Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Geospatial Analysis Of Sinkhole Density And Characteristics In West Virginia, Marissa Shannon Loftus

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Creation of a sinkhole map of West Virginia provides useful data to help identify areas susceptible to sinkhole related hazards, as well as allowing for detailed analysis of factors controlling karst development. Newly available, statewide LiDAR-derived digital elevation data have made mapping sinkholes over larger spatial extents feasible. For this study, sinkholes were mapped for all areas of West Virginia that are underlain by carbonate rocks; then the distribution and characteristics were evaluated overall and in four focus areas (Berkeley and Jefferson counties, Pendleton County, Greenbrier County, and Monroe County). These areas correspond to broader physiographic regions, with Berkeley, Jefferson, …

The Classical Limit In Geometric Quantization By Group Extension, Paul Bracken

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

Physical systems as a rule are associated with a symmetry group. The group approach to geometric quantization makes use of this to introduce a quantization by means of group extension. This procedure is discussed and applied to a physical system whose group law has its origin with the Galilean group. The main intention is to investigate the classical limit and its relationship under this approach to geometric quantization. The classical quantization conditions are obtained based on a deeper foundation.

Eigenvalue Spacing Distributions And The Weak Disorder Limit For Random Schrodinger Operators, Kyle E. Hammer

Theses and Dissertations--Mathematics

We study a collection of discrete Schrodinger Operators with random potentials through the lens of global and local eigenvalue spacings. We discuss the three models: the standard scaled disorder Anderson Model, the Anderson-Bernoulli Polymer Model, and the Discrete Fractional Laplacian Anderson Model. First, we discuss the scaled disorder case using the invariant measure and its application to the density of states in the weak disorder limit. We also prove the limit of the local and global eigenvalue spacings in the non random case, and demonstrate numerically how randomness affects the eigenvalue spacings. We then discuss a special family of random …

Spectral Properties And The Behavior Of The Current-Current Correlation Measure For The Luttinger-Sy Model, Jonathan Benoit

Theses and Dissertations--Mathematics

The Luttinger-Sy Model, sometimes referred to as the Pieces Model, is a Random Schrodinger Operator on L²(R) which is characterized in part by "pieces" whose endpoints are chosen by a Poisson Point Process. The Hamiltonian in this setting is then given as a direct sum of Laplacians with Dirchlet boundary conditions on each piece. In this work, we show several spectral properties of the Luttinger-Sy Model, including proving the deterministic spectrum is [0,infinity) and that a Wegner-type and Minami-type estimate both hold. Additionally, we show that the finite-volume Current-Current Correlation Measure is singular continuous with respect …

Student Conceptions Of Summation And Limits In The Definite Integral Following Quantitatively Focused Instruction, Caleb Daniel Holloway

2026 Scholarly Teaching Conference: Concurrent Session Papers

Recent studies have examined how students form productive conceptions of the definite integral and discussed techniques for promoting such conceptions. In this paper I present findings from interviews held with six students enrolled in second-semester calculus, four of whom had received quantitatively focused instruction on the definite integral. All six were chosen for their observed use of summation conceptions on definite integral problems, and here their conceptions are explored further. Additionally, we gain insight on their thinking regarding limits as related to the definite integral. The findings presented here add to our understanding of student thinking regarding the integral and …

Test Retakes In Introductory Math Courses, John Hird, Chris Mcclain

2026 Scholarly Teaching Conference: Poster Session Papers

In this poster, we describe the implementation of an exam retake model using specifications grading for math courses taken by non-STEM majors. This system was implemented by two faculty members over three years in two sequential courses. During that time, we tried several versions of allowed retakes, with varying restrictions on partial credit. Some of the challenges that we faced were scaling the system for use by different faculty members and with different courses, managing faculty workload on writing and grading multiple exams, and managing student expectations.

Techniques For Inclusive College Mathematics Classrooms, Christopher Anderson Davis, Josh Hiller, Anil Venkatesh

Journal of Mathematics and Science: Collaborative Explorations

Creating a welcoming and inclusive mathematics classroom is an important responsibility for all college mathematics faculty. But where do we begin? In this paper we present several techniques based on White’s (2024) building inclusive classrooms strategies framework, which the authors have found to be successful in making their own classrooms more inclusive. The techniques include the inclusion of contemporary diverse voices, exploring the history of applications of mathematical concepts, elevating the diverse intellectual history of mathematics, bringing diverse guest speakers into the classroom, and mentoring students as they engage in doing research. For each strategy we provide narrative comments based …

Connections Between Mathematics And Chemistry: An Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Curricular Initiative, George Ashline, Bret Findley

Journal of Mathematics and Science: Collaborative Explorations

In this article, we describe an undergraduate curricular initiative involving mathematics and chemistry faculty and students. Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Program, a program designed to encourage the study of and connections between quantitative fields and life sciences, this interdisciplinary collaboration features undergraduate student research and involves the development of curricular connections between mathematics and chemistry. Through this initiative, we have created activities for calculus courses featuring chemistry applications as well as activities for chemistry courses showcasing mathematical concepts. After the implementation of these curricular enhancements, we gathered student …

Exploring Recruitment And Retention Of Mathematics Teachers In Southwest And South-Central Virginia, Anthony Dove

Journal of Mathematics and Science: Collaborative Explorations

This study examines the recruitment and retention of secondary mathematics teachers in rural southwest and south-central Virginia public schools from the perspectives of school principals. Guided by three research questions focused on retention, recruitment, and opportunities for improvement, the study employed a constant comparative analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with principals from 10 rural middle and high schools. Findings indicate that many schools have historically benefited from long-term teacher retention reinforced by strong community ties and supportive school environments. However, anticipated retirements, salary competition within the region, and increasing challenges in recruitment are beginning to place strains on schools. Principals …

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Journal of Mathematics and Science: Collaborative Explorations

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A Major Update And Improved Validation Functionality In The Mwtab Python Library And The Metabolomics Workbench File Status Website, P. Travis Thompson, Hunter N. B. Moseley

Markey Cancer Center Faculty Publications

Background: The Metabolomics Workbench (MW) is a public scientific data repository consisting of experimental data and metadata from metabolomics studies collected with mass spectroscopy (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analyses. Although not as rapidly as in the past, MW has steadily evolved, updating its mwTab and JSON deposition text file formats and its web-based infrastructure. However, the growth of MW has been exponential since its inception in 2013 and continues to be exponential, with the number of datasets hosted on the repository increasing by 50% since April 2024. As part of regular maintenance to keep up with changes to …

Challenges And Applications Of Fine-Grained Temporal Action Understanding: Modeling Temporal Granularity And Data Efficiency, Halil I. Helvaci

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Fine-grained Temporal Action Segmentation (TAS) has become a cornerstone of video understanding, offering dense frame-level predictions essential for clinical assessment, surgical skill evaluation, and human-computer interaction. While TAS methods have delivered strong results on coarse-grained benchmarks, two fundamental challenges persist: (1) global attention mechanisms dilute boundary information critical for subsecond precision, a phenomenon we term the temporal granularity bottleneck, and (2) dense frame-level annotation remains prohibitively expensive, with most datasets requiring exhaustive labeling of lengthy untrimmed videos. These challenges are particularly pronounced in medical domains, where sub-second primitives define clinical outcomes while expert annotation remains scarce. In this dissertation, we …

Generative Ai Peer Tutoring To Support Peer-Reviewed Source Identification And Evaluation, Rae Mair, Michelle Kelley, Taylar Wenzel, Andrea C. Borowczak, Yuqing Li, Mike Borowczak

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This chapter explores the design and evaluation of a generative artificial intelligence peer tutor prompt to support college students in identifying and evaluating peer-reviewed sources for academic research. Grounded in literature on peer tutoring, Socratic dialogue, and AI-supported learning, the authors describe an iterative prompt engineering process designed to transform large language models (LLMs) into Socratic-style peer tutors capable of scaffolding student reasoning without completing tasks for them. Five guiding criteria for an effective peer tutor shaped development and evaluation: cognitive congruence, step-by-step guidance, avoiding giving answers, adaptability to student level, metacognitive transparency, and following assignment directions. Across multiple human-centered …

Visual Analytics For Interpretable Quantum Computing, Shaolun Ruan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Quantum computing has entered a stage of increasing practicality. Many quantum hardware vendors such as IBM, Rigetti, Honeywell, and IonQ now enable experiments on real devices in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. These platforms show computational advantages in domains such as optimization, machine learning, and materials science. However, they remain limited by hardware noise and the absence of human-interpretable information. Existing visual metaphors, such as the Bloch Sphere for single-qubit states or circuit schematics for algorithm design, struggle to convey multi-qubit entanglement or measurement probabilities in ways accessible to human reasoning. Likewise, the rise of variational quantum circuits and …

Constrained Reinforcement Learning: From Single-Agent Safety To Multi-Agent Coordination, Hao Jiang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Real-world decision-making systems such as autonomous driving and largescale ride-pooling must operate under strict safety and resource constraints. Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, while powerful in simulation, often fail to guarantee such constraints, limiting their real-world deployment. The fundamental challenge lies in integrating constraint satisfaction with long-term reward optimization, especially when outcomes are stochastic and interdependent across multiple agents.

This dissertation advances the field of Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) from both single-agent safety and multi-agent coordination perspectives. In the single-agent setting, we introduce a Reward Penalty framework that augments the state space with cumulative cost and penalizes only trajectories that …

Improving Pid Control With Bayesian Optimization For Adversarially Robust Federated Learning, Adrian Pena, Sergei Chuprov, Raman Zatsarenko, Leon Reznik

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Federated Learning (FL) often suffers from unstable convergence and reduced robustness under non-IID data and malicious attacks. In this paper, we present FedPIDAvg_tuned, a control-theoretic aggregation framework for improving stability and adversarial robustness in FL. In particular, our approach combines a server-side Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) controller with Bayesian optimization to tune controller gains for different data and attack conditions. The PID controller regulates global model updates through feedback on loss dynamics, providing adaptive scaling that improves stability and convergence. The tuned gains are applied within a trust-weighted trimmed-mean mechanism to remove adversarial or outlier updates. Using the Flower framework, we evaluate …

Redefining Educational Technology: A Critical Collaborative Inquiry, Aras Bozkurt, Helen Crompton, Robert Farrow, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Jon Dron, Richard West, Agnieszka (Aga) Palalas, Matth Bower, Junhong Xiao, Ahmed Tlili, Danah Henriksen, Angelica Pazurek, Henk Huijser, Thomas K. F. Chiu, Petar Jandrić, Katy Jordan, John Curry, Royce Kimmons, Mutlu Cukurova, Thomas Reeves, Gwo-Jen Hwang, Peter Shea, Jason Lodge, Martin Weller, Davy Ng, Tutaleni Iita Asino

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Educational technologists have not settled on a fixed definition of the field and likely never will. However, attempting to define the field helps to understand the epistemological meanings that shape what the field sees, values, and considers worth pursuing. Through a critical historical review spanning over a century, alongside theoretical engagement with the concepts of entanglement and distributed agency, this paper identifies three key insufficiencies in current educational technology frameworks. These are the persistence of an instrumental-facilitative paradigm that treats technology as a resource deployed by human agents; the theoretical dissolution of the pedagogy-technology dichotomy that existing definitions have not …

Monitoring, Oversight, And Learning In Medical Ai, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

When medical AI errs, it often goes unnoticed. If there’s a specific patient injury, and the link to AI is obvious, that problem might be reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but not always. And many other types of problems, like worse performance on specific groups or ineffective integration into health system workflows, simply don’t fall within the contours of regularized reporting. Even if they are noticed by the health system—far from a given—there’s no obvious way to share that information more broadly. Against this backdrop, there are justified calls for better oversight and reporting. But there’s the …

Multimodal Emotion Detection System, Shubhankar Sameer Munshi

Master's Projects

Trying to understand emotion from speech is a problem that is present in human computer interaction. Nevertheless, there are still some shortcomings in current SER methods. Text-based systems may miss vital vocal cues, such as sarcasm, tone changes, and delivery. On the other hand, purely audio-based systems are prone to noise and unstable acoustic features. The combination of linguistic and acoustic features in multimodal approaches partially solves this problem, but many existing approaches use inflexible multimodal fusion techniques that cannot adjust their behaviors according to the quality of input signals. In this work, we propose a multimodal approach based on …

Modeling Sealed Deck Construction In Collectible Card Games Using Learning-To-Rank Approach, Michael Dinh Nguyen

Master's Projects

Artificial intelligence has demonstrated strong performance in complex decision-making domains such as chess and Go, motivating research into its application for games with even richer rules and combinatorial complexity. In collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, deck construction from a constrained card pool is a critical and challenging task that requires evaluating card strength, synergy, and resource balance. This project explores whether machine learning, specifically learning-to-rank (LTR), can effectively model these human decision processes to construct competitive decks in a sealed format. The results found here can also be applicable to other areas of note, such as sports drafting …

Evaluating Species At Risk In Data-Limited Fisheries: A Productivity-Susceptibility Analysis For Marine Aquarium Fish, Gabrielle A. Baillargeon, Alice A. Wynn, Jemelyn Grace P. Baldisimo, Michael F. Tlusty, Andrew L. Rhyne

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

The marine aquarium trade (MAT) is a significant global industry harvesting millions of wild-caught, live coral reef fishes for public and private aquaria markets in the United States and Europe annually, while supporting fisher livelihoods in the Indo-Pacific. This diverse and species-rich trade is considered data-limited, creating barriers to quantifying the current and future socio-ecological sustainability of the fishery. We present a revised and expanded productivity–susceptibility analysis (PSA) that serves as a holistic risk assessment to estimate the vulnerability of marine aquarium fish to overfishing. Our global analysis includes 306 species that are actively in trade. Improvements to the PSA …

Connecting Classroom Physics To Real-World Research: A Citizen Science Approach In Ap Physics 1, Heather M. Landgarten

West Chester University Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Final Projects

Advanced Placement (AP) Physics 1 emphasizes evidence-based reasoning, quantitative modeling, and scientific inquiry. However, secondary science instruction often remains focused on procedural problem solving and standardized assessment rather than authentic scientific practice. This study examined the integration of citizen science projects into an AP Physics 1 curriculum to provide students with authentic research experiences while reinforcing physics concepts during the post-AP examination instructional period.

Using a classroom-based mixed-methods pre–post design, students participated in citizen science activities through publicly available research platforms, including Zooniverse. Students collected and classified authentic scientific data, analyzed real-world datasets, developed research questions, compared observations with theoretical …

A Preliminary Investigation Of Research Collaboration Through Scientific Paper Co-Authorship In The Gulf Of Mexico, Juliet Vallejo, Evelyn Roozee, Dongkyu Kim, Andrew M. Song, Christopher A. Gabler, Jasper R. De Vries, Antonia Sohns, Gordon M. Hickey, Owen Temby

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

It is well known that publications with collaborators from external institutions increase citations. This effect scales with spatial distance. There are also many barriers to long-distance collaborations, including linguistic differences, funding constraints, and the incremental costs of remote collaboration. This paper uses the Gulf of Mexico as a case study to examine long-distance research collaboration because it consists of three countries with diverse development levels and two prominent diplomatic languages, within a singular regional ecosystem of tremendous natural and economic value. This paper uses bibliometric network analysis to examine scientific research article co-authorship in the Gulf of Mexico from 2000 …

Histochemical Alteration, Protein Nitration, And Antioxidant Expression In Oysters As Early Warning Indicators For Microplastic Contamination In The Texas Gulf Coast, Rebecca Muñiz, Md Faisal Amin, Md. Saydur Rahman

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Microplastics are widely distributed in aquatic environments and have been detected in numerous organisms. Marine bivalves are among the most affected aquatic organisms by microplastics due to their filter-feeding behavior. In this study, 60 oysters were collected from two sites along the Texas Gulf Coast. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and Nile red staining were used to detect microplastics in oyster (Crassostrea virginica) tissues. We compared field and laboratory samples collected after a two-week depuration period to identify differences in the shape and size of microplastics in oyster tissues. Results from the field sites showed a large number of microplastics, …

Scope Of Microbial Transglutaminase For Site-Specific And Oriented Immobilization Of Native Antibodies From Various Host Species, Emily Beitello, Kwame Osei, Faith E. Breausche, Jon A. Friesen, Jeremy D. Driskell

Faculty Publications – Chemistry

Modification of antibodies to chemically couple labels or immobilization reagents is essential for developing biosensors. Typically, conjugation occurs through chemical methods that leverage reactive amines and thiols on native antibodies; however, this nonspecific approach can interfere with antibody function. Microbial transglutaminase (mTG) is an enzyme that has been used for site-specific conjugation of chemical modifiers to the F_c region of native antibodies, but thus far mTG-mediated conjugation has been limited to production of antibody-drug conjugates with human IgGs. Here, we assessed the scope and versatility of mTG to target IgGs, with the goal of site-specific conjugation to facilitate oriented …

Investigations Toward A Unified Reaction Pathway Of Thermal And Tbsotf-Mediated Oxidopyrylium-Alkene (5 + 2) Cycloadditions, Adam J. Youman, Samantha N. Rokey, Wentao Guo, Jacob P. Grabowski, Susanna N. Angles, Jacob J. Bulandr, Qing Sun, John R. Goodell, Dean J. Tantillo, T. Andrew Mitchell

Faculty Publications – Chemistry

Oxidopyrylium-based (5 + 2) cycloadditions are crucial reactions to construct seven-membered carbocycles containing an ether bridge (i.e. oxabicyclo[3.2.1]octanes). Intramolecular silyloxypyrone-based (5 + 2) cycloadditions were investigated and revealed several features: (1) the TBDPS thermal process proceeds via a zwitterionic oxidopyrylium intermediate similar to previously reported TBS variants; (2) the TBSOTf-mediated reaction proceeds through a cationic oxidopyrylium intermediate; (3) quantum chemical calculations predict a stepwise process for an electron-rich dipolarophile for each set of conditions. The thermal silyloxypyrone-based (5 + 2) cycloadditions were extremely dependent on the nature of the dipolarophile and the silyl transfer group. The TBDPS enhances the …

Ordo Ab Chao: Crystallographic Disorder As A Window Into Ionic Liquid Structure, Joseph Cooper, Marija Scheuren, Lara I. Teodoro, Christopher M. Butch, Raychell A. Jerdo, Kylie M. Allen, Mariana E. Toner, Matthias Zeller, Arsalan Mirjafari, Patrick C. Hillesheim

Faculty Publications – Chemistry

Despite being intended to resist crystallization, ionic liquids (ILs) quite frequently form solids, albeit with low melting points. The design motifs that lower melting points can leave measurable signatures in the solid state, manifesting as crystallographic disorder, and often give rise to metastable liquid states. While sometimes treated as experimental complications, such features provide a valuable window into the structural origins of IL phase behavior. Herein, we report a crystallographic study of a series of benzylated ILs that crystallize either directly or from long-lived supercooled melts. Single-crystal X-ray diffraction, supported by computational modeling and statistical analyses, provides structural evidence that …

Asymmetric Synthesis Of The Hiv Protease Inhibitor Tmc-126, A Pmx Antimalarial Protease Inhibitor, And A Putative Covid-19 Inhibitor Using A Highly Stereoselective Glycolate Aldol Addition Reaction Pathway, Kweku Amaning Affram, Austin Carter, April Breede, Alexandra Kimsey, Godson Hemeson, Bader Semakieh, Moses Martinez, Emmanuel Ayim, Joy Odeh, Shawn R. Hitchcock

Faculty Publications – Chemistry

An asymmetric glycolate aldol addition pathway was developed for the synthetic preparation of a series of protease inhibitors based on the hydroxyethylamine structural motif. A single glycolate aldol adduct derived from a highly diastereoselective (≥95:5 d.r.) asymmetric aldol reaction served as the starting point for the synthesis of the inhibitors. The starting material is easily prepared and purified via recrystallization on multigram scales. This work describes the synthesis of the HIV protease inhibitor TMC-126, the Plasmepsin X (PMX) inhibitor 49c for the treatment of malaria, and a computationally derived inhibitor for the 3CLpro of the SARS-CoV-2 from a single common …

Cogram: A Computational Pipeline For Genome Assembly And Reconstruction Using Graph Neural Networks, William Coggins

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Genome assembly — the reconstruction of a complete DNA sequence from short, overlapping reads — remains a fundamental challenge in computational biology. A central difficulty is distinguishing true genomic overlaps from spurious connections arising from repetitive sequences, a task that traditional assemblers address through hand-tuned heuristic rules applied to de Bruijn or overlap graphs. This thesis introduces COGRAM (Coggins–Ramasamy Assembly Method), a genome assembly pipeline that reframes sequence reconstruction as an edge classification task on a k-mer overlap graph, replacing heuristic graph cleaning with a learned model.

COGRAM constructs a directed overlap graph from raw sequencing reads using a k-mer …

De Novo Protein Binding To Zinc Oxide Through Biomineralization Pathways, Jean-Mark A. Francis

Theses and Dissertations

De novo proteins are structurally distinct from proteins found in nature and thus capable of having their amino acid sequence modified to accomplish tasks such as increasing protein-nanoparticle binding without unfolding or decomposing. Zinc Oxide nanoparticles are functionally distinct from their bulk counterparts and are widely used as semiconductors in a variety of fields such as medicine and agriculture. With demand for these nanoparticles increasing, environmentally sustainable methods of Zinc Oxide nanoparticle synthesis are being investigated as an eco-friendly alternative to currently utilized but environmentally hazardous chemical and physical techniques. This research investigates the binding characteristics between Zinc Oxide nanoparticles …