Digital Commons Network^™

It's In My Nature: A Look At The Individual Differences That Influence Perceptions Of Work Stress Recovery With Nature Breaks, Nathaly Rayo

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

The purpose of this study was to explore how individual differences influence employee

perceptions of nature breaks at work. While nature provides restorative benefits to employees such

as reduced fatigue and feelings of recovery and awe, individual differences may impact the fit

between an employee and nature as a desirable work break location. We adopted a person-centered

approach and conducted a Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) using the indicators of nature

connectedness, regulatory focus, uncertainty intolerance, and openness to experience. Results

supported the emergence of four distinct profiles: break under-regulating nature adventurers,

nature-adverse break-takers, nature-loving break self-regulators, and reserved nature-neutral

break-takers. …

Thriving Through Turbulence: Exploring Team Resilience Through An Adversity-Centered Lens, Krisztina Szabo

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Although adversity has been a central component of team resilience definitions (Fisher et al., 2022; Raetze et al., 2022), there is little known about how different characteristics of adversity influence team functioning. Drawing from Event System Theory (Morgeson et al., 2015), the dissertation examined the connections between adverse event characteristics (i.e., event novelty, criticality, disruption, duration), team processes (i.e., planning, collective sensemaking, strategy formulation, coordination, monitoring and backup behaviors), and team outcomes (i.e., team performance) in the context of a repeated measures research study. The results indicated that novelty and criticality of adverse events were significantly and positively related to …

The Role Individual Differences And Environmental Factors In Automated Driving Performance, John M. Duany

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

A series of experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of ADHD diagnosis, inclement weather, non-driving-related tasks (NDRT), automation failures, and traffic density on driving performance and takeover performance. This study also examined the relationship between dispositional factors (i.e., trust in automation, cognitive failures, and self-efficacy) and dynamic factors (i.e., mental workload, situation awareness, and situational trust) in relation to automated driving performance. A total of 156 participants were recruited for this study, including drivers with and without attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Each participant completed four experimental drives and two baseline drives. Mental workload, heart rate variability (HRV), situational trust, …

Pride Or Prejudice: An Examination Of Queer Content In Florida High Schools, Niamh L. Harrop

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

This thesis explores how queer individuals reflect on the presence—or more often, the absence—of queer content in their high school education. Despite increasing visibility of LGBTQ+ people in popular culture and legal reform, formal educational spaces remain largely heteronormative and cisnormative structured from a heterosexual and cisgender standpoint. Through a critical qualitative approach, this study draws on semi-structured interviews with 13 queer participants who attended high school in Florida in the years between the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015 and the passage of Florida’s H.B. 1557 (“Don’t Say Gay” law) in 2022. Using thematic analysis, four key themes were …

Examining Educational Inequalities And Driving Science’S Next Generation Forward: Geobus Program Theory Evaluation, Elise M. Lorenzo

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

This study presents a theory-driven evaluation of GeoBus, a mobile science lab designed to deliver hands-on, “fun learning experiences” via a solar powered, technology-rich learning environment brought directly to K-12 students in Central Florida Title 1 schools. While STEM education is widely recognized as essential for promoting equity, many schools, particularly in under-resourced communities, continue to face barriers to accessing meaningful and inclusive science learning opportunities. GeoBus was created in response to this need, offering students an informal learning environment with exposure to geospatial technologies and interactive science content.

Drawing on mixed-methods data, including content from the GeoBus website and …

Experiencing Race, Racism And Racialization In Transnational Contexts: Racial Literacies Of First-Year International Asian Students., Nasiba Norova

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

This research focused on exploring the racial literacies of first-year international East Asian (EA) students, specifically examining their perceptions of and experiences with race, racism, and racialized groups in various social and educational contexts in both their home countries and the United States. The study used critical ethnography to examine the perspectives of EA international students and composition faculty. It involved multiple semi-structured interviews, journal entries, racial literacy autobiographies, site document analysis, and class observations to understand how students perceived exposure to race, racism, and racialized groups and how faculty viewed the importance of racial education for international students in …

Staff Education On The Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale, Nathlie Ndokame

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Summary This was a staff education project aimed at improving nurse knowledge on the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS) tool. The identified gap in practice was a lack of knowledge and confidence among psychiatric nursing staff in utilizing this evidence-based suicide risk assessment tool. This project question was as follows: Does the implementation of an education program for psychiatric nursing staff on the use of the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale improve knowledge of patients at risk for suicide? The project employed the ADDIE framework and the Johns Hopkins evidence-based practice model. A comprehensive literature search was conducted, yielding 67 relevant …

Isolation And Divergence Of Greater Earless Lizards (Phrynosomatidae: Cophosaurus) In Western North America Support Multiple Diversification Processes And A Complex Demographic History, Christopher Robert Blair, Carlos Joaquín Pavón-Vázquez, Qaantah Rana, Keaka Farleigh, Erika Crispo, Thomas Panzera, Felipe De Medeiros Magalhães, Britt White, Uri Omar Garcia-Vazquez

Publications and Research

The Southwestern US and northern Mexico continue to serve as ideal regions to elucidate the suite of ecological and evolutionary processes influencing lineage diversification. The complex geological history of arid North America, coupled with paleoclimate change during the Pleistocene and diverse ecoregions makes a multipronged approach to hypothesis testing necessary. We combine thousands of loci from a genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approach along with mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from the Greater Earless Lizard (Cophosaurus texanus) to examine diversity and test for cryptic population structure. We also apply recently developed coalescent approaches in a Bayesian framework to estimate migration rates. Population …

Skin-To-Skin Contact At Birth For Very Preterm Infants And Symptoms Of Depression And Anxiety In Parents During The First Year – A Secondary Outcome Of A Randomized Clinical Trial, Siri Lilliesköld, Karoline Lode-Kolz, Björn Westrup, Nils Bergman, Kimmo Sorjonen, Ulrika Ådén, Evalotte Mörelius, Siren Rettedal, Wibke Jonas

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Background: Mental health issues are common in parents to preterm infants. In the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), skin-to-skin contact (SSC) as an avenue for parent-infant closeness may improve parental mental health. Few studies exist regarding its benefits when initiated immediately postbirth. The aim was to determine the effect of SSC for very preterm infants at birth on parents' mental health, by assessing symptoms of depression and anxiety within the first year. Methods: The Immediate Parent-Infant Skin-to-Skin Study was a randomized clinical trial conducted 2018–2021 at three NICUs in Sweden and Norway. Very preterm infants (28–33 weeks of gestation) were …

Learning Structure With Multivariate Information Bottleneck And Exploration Of New Methods In Sequential Decision Making, Volodymyr Makarenko

Master's Theses

Research in useful information extraction has been motivated by the increasing demand to extract insights from unstructured data, and by the need to store and transmit great volumes of information, often originating in unstructured data such as videos. Research in rate distortion and information bottleneck paved the path for understanding and guiding the design of lossy encoders, capable of extracting relevant information. Independently, research in deep representation learning has enabled numerous applications for unstructured high-dimensional data such as images. However, the interpretability of the deep learning methods remained limited. Several desired properties of learned representations have been suggested, including disentanglement. …

The George-Anne Inkwell Edition, Georgia Southern University

The Inkwell

No abstract provided.

The Cohort Space As Experienced By Latina Doctoral Students, Tiana Bierwert

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

This phenomenological study explores how Latina Doctoral Students experience cohort spaces within graduate programs, focusing on the gendered and racialized challenges embedded in these environments. Utilizing pláticas as a culturally grounded method and guided by a Latina Feminist Phenomenological framework, this research examines how cohort models—which are often designed to foster support and collaboration—can instead exacerbate marginalization for students at the intersections of race and gender. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of White Space and Counterspace, the study interrogates how cohort environments can operate as sites of exclusion and surveillance, where dominant norms are reproduced and where Latina Doctoral Students …

Factors Associated With Discrimination-Related Distress Among Sexual And Gender Minority Individuals: A Predictive Analysis, Emylia Terry

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals face disparate rates of mental health outcomes, such as psychological distress, which contributes to suicidality. This may be attributable to minority stress, which posits that health inequities impacting this community are driven by increased exposure to stigma- and discrimination-related stressors. The negative physical and psychological health impacts of psychological distress and discrimination are well-documented in the literature. Structural stigma – in the form of harmful anti-LGBTQIA+ laws and policies – is associated with increased suicidality. However, little is known about factors associated with perceived discrimination occurrences and discrimination-related distress. First, a systematic review was …

Hot Spring Associated Infectious Diseases In The Great Basin And Southwest, Matthew Bentz

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Like all bodies of freshwater, natural hot springs can harbor pathogenic microorganisms that carry the threat of infectious disease. The unique chemistry, increased temperature, and popularity for bathing may alter the risk profile of hot springs compared to other natural bodies of water. Despite this risk, the role of hot springs as a reservoir for infectious diseases remains understudied, particularly within the context of regional public health. Nevada and the Great Basin/Southwest have increasingly promoted hot springs for the purposes of tourism, and they share a strong link to the cultural heritage of the region. The unknown risk profile and …

The Speech-To-Song Illusion Across Development And The Effects Of High-Level Expectations, Rodica R. Constantine

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The typical listener can readily categorize auditory stimuli as either speech or song even though these structures share many acoustic similarities. These musical and linguistic categories may nevertheless take time to develop as children acquire language- and music-specific knowledge. In the Speech-to-Song (STS) illusion, multiple repetitions of a natural spoken utterance can give rise to a perceptual switch wherein the stimulus begins to sound song-like to the listener. While the STS illusion has been well-researched in adult listeners, it had yet to be investigated in children. In our study, we examined whether children experience the STS illusion by presenting participants …

Understanding Ore Deposit Scale Controls On Au Enrichment In Carlin-Type Au Mineralization: A High-Resolution Study Of The Rita K Deposit, Conner T. Callaway

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Controls on the distribution of gold (Au) within the Rita K Carlin-type deposit are poorly understood. The primary Au-bearing carbonate unit Wispy, is a bioturbated muddy limestone with debris flow clasts that range in size but are typically >5 cm occurring in the lower sections. The orebody is described as a syncline-anticline pair that hosts high-grade Au ore in the fold hinges. The spatial relationship between Au mineralization and fold hinges suggests that shortening due to folding is an important mechanism producing Au-enriched zones. However, the exact mechanism of Au enrichment and deposit-scale controls on Au distribution and fluid evolution …

Empowering Science With The World's First High Accuracy And High Throughput Functional Assay, Christopher Giacoletto

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Understanding the functional consequences of genetic mutations remains a central challenge in modern biology, with far-reaching implications for human health and disease. While early systematic methods like alanine scanning and phage display provided foundational insights into protein structure and function, the emergence of high-throughput approaches—such as Multiplexed Assays of Variant Effect (MAVEs)—and predictive tools powered by artificial intelligence have vastly expanded our ability to profile mutational landscapes. However, these methods are often constrained by trade-offs between accuracy, scalability, and biological relevance.This dissertation presents the development and application of the GigaAssay, the world’s first high-throughput functional assay capable of delivering both …

Integrated Uav Platform For Multi-Spectral, Thermal, And Eos Imaging In Wildfire Monitoring And Modeling, Md Shariful Islam

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis presents the design and development of a modular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system based on a quadcopter platform for flexible and efficient wildfire-related multimodal image acquisition. Addressing key limitations in ecological UAV monitoring such as sensor inflexibility, time-consuming reconfiguration, and imprecise image georeferencing, the system introduces a versatile payload integration framework supporting three distinct imaging sensors: MicaSense Altum-PT, FLIR Vue Pro R, and Sony Alpha 6000.All onboard components, including the flight controller, autopilot software, GNSS module, motors and ESCs, were selected to optimize stability and payload performance. A gimbal-free, downward-facing mount simplifies field deployment, while custom integration enables …

Functional Biopolymers Applied To Sustainable Technologies In The Environment And Healthcare, Fengjie He

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Biodegradable polymeric materials (biopolymers) are naturally derived materials known for their excellent biocompatibility, biodegradability, sustainability, and versatile chemical functionality. They have attracted increasing attention in various applications as alternative to synthetic materials ranging from food packaging to tissue engineering. Meanwhile, with intrinsic advantages, biopolymers have also emerged as promising materials in addressing contemporary challenges in both biomedical and environmental fields. Motivated by the significant potential of biopolymers and the growing need for sustainable materials, my research focuses on the design and engineering of biodegradable polymers with novel modification methods and application directions. In this work, two representative biopolymers are selected: …

The Dual Impact Of Moral Injury: Links To Ptsd Symptoms And Disinhibited Externalizing In U.S. Combat Veterans, Bianca S. Islas

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Moral injury is an experience of psychological distress that occurs when a person’s morals are violated by themselves or others, including institutions and organizations. Such violations of morality can be impairing and have high rates of comorbidity with internalizing disorders (posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety, suicidality), which may indicate that moral injury is a transdiagnostic construct. This study had four aims, which were accomplished using from a nationally representative, probability-based sample of 1,353 US military veterans. In the first aim, we created structural models of moral injury using the Moral Injury Events Scale (for which a bifactor structure with a specific …

Investigating Information Extraction And Language Models In Medical Domain Text Processing, Pouyan Nahed

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation demonstrates that carefully adapted language-model pipelines can transform unstructured clinical-trial and pharmacological prose into reliable, low-latency structured data. Four interconnected studies support this claim.Tri-AL platform. An open-source dashboard ingests all 440 k+ ClinicalTrials.gov records—including every historical revision—into a normalized schema and parses the 20 GB XML archive over 10x faster than a BeautifulSoup baseline, while exposing hooks for demographic analytics and supporting integration of user-defined modules. Clinical trial summarization. An encoder–decoder model is trained on 57k description–summary pairs to condense clinical trials into a few sentences. ROUGE evaluation shows a 20% improvement over the baseline, while graph-based evaluation …

Identifying Appropriate Clinical Cutoffs For Traumatic Dissociation In Maltreated Youth, Amanda L. Mraz

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Maltreated youth who experience traumatic dissociation are at an increased risk for various severe psychopathological outcomes. Much is still unknown about the risk factors for traumatic dissociation in maltreated youth. The present study aimed to identify dissociation (e.g., dissociative amnesia, absorption and imaginative involvement, passive influence, and depersonalization and derealization) risk factors, via parametric statistical methods, in association with the appropriate clinical cutoff for the total and subscale scores from the Adolescent Dissociative Experiences Scale (A-DES). Investigatory variables included demographic (e.g., age, race, and gender), cognitive (e.g., resiliency and posttraumatic cognitions), and psychological (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression …

Pylro: A Python Calculator For Analyzing Long-Range Structural Order, Kevin Parrish

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

We present PyLRO, an open-source Python calculator designed to detect, quantify, and display long-range order in periodic structures. The program’s design methodology, workflow, and approach to order quantification are thoroughly described and demonstrated using a simple toy model. Great care is considered in the detailing of the calculation logic, as is standard in the development of computational methods. Additionally, we apply PyLRO to a series of metastable AlPO4 structural intermediates from a prior high-pressure study, demonstrating how to compute and visualize structural order in all directions on a Miller sphere. We further highlight the program’s capabilities through a high-throughput analysis …

Tractors On The Mall: Unraveling The New Deal, Political Shifts, And The 1980s Farm Crisis, Tracy M. Neblina

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In the 1980s, Midwestern farmers faced an economic crisis that rivaled the Great Depression. Agricultural policy in the 1970s and 1980s led to a boom and bust for many of the nation’s farmers, causing the decline in rural communities in the middle of the country. During this period, more efficient agricultural production, shifting federal policy, high inflation, and devalued farmland led farmers in the Midwest to face incredible economic hardships, loss of land, changes in their communities, and challenges to their sense of purpose and identity. The Farm Crisis of the 1980s furnishes an extraordinary opportunity to investigate a confluence …

Nevada Hpv Vaccine Completion Time And Adherence Among 9-14-Year-Olds From 2017-2023, Emily Sandoval

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The HPV (Human Papillomavirus) is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections, in the United States. Since its development in 1991, the HPV vaccine has been proven to be highly effective against the infection (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2024). In order for an individual to receive optimal protection, the CDC has given guidelines dependent on age. It is important to understand changes in HPV vaccine completion for future public health immunization campaigns and objectives. To analyze how HPV completion and adherence has changed from 2017-2023 among the 9-14-year-old population, a retrospective cohort study was conducted utilizing …

Development Of An Access Charge Framework For High-Speed Rail Incorporating Rail Replacement Costs And Dynamic Train Characteristics, Nitesh Kumar Yadav

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis develops a framework to determine track access charges for shared high-speed rail corridors, with a focus on rail replacement cost driven by train-induced loads. The method explicitly accounts for both static loads, resulting from axle weights, and dynamic loads that arise from train speed and track geometry, particularly curvature. Train characteristics such as axle load, operating speed, frequency of service, and number of wheels are integrated with track parameters, including curve radius, to calculate the total vertical load. These loads are used to estimate the cumulative tonnage threshold for rail replacement and the resulting service life of the …

Bio-Inspired Electroactive Polymer (Eap) Sensors For Surface And Canal Flow Sensing In Dynamic Environments, Nazanin Minaian

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Nature can often create some of the most efficient and elegant solutions to complex problems, and engineering stands to benefit greatly from these time-tested designs. One of the more sophisticated examples of this is the lateral line system in fish: a distributed network of superficial and canal neuromasts that enables aquatic species to detect fluid disturbances with remarkable precision. This dissertation leverages that biological framework to explore the potential of electroactive polymers (EAPs), aiming not just to replicate structure, but to emulate function.Two classes of EAPs form the basis of this work: electroactive plasticized polymer gels (EPPGs) and ionic polymer-metal …

Outcomes Of Patients With Newly Diagnosed Acute Myeloid Leukemia With Flt3-Tyrosine Kinase Domain Mutations: Prognostic Implications Of Npm1 Co-Mutation, Sankalp Arora, Wei-Ying Jen, Musa Yilmaz, Indraneel Deshmukh, Jayastu Senapati, Sanam Loghavi, Ghayas C Issa, Nicholas J Short, Tapan M Kadia, Courtney D Dinardo, Gautam Borthakur, Joseph Jabbour, Naveen Pemmaraju, Michael Andreeff, Koichi Takahashi, Kapil Bhalla, Uday Popat, Elizabeth J Shpall, Betul Oran, Hussein A Abbas, Guillermo Garcia-Manero, Farhad Ravandi, Hagop Kantarjian, Naval Daver

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background: The prognostic impact of Fms-like tyrosine kinase 3 (FLT3)-tyrosine kinase domain (TKD) mutation in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is not well defined. The authors described outcomes of one of the largest cohorts of patients with FLT3-TKD mutated (FLT3-TKDmut) AML to date.

Methods: This retrospective study included patients with newly diagnosed AML who received frontline treatment at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center from January 2012 to March 2024 divided into two cohorts: FLT3-TKDmut AML and nucleophosmin-mutated (NPM1mut)/FLT3-TKD wild-type (FLT3-TKDwt) AML. Patients with FLT3 internal tandem duplication mutations were excluded.

Results: In total, 2922 patients were …

Lipidomic And Proteomic Insights From Extracellular Vesicles In The Postmortem Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Reveal Substance Use Disorder-Induced Brain Changes, Chioma M Okeoma, Wasifa Naushad, Bryson C Okeoma, Carlos Gartner, Yulica Santos-Ortega, Calvin Vary, Savio Lima-Bastos, Victor Corasolla Carregari, Martin R Larsen, Alessio Noghero, Consuelo Walss-Bass, Rodrigo Grassi-Oliveira

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Substance use disorder (SUD) significantly increases the risk of neurotoxicity, inflammation, oxidative stress, and impaired neuroplasticity. The activation of inflammatory pathways by substances may lead to reactive astrogliosis and chronic neuroinflammation, potentially mediated by the release of extracellular particles (EPs), such as extracellular condensates (ECs) and extracellular vesicles (EVs). These particles, which reflect the physiological, pathophysiological, and metabolic states of their cells of origin, might carry molecular signatures indicative of SUD. In particular, our study investigated neuroinflammatory signatures in SUD patients by isolating EVs from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) Brodmann's area 9 (BA9) from postmortem subjects. We isolated BA9-derived …

Evaluation Of The Antimicrobial Management Of Intracranial Suppurative Infections In A Single Pediatric Institution., Cameron E. Bizal, Alaina N. Burns, Rana El Feghaly, Brian R. Lee, Ann L. Wirtz

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

OBJECTIVE: To describe the antimicrobial management of and examine the etiology of intracranial suppurative infections (ISIs) at a single pediatric institution.

DESIGN: Retrospective review.

PATIENTS: We included children hospitalized at a 367-bed freestanding pediatric institution for treatment of an ISI (epidural or subdural empyema, brain abscess) between January 1, 2015, and September 30, 2023. ISIs were identified using international classification of diseases 9/10 discharge diagnosis codes.

METHODS: We collected data regarding patient characteristics, infection etiology and complications, antimicrobial choice and route (empiric, definitive, and outpatient), microbiology results, treatment duration, and treatment-related outcomes from the electronic health record.

RESULTS: A total …