Digital Commons Network^™

April 23, 2026, James Madison University

The Breeze, 2020-

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Autonomous Utility For Trash Organization Robot (Auto-Bot), Savneet Badial, Michael Collantes, Minh Dinh

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

The global waste crisis is accelerating faster than current manual collection methods can manage, leading to significant environmental degradation and inefficient resource allocation. This system is designed to modernize waste collection through integrated robotics, computer vision, and real-time data tracking, providing a scalable solution for facility managers to identify and manage disposal trends effectively.

The core of the AUTO-BOT system is a mobile platform equipped with a high-precision robotic arm. While the project initially explored wide-scale autonomous navigation, the current focus has been refined to the critical tasks of object detection, classification, and physical collection. The robot utilizes a Raspberry …

Terrasmart, Shakeel Ahmad, Joshua Fontanilla, Ashley Brown, Catalina Franco Gomez, Nico Aragon Guevara

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

Homeowners who want healthy lawns and gardens often lack the time or knowledge to properly maintain them. Our solution provides an easy-to-use soil probe paired with AI- based guidance that helps homeowners understand soil conditions and plant needs. By translating soil data into clear recommendations, the system reduces guesswork, prevents common gardening mistakes, and helps homeowners maintain healthier landscapes with minimal effort.

TerraSmart. A smart soil probe powered by AI. It measures moisture, nutrients, and temperature in real time. And the app empowers you and turns you into a smart gardener with the synthesized data. The AI turns raw data …

The Laundry Buddy, Jake M. Martin

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

Poster Abstract:

Laundry Buddy is an innovative, all in one laundry caddy designed to simplify the experience of using shared laundry facilities. The product features four integrated compartments for different laundry supplies, along with measurement lines, spill proof lids, and a built in drawer for dryer sheets or small items. Its compact, portable design reduces clutter and eliminates the need to carry multiple bulky containers. Targeted toward students and apartment residents, Laundry Buddy addresses a common inconvenience with a practical and affordable solution. By combining functionality, organization, and ease of use, the product aims to improve efficiency and convenience in …

Aria – Ai Robot Intelligence Assistant, Balakrishna Reddy Channa Reddy

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

ARIA (AI Robot Intelligence Assistant) is an autonomous AI-powered robot designed to improve human-robot interaction and autonomous navigation. The system integrates advanced capabilities including face recognition, voice commands, AI responses, obstacle avoidance, phone tracking via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and autonomous navigation.

The architecture consists of multiple layers: sensors (camera, microphone, and ultrasonic), a Raspberry Pi serving as the AI brain, an Arduino for motor control, motors and wheels for movement, and phone connectivity via Bluetooth (BLE). This layered design enables real-time perception, decision-making, and physical interaction with the environment.

Future development directions include real-time learning, edge AI optimization, and …

Quietcue, Luisa Maria Anderegg

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

QuietCue is a smart noise-monitoring device designed to improve shared living environments by reducing noise-related conflicts. It continuously detects sound levels and provides real-time visual feedback through a simple color-coded lighting system, helping users become aware of when noise becomes disruptive. By encouraging self-regulation instead of confrontation, QuietCue promotes respectful behavior among roommates and creates a more comfortable living space.

Bread October, James W. Casey

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

I developed a whimsical sandwich topper design that makes a submarine sandwich resemble an actual submarine. Though it is currently plastic, future variations could be edible, and the goal would be to sell the rights to a large sandwich chain or the US Navy.

Frostshield Pitch, Viridiana Guillen

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

Winter mornings often begin with an inconvenient and frustrating routine, scraping frost, ice or snow from car windshields. This presentation introduces FrostShield, a protective windshield cover designed to prevent frost build up overnight, allowing users to start their day quickly and stress free.

Thergo, Jannelle Maglay, Stephany Reyes Mares, Jose Aguiniga

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

Our product is called Thergo "Relief that works as hard as you do". The main objective is to develop a therapeutic heated mousepad that integrates wrist relief into everyday computer use, providing heat therapy, manual massage, and wrist stabilization while maintaining the functionality and aesthetics of a standard desk accessory.

Artificial Intelligence-Powered Novel Vital* Hand Robot For Domestic Tasks, James Casey, Harshitha Mallappa, Dongbin Lee

Pacific Innovation and Entrepreneurship Summit (PIES)

This research is to develop a customized robot arm capable of performing household tasks, by pairing a human-like robot hand with visual and tactile sensors, and used an AI-powered vision-tactile-action model to allow the robot to use these sensors to interact with objects and perform tasks to meet our ultimate goal which performs object-based household tasks by vision-and-tactile sensors and use the hand as the end-effectors of a humanoid robot while communicating with human interactively.

The novelty of our proposed robot hand is to have two thumbs rotating panning-tilting on opposite sides and two fixed tendon-driven fingers of the palm …

An Ot Educational Program For Individuals With Upper And Lower Limb Amputations, Laurie R. Spinks Mrs, Cassandra Nelson

Spring 2026 OTD Capstone Symposium

An OT approach to reducing prosthetic abandonment with an accessible guide to promote self sufficiency and community connections for individuals with amputations.

Quantification Of Mouse Tracheal Epithelial Cell Differentiation With Cilia Defects, Olivia V. Allen

Honors Thesis

Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD) is an autosomal recessive disorder that affects 1 in every 7,500 live births. PCD results from motile cilia defects, impairing mucociliary clearance and causing chronic respiratory infections. Our lab studies include three PCD mouse lines — bgh (Spef2), nm1054 (Cfap221), and Cfap54^gt/gt (Cfap54). Prior transcriptomic data led us to hypothesize that PCD mutant mouse tracheal epithelial cells (MTECs) exhibit reduced differentiation into ciliated cells. MTECs from the trachea of the Wild Type (WT) and the PCD mutant mouse lines were cultured at an Air Liquid Interface (ALI) to start …

Mechanism Of Improved Miscibility Of Co2–Oil Systems By Multiester-Headgroup Surfactants, Ning Xu, Yanling Wang, Baojun Bai, Yu Zhang, Wenjing Shi, Zhaonian Zhang, Wenhui Ding, Peixu Ma, Zan Gao

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In the pursuit of carbon neutrality, the CO₂-enhanced oil recovery provides dual benefits by enabling both carbon sequestration and incremental oil production. However, its application is limited by high minimum miscibility pressure. CO₂-philic and oil-affinitive surfactants have emerged as an effective, low-dosage, and cost-efficient strategy to reduce the minimum miscibility pressure. In this study, macroscopic phase behavior experiments combined with molecular dynamics simulations were employed to systematically elucidate the influence of multiester-head surfactants on CO₂–oil miscibility. Using a modified pressure–volume–temperature apparatus equipped with optical power monitoring, we determined that multiester-head surfactants reduced the first-contact …

Weighted, I Drown Peacefully, Clarke P. Hamilton, Masaru Suzuki

Honors Thesis

weighted, i drown peacefully is a call-and-response to my ancestral history and heritage as African American, and my physical experience at the door of no return on Goree Island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal.

Through ceramic face pots invoking the face jugs recovered from Edgefield, South Carolina, visual metaphors of the calla lily and cowrie shell, wood iris petals holding water, and a watercolor painting with Adinkra symbols Adwo & Sankofa, I mark the Atlantic Ocean as a resting place of my ancestors.

This piece is for those who have transitioned from this plane to the next. I carry …

A Tale Of Trees And Turtles, Adam Drapcho

UNH Today Archive

No abstract provided.

Detecting Eigenvectors Of An Operator That Are Near A Specified Subspace, David Darrow, Jeffrey S. Ovall

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In modeling quantum systems or wave phenomena, one is often interested in identifying eigenstates that approximately carry a specified property; scattering states approximately align with incoming and outgoing traveling waves, for instance, and electron states in molecules often approximately align with superpositions of simple atomic orbitals. These examples—and many others—can be formulated as the following eigenproblem: given a selfadjoint operator L on a Hilbert space H and a closed subspace W ⊂ H, can we identify all eigenvectors of L that lie approximately in W? We develop an approach to answer this question efficiently, with a userdefined tolerance and range …

Walking Through The Alleys Of Motza (Moẓa): Early Evidence Of Settlement Planning And Urban Organization, Dmitry Yegorov, Anna Eirikh-Rose, Hamoudi Khalaily

'Atiqot

Recent excavations at the Final Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) mega-site of Motza revealed the earliest evidence of settlement planning in the Southern Levant to date. The size of the site and the layout of its architectural units indicate that planning decisions were made throughout the settlement establishment and development, beginning with the choice of its location and extending to the organization of intra-site space. This is evident from the presence of central alleys connecting neighborhoods and open areas, alongside smaller roads and passageways linking private and communal structures, and courtyards. The high level of internal organization implies coordinated decision-making by …

Llm For Clinical Named Entity Recognition: A Study On Rag With Pubmed And Umls, Apoorv Tripathi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first step of biomedical NLP is recognizing clinical named entities, which consist of identifying and categorizing a variety of clinical entities such as diseases, symptoms, genetics, diagnostic tests, procedures, etc. from a body of unstructured clinical text. This study presents a PubMed and UMLS based Retrieval Augmented Generation framework which improves the performance of the Large Language Models to identify clinical entities by providing context. In particular, the framework consists of a two-stage pipeline, where candidate tokens are identified from initial LLM-based classification and refined with retrieved context from either PubMed or UMLS. The proposed framework is assessed across …

Synthesis, Structural Elucidation, In Vitro Antibacterial Activity Of Mononuclear Ag(I) Complex Derived From (E)-N-(4-Fluorophenyl)-1-(Pyridin-2-Yl) Methanimine And Triphenylphosphine Ancillary Ligand., Olufemi Stephen Odulaja, Saliu Alao Amolegbe, Muritala Adeniyi Olusola

Tanzania Journal of Science

Chemo-therapeutic application of metal complexes to remediation and subjugation of emerging infectious diseases with a view to improving potency and efficacy of a variety of drugs is gaining more momentum, especially in the 21st century. This research work designed a new biologically active complex [AgL(PPh3)2]NO3,C, obtained from the reaction of Ag(I) nitrate with bidentate pyridinyl Schiff base ligand (E)-N-(4-fluorophenyl)-1-(pyridin-2-yl) methanimine L, with triphenylphosphine (PPh3) as co-ligand. Characterisation was done by FT-IR, UV-Vis, NMR, (TGA/DTA), X-ray crystallography, and elemental analysis. The combined effects of pyridinyl Schiff base ligand and PPh3 on the antibacterial activities against Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, …

Steam Olympics Raises $7,500 For Iwu Scholarships, Emily Bollinger

Press Releases 2020-2029

No abstract provided.

Dietary Preferences And Food-Seeking Behavior Of Discoid Cockroaches, Blaberus Discoidaliscont., Robert Larsen, Sadie Ariola

2026 Student Academic Showcase

Blaberus discoidalis, also known as discoid cockroaches, inhabit the tropics of South America where their diet consists of leaf litter and decaying organic matter on the ground. This experiment expands on research from two previous years, originally based on the loitering time of the roach's different food types. Such as peanuts, leaf litter, and bananas. The experiment this year was to determine which food was preferred by determining how much it was eaten. Each food item, peanuts, banana, and leaf litter (peanuts alone are crushed) were dried in an oven for 24 hours and weighed before and after each trial. …

Sudden Cardiac Arrest & Newly Diagnosed Arrhythmogenic Cardiomyopathy In A High School Athlete, Jacob Rolfes, Brent Holtgrewe, Mike Tzianos

2026 Student Academic Showcase

A high school soccer player experienced sudden cardiac arrest during competition and required immediate CPR and AED use. Following resuscitation, physicians ruled out commotio cordis and identified findings consistent with arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, supported by a prolonged T-wave on EKG while all other laboratory and catheterization results were normal. The athlete later received an ICD and pacemaker, prompting significant physical, emotional, and lifestyle adjustments. This capstone project examines the emergency response, the role of trained medical personnel at sporting events, and the implications of early cardiac screening for adolescent athletes. Through consented family interviews, structured questionnaires, and case-based data collection, the …

Turning Service Into Stability: Measuring Self-Sufficiency Outcomes At Presbyterian Children’S Homes & Services, Olivia Wolf, Alex Wolf

2026 Student Academic Showcase

Community organizations play a critical role in helping vulnerable children, youth, and families achieve stability and independence. This service learning project partnered with Presbyterian Children’s Homes and Services (PCHAS) to evaluate how well its programs support client progress toward self sufficiency. Using discharge data from the Arizona Self Sufficiency Matrix, students analyzed outcomes across multiple program types and four service sites. The evaluation found strong improvements in areas related to immediate stabilization, including personal safety, legal status, substance use recovery, and disability support. However, clients continued to face ongoing challenges in childcare access, housing stability, parenting skills, children’s education, and …

Effects Of Menstrual Cycle Phases On Muscular Strength And Ligament Laxity, Nicole Waldo Johnson

2026 Student Academic Showcase

Female participation in sport continues to increase, yet women remain largely underrepresented in research. Due to hormonal differences, additional research is needed to understand how menstrual cycle (MC) phases influence performance and injury risk. Females experience higher incidences of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries, which may be influenced by hormonal fluctuations. The purpose of this study is to examine how MC phases and changes affect muscular strength and ligament laxity at the knee. Muscular strength and ligament laxity will be tested twice during the MC: once during the early follicular phase (EFP) and the second set are to be collected …

Longitudinal Fueling Status Of High School Female Athletes, Kaylee Turner, Abigail Rickermann

2026 Student Academic Showcase

Low energy availability (LEA) is a clinically significant concern in adolescent female athletes due to its impact on growth and development, bone health, hormonal function, performance, recovery, and cognitive outcomes. Despite established associations, a clear longitudinal understanding of how LEA relates to injury and illness rates across an academic year remains limited, representing a clinical gap in athletic training and sports medicine literature. The purpose of this capstone project was to develop a comprehensive Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocol to support a future longitudinal investigation examining LEA and its relationship to injury and illness incidence in high school female athletes. …

The Weight Of Marijuana: Marijuana As A Gateway To Binge Eating, Hailey Proctor

2026 Student Academic Showcase

As many societies move toward the legalization of marijuana the other underlying side effects and symptoms of this drug must be analyzed so that users may be fully informed about the effects of their drug usage. Therefore, this exploratory project looks to evaluate the relationship between the use of marijuana as a recreational drug and binge eating. Throughout the project three main topics have been explored including the adverse outcomes of binge eating and over eating, how cannabis use can play a role in binge eating, and if binge eating can be a contributing factor in initiating the use of …

The Impact Of Prior Abusive Dating Experiences And Gender On Romance Scam Victimization And Monetary Loss, Trevor Rowe

Department of Psychology

Online romance scams are a rapidly expanding cybercrime that affects millions of people each year, financially and emotionally. This study examines an underexplored question: Will individuals with a greater number of abusive partners be more vulnerable to romance scam victimizations and lose more money? Adult dating app users (N = 518) completed an online survey. After controlling for being approached for relationships, those with a greater number of past abusive partners were more likely to be victims and lost more money. In addition, men reported a higher frequency of romance scam victimizations and more money loss.

Horned Oak Galls And Their Dispersal On Lindenwood's Campus, Peyton Birkenmeier, Timothy Sesterhenn

2026 Student Academic Showcase

Horned oak galls are woody growths found on the branches of oak trees (Quercus sp.). These growths are caused by the parasitic wasp, Callirhytis cornigera. These wasps produce the galls by piercing the branch with their ovipositors and laying eggs into the branch. Based on the severity of infestation, these galls can cause severe damage or even death to oak trees. This research determined the dispersal and severity of horned oak galls infesting the different species of oak trees around the heritage side of Lindenwood. This was done by walking around the heritage side of campus and observing different species …

Identification Of Lipid Quantitative Trait Loci Linked With Cardiometabolic Disease In Asian Indians And Europeans: A Genome-Wide Association Study And Mendelian Randomization, Madhusmita Rout, Christopher E. Aston, Ravindranath Duggirala, Harald H. H. Goring, Oliver Fiehn, Dharambir K. Sanghera

School of Medicine Publications

Background: Genetic mechanisms that predispose people to type 2 diabetes (T2D) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) remain poorly understood, partly because of a lack of sufficient data on non-European ethnic groups. Extending these evaluations to diverse cohorts is essential for gaining insights into the molecular pathways involved in disease development among human populations. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the genetic connection between the human lipidome and cardiometabolic disorders. We conducted a metabolite genome-wide association study (mGWAS) in a Punjabi population from India, along with multi-layer replication studies using the UK Biobank and other independent European and non-European cohorts.

Methods …

Corrigendum To "Reflective Thinking And Its Relationship With The Performance Of Selected Offensive Basketball Skills Among University Students'' [Modern Sport 2026; 25(1):102–111], Rawaa Jawad Kadhim, Intisar Owaid Ali

Modern Sport

Corrigendum to "Reflective Thinking and its Relationship with the Performance of Selected Offensive Basketball Skills Among University Students'' [Modern Sport 2026; 25(1):102–111]

Reason for Correction: Following a careful review of the authorship contributions, the authors request the addition of Dr. Intisar Owaid Ali to the authorship list in recognition of her substantial academic contributions to this study.
Updated Author Information
Author Name: Intisar Owaid Ali
Affiliation: College of Physical Education and Sports Sciences for Women, University of Baghdad
Email: [email protected]
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-0108-5277
Updated Author Contributions (CRediT): Dr. Intisar Owaid Ali contributed to the Conceptualization, Methodology (study design and …