Digital Commons Network^™

Comparing Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion (Dei) Initiatives In The Usa And Africa: Challenges, Leadership Strategies, And Cross-Regional Adaptations, Marthe Annan Kingsley

Dissertations

Purpose: This comparative study qualitatively explores how organizational leaders in the United States and Africa apply transformational leadership to implement Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, focusing on the challenges they face, the leadership strategies they employ, and how effective strategies in each region might be adapted for cross-regional improvement.  Methodology: Using a qualitative comparative case study design grounded in Bass and Riggio's (2006) four dimensions of transformational leadership, the study drew on semi-structured interviews with 12 organizational leaders (six from the United States and six from Africa) including executive, DEI-specific leadership roles across nonprofit, private, and public sectors. Data …

Why They Stay: Exploring Mid-Level Managers’ Experiences During Economic Instability, Cynthia Josefina Bryan

Dissertations

Purpose: This phenomenological study explored mid-level managers’ perceptions of the impact of organizational environments fostering recognition, empowerment practices, and psychological safety on sustaining their organizational commitment when economic instability impeded leadership succession planning, employee upskilling, and staff retention. Additionally, the study identified sustainable, nonfinancial organizational practices that influenced participants’ decisions to remain with their organizations during periods of economic instability.

Methodology: Grounded in Organizational Support Theory and Organizational Commitment Theory, the study included eight mid-level managers representing public, private, nonprofit, and educational organizations. Data were collected through demographic questionnaires, field notes, and semi structured interviews. Data analysis followed Moustakas’s (1994) …

Unleashed: A Phenomenological Study Of Empowerment Leadership Among Elementary School Superintendents, Michelle Marie Ramirez

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this exploratory phenomenological study was to identify and describe the strategies used by exemplary superintendents of elementary school districts in Fresno, Kern, Monterey, and San Luis Obispo counties to create conditions for empowerment for everyone in their organization based on five variables: trust, love, belonging, strategy, and culture.

Methodology: This phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of exemplary elementary school district superintendents in Fresno, Kern, Monterey, and San Luis Obispo counties. Purposeful, criterion sampling was used to identify 10 participants who met the study’s criteria. The semistructured, open-ended interview protocol was developed by a thematic research …

Replication Study Of Leadership Approaches Federal Employees Find Effective For Enhancing Morale And Productivity, Bobby Orozco

Dissertations

This study used the full range leadership model (FRLM) and lead-member exchange theory to examine leadership’s impact on federal employee morale, trust, engagement, and performance. A descriptive qualitative study design involved semistructured interviews with 16 nonsupervisory transportation security officers (TSO) at nine Northern and Southern California airports. Participants had a minimum of 2 years federal employment and 1 year union representative experience. Audio recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and thematically analyzed using NVivo software. Organizational documents were also used to triangulate interview data. Results revealed an inspirational, caring, and collegial leadership style was most effective in enhancing morale and productivity. …

Human Resources Professional’S Job Practices In Manufacturing That Impact Employee Job Satisfaction And Retention, Alma Rosa Avalos

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this explanatory sequential mixed methods study was to identify and describe employee job practices in the manufacturing industry as perceived by HR professionals that impact employee job satisfaction. The second purpose of this study was to determine which employee job satisfaction practices have the most impact on employee retention as perceived by HR professionals.

Methodology: An explanatory sequential mixed methods design examined the perceptions of 30 purposively selected Los Angeles County HR professionals. Data was collected through an online survey and interviews and analyzed using descriptive statistics, frequency tables, and qualitative analysis.

Findings: HR professionals consistently …

When Nigeria Happens To You: Finding Effective Leadership Approaches For Crisis Management And Organizational Resilience Among Nigerian Leaders, Grace Odim

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore how Nigerian SME leaders interpret and apply leadership strategies to manage crises and build organizational resilience in volatile environments. The study focused on key dimensions of leadership, including strategic crisis navigation and vulnerability assessment, organizational resilience, contextual leadership, experiential learning and innovation, and organizational sustainability.

Methodology: This study employed a qualitative phenomenological research design to examine the lived experiences of Nigerian SME leaders who had navigated significant organizational crises. Participants were purposefully selected based on their direct experience managing disruptions that affected their businesses. Data were collected through semistructured interviews …

Desarrollo E Implementación De Un Seminario Sobre Comunicación Para Parejas De La Iglesia Adventista Del Séptimo Día Hispana De West Suburban En Villa Park, Illinois, Nelson Salazar

Doctor of Ministry Projects

Problem

The 184-member West Suburban Hispanic Seventh-day Adventist Church has no record of holding a communication seminar for couples in the congregation. Several church members have requested that training be provided to the church's forty-five couples. The benefits that the seminar on couples’ communication can confer have the potential to foster unity in marriages and homes. The lessons learned from the implementation of this project can also serve as a reference for other congregations with similar realities.

Methodology

For the development and implementation of this training seminar, after obtaining the necessary administrative permits, the author examined the topic of couple …

Insulinemic And Inflammatory Dietary Patterns And Colorectal Cancer Risk: A Dietary Data Harmonization Study Of One Million Participants In The Consortium Of Metabolomics Studies (Comets), Ni Shi, Rachel Hoobler, Rhea Harewood, Amanda E Toland, Demetrius Albanes, Emmanouil Bouras, Marc J Gunter, Linda M Liao, Steven C Moore, Fulvio Ricceri, Jerome I Rotter, Rashmi Sinha, Rachael Stolzenberg-Solomon, Anne Tjønneland, Alexis C Wood, Danxia Yu, Mary C Playdon, Fred K Tabung

Children’s Nutrition Research Center Staff Publications

Background: Inflammatory and insulinemic dietary patterns have been associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but generalizability across diverse populations with heterogeneous food supplies and dietary behaviors has not been established.

Objectives: We harmonized disparate dietary and covariate data on a large scale to compute the reverse Empirical Dietary Index for Hyperinsulinemia (rEDIH), reverse Empirical Dietary Inflammatory Pattern (rEDIP), and Healthy Eating Index (HEI)-2015 scores, and tested their associations with CRC risk.

Methods: We leveraged data among 501,892 women and 407,390 men from 6 cohorts across the United States (NIH-AARP, Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian, SCCS) and …

The Executive's Takeover Of Independent Agencies: How Institutional Design Gave Way To Political Will, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

The anticipated demise of the independent agency is a saga that implicates Congress as much as it does the President or the Supreme Court. By capitulating to presidential initiatives and failing to defend their institutional prerogatives, Congress has facilitated presidential control of the administrative state. Indeed, irrespective of whether the Court formally repudiates Humphrey’s Executor, Congress has largely acquiesced to a regime whereby presidents essentially control independent agencies. By highlighting the competing incentives of Congress and the White House, this Essay explains the rise of presidential unilateralism vis-à-vis independent agencies. This Essay also casts light on a critically important but …

Firearms And Fora: Constructing Public Carry Doctrine, Timothy Zick

Faculty Publications

Where can a person lawfully carry firearms in public? Under what conditions can they do so? Now that the Supreme Court has formally recognized a Second Amendment right to public carry, these are among the most important unresolved questions regarding the right to bear arms. The Second Amendment’s public carry doctrine is in its infancy. How the doctrine develops will have a profound impact on the exercise of Second Amendment rights in public places and on the public square. Integrating a new constitutional right into the public square is not a novel problem. After the Supreme Court recognized First Amendment …

Introduction To Trigger Warnings: Teaching Through Trauma, Ian Barnard, Ryan Ashley Caldwell, Jada Patchigondla, Aneil Rallin, Morgan Read-Davidson, Ethan Trejo, Kristi M. Wilson

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"The individual histories of both trigger warnings and trauma have evolved rapidly in the overlapping wakes of COVID, mental health crises, attacks on educational institutions in the United States, climate apocalypse, evergrowing economic inequities, and, more promisingly, attempts at political redress and educational equity. At the same time, trigger warnings and trauma have become exponentially more intimately linked in the past few years. But however often the topic of trigger warnings provokes heated discussion, the appeals and alignments of the interlocutors equally as frequently defy neat political binaries. Critiques of trigger warnings come from all sides of the political and …

Trigger Warnings And A Pedagogy Of Trust, Morgan Read-Davidson

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"While the larger conversation about difficult content and trigger warnings is not new, the sudden need for urgently scheduled meetings with me did not begin until the COVID- 19 pandemic crisis and our move to remote instruction, and the subsequent adjustment back to the classroom. This seems to coincide with the increase of online and social media interaction during the pandemic, where the use of trigger warnings and content warnings on social media, particularly on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, have made the conversation far more visible. For students, this seems to have given them validation and confidence, as well as …

Vestibular Migraine And Ssri Withdrawal: A Case Presentation, Grace Fairchild, Sarah Redding, Ashley Flagge

V&B Presentations

No abstract provided.

Searching For Cause Of Unexplained Protein Interaction With Multiple Assembly Methods, Gavin Anderson

Master's Projects

Research into colistin adjuvants has identified interactions between a host of proteins and proteins found within certain strains of bacteria. BLAST, a widely adopted local sequence alignment tool, was used to create a database containing the genomes of relevant bacterial strains, which would then be used to query against the previously identified proteins. Many of these strains do not have publicly available assemblies, which makes database construction difficult. CATwalk, a new naïve fragment extender, is first described in this paper and used to extend fragments of interest. BLAST results first identified short fragments with sufficient similarity, which can then be …

Memory Effects In Many-Body Systems, Jeffrey Beckstrand

Master's Projects

This thesis investigates memory effects in many-body systems through the MoriZwanzig Formalism for projected dynamics of a Hamiltonian System which yields the Generalized Langevin Equation (GLE). The GLE is a stochastic differential equation (SDE) that studies the dynamics of observables under the effects of many other observables in the system. Although satisfying, the GLE has a term called the Memory Kernel that encodes the past of the system and introduces a computational challenge by introducing a non-Markovian property to the equation. The kernel is often approximated by introducing a delta function, which simplifies the computation, but at the loss of …

Impact Of Cigarette Smoke On Immune And Stromal Cells, Justin Wong

Master's Projects

Cigarette smoke is a plight on human health, being a major contributor to lung diseases. The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) directs immune regulation and metabolic adaptation in response to environmental toxins. This study investigates transcriptomic changes between wild-type and AHR knockout mouse lung tissue under smoke and air conditions. Single-cell RNA sequencing data were generated by the Butcher Lab and analyzed in Seurat for differential gene expression (DGE) analysis. A two way ANOVA framework was used with DGE analysis to classify genes as smoke induced or suppressed in an AHR dependent or independent manner, and these gene sets were analyzed …

Safe-R2r: A Safety-Aware And Budget-Optimized Retrieval Controller For Rag Systems, Mandar Sunil Gondane

Master's Projects

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual grounding in large language models by incorporating external evidence during inference. However, most RAG systems rely on fixed retrieval strategies that ignore query difficulty, computational cost, and prediction uncertainty. This project introduces SAFE-R2R (Safety-Aware and Budget-Optimized Reason-to-Retrieve), a retrieval controller that treats retrieval as a query-dependent decision problem. SAFE-R2R organizes retrieval into a multi-rung ladder ranging from no retrieval to deeper retrieval with reranking. At each rung, the system generates an answer, computes reliability signals, and combines them into a risk score used within a conformal calibration framework to decide whether to accept the answer …

Multi-Agent Path Planning And Optimization Using Q-Learning, Chirag Rudrish

Master's Projects

Robot navigation in a multi-agent setting requires a balance between safety and efficiency, especially in dense environments. In these two-dimensional spaces, the scope for geometric errors is much less and could lead to collisions or immobility. This project proposes to address the navigation task using a two-phase path planning pipeline that combines reinforcement learning and convex optimization in a scalable and robust manner. The first phase consists of generating diverse collision-free paths using a Q-learning agent that is trained on a visibility graph representation of the environment. The discretization of the environment using waypoint-based graphs allows the agent to train …

Cost-Aware Predictive Routing For Vision-Language Models, Sahil Sait Naveed

Master's Projects

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used for multimodal tasks, but their inference costs vary widely across model tiers. This work presents a predictive routing framework that assigns each query to the most cost-effective VLM by using multimodal embeddings, clustering, and per-cluster model error estimates. Evaluated on six commercial VLMs, the selected router reduces average cost by about 49 percent relative to the quality-first setting on both validation and test. This comes with accuracy losses of 0.4 percentage points on validation and 0.9 on held-out test data. It also outperforms K-NN and ZeroRouter routing baselines while providing lowercost operating points than …

Stepwise Sudoku Reasoning Training Using Transformers, Lok Man Chu

Master's Projects

Sudoku is a constraint satisfaction problem that serves as a testbed for studying reasoning and stepwise deduction. While many solvers can produce correct solutions, they often fail to generate human interpretable sequences of logically consistent steps. This study investigates whether a transformer trained on stepwise deduction traces can learn to solve Sudoku puzzles through sequential, logically deducible moves. Results show that solve accuracy improves significantly with more training data, reaching approximately 78% at 1500k samples. Stepwise analysis indicates that the model effectively learns simple strategies, achieving near-perfect performance. However, performance on more complex strategies remains limited. Overall, while the model …

Adaptive Real-Time Fraud Detection Using Online Learning And Explicit Concept-Drift Detection, Purva Govind Tugaonkar

Master's Projects

Real-time credit card fraud detection faces challenges such as extreme class imbalance, delayed feedback, and concept drift in transaction streams. This project implements and evaluates an adaptive streaming fraud detection framework based on three methodologies: (1) online learning with incremental updates, (2) explicit conceptdrift detection using statistical monitoring, and (3) separate models for immediate and delayed supervision, combined with cost-sensitive learning and anomaly detection. The system processes the credit card fraud dataset in a batched streaming fashion, uses multiple online learners and ensembles. Experiments show that online, driftaware models maintain high recall on frauds while controlling false positives under imbalanced …

Multi-Agent Path Planning And Optimization Using Q-Learning, Chirag Rudresh

Master's Projects

Robot navigation in a multi-agent setting requires a balance between safety and efficiency, especially in dense environments. In these two-dimensional spaces, the scope for geometric errors is much less and could lead to collisions or immobility. This project proposes to address the navigation task using a two-phase path planning pipeline that combines reinforcement learning and convex optimization in a scalable and robust manner. The first phase consists of generating diverse collision-free paths using a Q-learning agent that is trained on a visibility graph representation of the environment. The discretization of the environment using waypoint-based graphs allows the agent to train …

2026-2029 Strategic Plan, Susan Davies

Documents of the Brain Health Collective

No abstract provided.

Ai Deployment Authorisation: A Global Standard For Machine-Readable Governance Of High-Risk Artificial Intelligence, Daniel Djan Saparning

Student Publications

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) governance lacks a formal, enforceable mechanism for determining whether a given AI system is legally permitted to operate in a specific domain and jurisdiction. Existing approaches-such as model cards, audits, and benchmark evaluations provide descriptive information about model behaviour and training data but do not produce binding deployment decisions with legal or financial force. This paper introduces the AI Deployment Authorisation Score (ADAS). This machine-readable, regulator-grade framework evaluates AI systems across five legally and economically grounded dimensions: Risk, Alignment, Externality, Control, and Auditability, derived from safety engineering, alignment theory, algorithmic accountability, and liability economics. ADAS produces …

The Political Disconnect: Working-Class And Low-Income People On What Politics Means To Them And How They Might Be Mobilized, Daniel Laurison, Kelly Diaz, Monica Guzman , '25, Zachary Kreines , '25, Kaj Tug Lee , '25, Lydia Orr, Sahiba Tandon , '25

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Works

A functioning democratic society must involve all kinds of people in deciding who will hold the power to enact laws and allocate tax dollars. However, working-class and low-income people vote at significantly lower rates than the more privileged in the US, and their participation has been declining in recent elections. In order to understand why those with fewer resources are less likely to vote and how this might change, a diverse group of researchers interviewed 232 low-income and working-class people (in every major racial group) from across Pennsylvania – 144 of whom either did not vote, or voted only occasionally. …

Voices Of The Silenced, Frank E. Dobson Jr., Madison Borowicz, Cedar Carden, Nick Clark, Kenneth Fischer, Selah Gitonga, Ray Harvey, Tanasia Cunningham, Max Lewis, Gretchen Schneider, Raymond Shellow, Destiny Sexton, Isaiah Siaway, Awo Warsame, Aashvi Soni

Undergraduate Publications

Voices of the Silenced is a collection of creative work produced by the students of English 1192 at Otterbein University (Fall 2025). This booklet brings together prose, poetry, visual art, and multimedia expression centered on themes of activism, self-advocacy, identity, resilience, and social change.

Table of Contents:

• Preface by Dr. Frank Dobson
• Are You Becoming Who You Want to Be? by Madison Borowicz
• Agree to Disagree by Cedar Carden
• A Seriously Unserious Nation by Nick Clark
• Closeted Courage by Kenneth Fischer
• The Philosophy of an Activist by Selah Gitonga
• The Price We Pay by Ray Harvey & TaNasia Cunningham
• The …

Construction Industry Preparedness For Generation Z And Millennials: Aligning Industry Characteristics With Workforce Job Preferences, Ameenullah Amiri, Dhaval R. Gajjar, Jason D. Lucas

The Professional Constructor

The construction industry in the United States suffers from workforce shortages, partly due to younger generations being hired more slowly than baby boomers retire. Generation Z’s (Gen Z) lack of interest in joining the construction industry, coupled with the retirement of older workers, has amplified the problem. This paper investigates existing literature to identify the work and career preferences of Gen Z and Millennials and determine where the industry may focus efforts to attract these two generations. Through a systematic literature review, this study identified overlaps and gaps between the current construction industry workforce’s perceptions of the industry and the …

Winter 2026 Otterbein Connections, Institutional Advancement

Otterbein Connections

In this issue:

• Welcome Letter by Floyd Akins
• Students Helping to Strengthen Bonds by Jordan Helphrey
• Volunteer Spotlight
• Division Name Update
• Year-End Giving by Jordan Helphrey
• Summer Fun at the 'Bein by Dana Viglietta '96
• Understanding Donor Advised Funds by Kathleen Bonte
• Class of 1975 Celebrates 50th Golden Reunion by Stephanie Clark
• Alumni Spotlight by Michael Hickin '25
• Reminders
• Words of Encouragement by Valerie Gruber '84

Menendez De Aviles And La Florida, Juan Carlos Mercado

Publications and Research

The present volume is a translation of Solis de Meras and Barrientos,  Menendez de Aviles y La Florida: cronicas de sus expediciones, edition, notes, and introduction by Juan Carlos Mercado

1967 5bfts First Reunion Dinner. Invitation (June 1967) From John Potter (Chair, 5bfts Clewiston) To Raf Cadets Who Had Trained As Pilots At 5bfts During Ww2, Jenifer A. Harding

Documents

The First Reunion Dinner for RAF pilots who had trained at 5BFTS during WW2 was held on October 14, 1967, at the Royal Aero Club, London. This invitation to the Reunion dated June1967, is from John Potter (Chair, 5BFTS Clewiston) to RAF cadets who had trained as pilots during WW2 at 5BFTS.