of Chemistry)

The aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (AaRSs) are an ancient family of structurally diverse enzymes that are divided into two major classes. The functionalities of most AaRSs are inextricably linked to their oligomeric states. While GluRSs were previously classified as monomers, the current investigation reveals that the form expressed in Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a rotationally pseudosymmetrical homodimer featuring intersubunit tRNA binding sites. Both subunits display a highly bent, “pipe strap” conformation, with the anticodon binding domain directed toward the active site. The tRNA binding sites are similar in shape to those of the monomeric GluRSs, but are formed through an approximately 180-degree rotation …


Establishment Of Six Flags Over The Deconstruction Of Sandtown, John Ely May 2025

Establishment Of Six Flags Over The Deconstruction Of Sandtown, John Ely

Master's Theses

Development, both private and public, has played a crucial role in the knowledge that historians can take from the land, but the desire to build quickly ultimately destroyed many sites before they were properly studied. The Chattahoochee River, along with almost all the other rivers and streams in the Southeast, supported not only survival but civilization. Unfortunately, almost the entire catalog of scholarly sources regarding these places was written by men of European descent, and these writers rarely discuss the details regarding the fate of the sites that were destroyed in the name of industry. Sandtown was an almost mythic …


Enhancing Diversion Success Through Financial Capability And Asset Building: A Framework And Proposed Intervention, Lissa Johnson, Margaret S. Sherraden, Carrie Pettus, Jude Miller, Jin Huang May 2025

Enhancing Diversion Success Through Financial Capability And Asset Building: A Framework And Proposed Intervention, Lissa Johnson, Margaret S. Sherraden, Carrie Pettus, Jude Miller, Jin Huang

Center for Social Development Research

Mass incarceration policies in the United States have generated the highest incarceration rate in the world, yet many incarcerated individuals have committed nonviolent offenses or been confined because they could not pay fines or fees. Diversion offers an opportunity for justice-involved individuals to avoid conviction and collateral consequences while maximizing public safety, reducing case processing, decreasing overpopulation in prisons, and lowering costs. However, diversion programs do not adequately address financial instability and insecurity that often contribute to criminal behavior. This paper reviews evidence on adult diversion programs and proposes an intervention approach responding to socioeconomic factors contributing to criminal behavior.


Trust-Related Health Beliefs In Medical Systems Among Black Americans Since Covid-19, Monique Johnson Dixon May 2025

Trust-Related Health Beliefs In Medical Systems Among Black Americans Since Covid-19, Monique Johnson Dixon

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

COVID-19 highlighted the longstanding systemic and structural racism that produced poor health outcomes in Black communities. Black minorities in the United States were disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with less access to health resources, low vaccine rates, and mistrust of healthcare providers and organizations. This interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) explored trust-related health beliefs with medical systems among Black Americans since COVID-19. The study explored the trust-related health beliefs through the six constructs of the health belief model—perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived barriers, perceived benefits, cues to action, and self-efficacy. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews of six participants who …