http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/ucd_etd/rss Recent eScholarship items from UC Davis Electronic Theses and Dissertations Sun, 30 Aug 2026 03:11:13 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9wv9678c For any Legendrian link Λ(β) in the standard contact manifold R 3 , ξ std arising as the rainbow closure of a positive braid word β, we develop an explicit and computable description of a novel Legendrian isotopy invariant associated with it, namely H• (Sh1(Λ(β), K)0): the cohomological category of compactly supported, microlocal rank-one, constructible sheaves of K-modules on R 2 with singular support controlled by Λ(β). We achieve this by parametrizing the objects of the category via the points of an associated braid variety X(β, K), and for any pair of objects, we provide a linear map that algebraically characterizes their possible non-trivial graded morphism spaces. Furthermore, we establish combinatorial rules governing the compositions of graded morphisms in the category under consideration. Finally, we present several applications of our results, highlighting the structural features captured by the categorical invariant of our interest. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9wv9678c Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rodríguez López, Ángel Manuel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9v44c33f To understand the impacts and outcomes of transportation infrastructure projects, it is vital to evaluate projects and verify if they met their expectations. I-405 Sepulveda Pass and I-880 Cypress Freeway serve as examples of California’s most traveled corridors in major metropolitan regions, and both roadways have experienced capacity-changing construction projects in their lifetimes. To evaluate the effect of changing infrastructure capacity on vehicle flow volumes and speed, I performed an interrupted time series with fixed effects regressions and graphical exploratory analyses. Additionally, I calculated volume and capacity ratios for insight into congestion and traffic distribution within the network. Both cases showed that the observed influences of capacity changes on travel patterns were inconsistent with the project documents. Currently, planning agencies have intentions to significantly transform these corridors; therefore, it is critical to make well-informed decisions... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9v44c33f Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Walike, Casey Elizabeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rk5099g The management of Honey bees (Apis mellifera) by humans has evolved over millennia to obtain commercial products such as honey, wax, and propolis. Around the world, pollination services increase crop production up to 50%, while also providing an annual income source for beekeepers (Porto et al., 2020). In the United States, specifically, honey bees pollinate over 100 commercially grown crops according to the 2022 USDA Annual Strategic Pollinator Priorities Report, increasing their total value by over ten billion dollars. In California alone, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) 2026 cost of pollination report, the almond industry required 1,630,000 colonies to pollinate 1,035,800 acres in 2025. From the 19 crops listed in the NASS report, almonds are the main solicitor of pollination services in the US.The use of pesticides in agricultural crops is a common and necessary practice to keep pest populations low, preserve crop production, and improve global... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rk5099g Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Encerrado, Angela Marisol https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9qt3g183 This thesis examines whether a sub-$100 bare-fabric FPGA can run a modern one-stage object detector for PCB defect inspection, and what the silicon-grounded cost story looks like once you measure it. The target platform is the Terasic DE10-Lite, carrying an Intel MAX 10 part with 49,760 logic elements, 288 nine-bit DSP slices, 205 KB of on-chip block RAM, and no hard processor. The workload is YOLOv8n trained on DeepPCB and quantized to INT8 with ONNX Runtime’s static post-training pipeline.The accelerator is an 8x8 Output-Stationary systolic array of INT8 multiply-and-add units written in SystemVerilog, with per-channel re-quantization and tile-based on-chip memory. All six representative convolution layers picked from the network (input channels from 3 to 384, kernel sizes 1 and 3, strides 1 and 2, output spatial dimensions 20 to 320) verify silicon bit-exact against the ONNX Runtime reference within a two-byte tolerance across 2,611,200 output bytes. A host-orchestrated coprocessor... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9qt3g183 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Saxena, Arunima https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nr9412m On August 8, 2023, a catastrophic wildfire devastated the town of Lahaina and severely impacted the broader Maui community. Thousands of structures were destroyed, and 102 lives were lost. It was the deadliest wildfire in Hawaiʻi’s recorded history and the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century. This disaster was not simply a natural event but the culmination of settler-colonial land transformations that systematically displaced Kānaka ʻŌiwi land management systems, introduced highly flammable invasive grasses, and disrupted integrated watershed systems. This study is grounded in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project called Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui (protecting the land of Maui). Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui is a wildfire mitigation and land stewardship program that I co-developed in response to the 2023 Lahaina wildfire in partnership with a high school field ecology teacher, a Kānaka ʻŌiwi biocultural conservation biologist, and a local nonprofit focused on watershed stewardship... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nr9412m Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Miller, Jadda M. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9m62877b Lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus), one of the five domesticated species within the Phaseolus genus, offer agroeconomic potential in the United States due to their production capacity and an increasing global demand for plant-based proteins. Although nutritionally comparable to more widely consumed legumes, lima beans remain one of the least consumed legumes in the U.S., and limited information exists on their sensory qualities and consumer acceptance across cultivars. Part of a nationwide study of lima bean genomics and germplasm resources funded by USDA NIFA SCRI, this research was a comprehensive investigation of the sensory properties and consumer acceptance of lima beans. This study specifically aimed to: 1) characterize the sensory profiles of succulent and dry cultivars, 2) identify positive and negative sensory drivers of consumer liking, and 3) explore perspectives and consumption behaviors among regular- and non-regular lima bean consumers.Quantitative and qualitative sensory... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9m62877b Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Murata, Yukina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gn191n9 I investigate how intra-household gender inequality—understood in terms of inequality of decision-making power, control of income, and burden of downside risk—contributes to low levels of agricultural technology adoption. My focus is sub-Saharan Africa, where the use of yield-increasing Green Revolution technologies is not widespread. As technology adoption in this context entails transitioning to relatively capital intense production, adopting households may face an increase in downside risk, given states in which net income is less than had they not adopted. Absent financial technologies like insurance, households may respond to increased risk by diverting investment to safer activities. I study how the intra-household sharing of income interacts with wives’ socially constructed caring responsibilities and exposure to risk to determine households’ labor response to new technologies, and their profitability.In the first chapter, I show theoretically how the adoption of a profitable,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gn191n9 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jones, Rachel Ellen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g02f6xq Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generalization across a wide range of tasks. These strengths present new opportunities to enhance traditional recommendation systems, including data augmentation on the sparse user-item interaction matrix. For example, one line of works prompts LLMs to generate augmented interaction data between users and cold-start items. Existing data augmentation works treat LLMs as powerful models to address cold-start issues in traditional recommendation systems by training them with augmented data that incorporates collaborative signals for cold-start items. However, they only provide LLMs with partial user histories to reduce input size and select random users without considering characteristics that facilitate cold-start item integration. To address these limitations, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that learns a policy to select users for LLM-based simulation, optimizing for cold-start... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g02f6xq Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Subbaraman, Nachiket https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f94v9d2 This dissertation develops equations that unify special relativity and biological evolution. We begin by mathematically formulating three foundational principles of biology. From these principles, we show that the tree of life is a multifractal geometry. The geometry makes durations fractal curves. We show how these fractal curves give rise to information-theoretic measures of relative duration. This yields an equation---the information-theoretic dilation equation---that gives the pairwise ratio of one lifespan relative to another as a nondimensional number. These unitless ratios render the tree of life a nearness space, an object more primitive than a metric space. Because these quantities are dimensionless, they are prior to any unit definition of time, such as the SI second. In this sense, the starting principles do not presuppose a dimension of time: we begin from ratios of nearness and derive time units from the relational structure of the living tree of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f94v9d2 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hudnall, Kevin Andrew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9cd6j5d0 The Arctic is experiencing rapid warming, transforming the landscape, carbon cycle and aquatic networks. Because the Arctic contains extensive surface waters, understanding how these changes influence aquatic carbon pathways is important for predicting ecosystem change and potential climate feedbacks. Yet, carbon cycling in aquatic networks has been focused on a few specific and accessible locations, and primarily on larger bodies of water such as rivers and lakes. Streams, however, form extensive drainage networks across the landscape compared to larger rivers and therefore, may play an outsized role in regional carbon cycling. In this dissertation, I integrate data collected in the field, from the existing literature, and from remote sensing techniques to understand the seasonal and landscape drivers of carbon transport in low-order streams on the Arctic Coastal Plain of Alaska as well as the magnitude and variation of these aquatic carbon fluxes. My research resulted in the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9cd6j5d0 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hock, Macall https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91p3s4fs Terpenoids are a diverse class of specialized metabolites that contribute to plant growth, defense, and environmental adaptation. Chapter 1 of this thesis provides a broad overview of the different types of terpenoid compounds and the roles they play in response to different biotic stimuli, ranging from beneficial interactions to defense. This chapter highlights the multifunctionality of these metabolites, many of which serve multiple roles within the plant depending on tissue type and environmental context. Diterpenoids, a class of terpenoids, have well-established roles in pest and pathogen defense across diverse plant species, including both gymnosperms and angiosperms. Specifically in maize, several pathogen-induced diterpenoid pathways, including the dolabralexin and kauralexin pathways, have been characterized. Chapter 2 expands upon this body of work and describes a novel diterpenoid pathway, termed the rosalexin pathway, which is mediated by the class I diterpene synthase... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91p3s4fs Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Schumaker, Siena Lee https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x95607x Shotgun metagenomic sequencing enables culture-independent characterization of microbial communities, but most analyses rely on transformed representations of sequencing data rather than raw reads. Reference-based profiling, de novo assembly, and genome binning simplify complex datasets while implicitly filtering and reshaping the underlying sequence information. The extent to which these transformations alter observable microbial diversity, and whether biologically meaningful signals are systematically lost, remains poorly quantified across diverse ecosystems.In this dissertation, I examine how microbial genome content is represented, lost, and biased across common metagenomic analysis workflows using large collections of publicly available metagenomes spanning host-associated, engineered, and environmental biomes. I first quantify the fraction of metagenomic content assignable to known reference genomes using scalable k-mer based methods, revealing strong biome-specific differences... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x95607x Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhao, Zhiying https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wt0m6j3 Over the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) systems have grown rapidly in terms of scale and capability. While such developments enabled a wide range of opportunities and seemingly impressive performance across various tasks, the significant complexity of modern AI systems has made it substantially challenging to understand their decision processes, analyze their failure cases, adapt them to new domains, or validate the corresponding datasets. To address the aforementioned challenges, this dissertation advances collaborative intelligence from humans, models, and data for understanding, validating, and scaling AI systems responsibly and efficiently. Instead of seeking ever-larger models or extensive supervision, the introduced approaches integrate intelligent visualization, human-aided analytical frameworks, multimodal representations, and model collaborations to enable more beneficial and practical AI solutions in real-world settings. To facilitate the effective... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wt0m6j3 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Xuan, Xiwei https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8v84r4zh Vision models replace manual measurement of plants from an agricultural field, measuring plant traits with throughput beyond human capability and with greater consistency than manual methods. Recent vision models trained on web-scale datasets with billions of labeled examples have achieved near-human accuracy on natural image benchmarks. Yet, this scaling is unachievable for agricultural vision tasks where seasonal cropping cycles, sensor costs, and data annotation requirements restrict training data to orders of magnitude fewer samples. In breeding programs, for instance, evaluating thousands of genotypes across seasons forces a rigid trade-off between high-throughput, low-resolution remote sensing and low-throughput, high-resolution proximal measurement, typically yielding only thousands of images per season.To resolve this bottleneck, this dissertation develops generative-model-based sensing methods that increase effective data resolution and throughput without proportionally... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8v84r4zh Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yun, Heesup https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sp690nv Drawing on theories of supportive communication and intergenerational relationships, this dissertation examines how memory activation and photographic priming function as communication-based mechanisms to enhance intentions to engage in supportive communication and supportive behaviors toward older adult family members. This work conceptualizes photographic priming as a form of memory activation that increases the accessibility of relationship-pertinent procedural records, thereby enhancing individuals’ readiness to engage in supportive communication. Based on this framework, the dissertation develops propositions regarding the effects of photographic priming as a form of memory activation on individuals’ intentions to provide emotional, instrumental, and informational support to their elderly family members, as well as their engagement in relational maintenance behaviors toward those family members.These propositions were tested through a pilot study and a controlled experiment.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sp690nv Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tseng, Jeffrey Tsifan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8q3202h7 Increased severity of drought due to climate change in Mediterranean climate regions around the world is expected to threaten viticulture by decreasing yield and quality of grapes. Grapevine rootstocks can provide a level of drought resistance to their scion to mitigate these effects. Grape root systems avoid drought stress by deep rooting, effective exploration of the soil profile for water, and root responses to drought to prevent severe drought stress. While these traits exist to a certain extent in commercially available rootstocks, breeding for new drought tolerant rootstocks has not been prioritized until recently. Breeding has the potential to improve drought resistance in new rootstock varieties beyond what is currently available. This dissertation discusses topics related to improving drought resistance of grapevine rootstocks. In chapters 1, 2, and 3, respectively, we explored comparison of propagation method on root system architecture and mapping quantitative trait... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8q3202h7 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dudley, Sam Edward https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nk6w0jc Adult tooth enamel is useful for understanding environmental exposure to heavy metal toxicants during childhood tooth development because, unlike bone, enamel does not remodel. Recent construction activity exposed human remains at several historic cemeteries in the cities of San Francisco and San Jose, California. The San Francisco cemeteries were in operation from 1870−1903, and the San Jose cemetery from 1870−1935. Based on historical records, we know that some cemeteries required payment for burial and were associated with higher socioeconomic-status individuals, including Odd Fellows Cemetery (n=8) and Masonic Cemetery (n=2) in San Francisco. By contrast San Francisco’s Golden Gate “City” Cemetery (n=2) and Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose (n=15) form the lower socioeconomic status population, as these individuals are from free or “pauper” graves. Tooth enamel was analyzed using Inductively Coupled Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) to measure the concentrations (ppm)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nk6w0jc Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wessling, Ari https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8kw740rn In this dissertation, I examine the status of propagandizing within speech act theory, challenge the assumption that persuasion itself is a speech act, and advance a minimal condition for propagandizing that I call Propagandizing*. Influential prior accounts such as Bernays, Marlin, and Stanley have focused on propaganda as a product rather than the act of generating propaganda, while existing accounts of persuasion like Austin and Walton treat persuasion as a speech act. I argue that a full analysis of propaganda qua propaganda must include a rigorous analysis of the act of propagandizing and particularly the act of intentional propagandizing. I make this argument by drawing on BDI psychology and a refined Gricean framework to argue that persuasion should be considered a perlocutionary aim rather than a perlocutionary object. Unlike a perlocutionary object, as a perlocutionary aim it is inherently strategic and thus can be retained over multiple successive persuasive attempts.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8kw740rn Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cunningham-Bryant, Stephen Andrew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8h57n656 How do dominant group members engage in meaning making of cultural appropriation, the act of taking from an outgroup culture, including intellectual property, cultural expressions, artifacts, history, and ways of being and knowledge? Benefit finding—identifying positive implications of an aversive event—has typically been studied as a coping process of meaning making for victimized groups. The current work investigates whether it can also function as a meaning-making process for perpetrator groups. Across 3 experiments, we examined whether engaging in benefit finding about cultural appropriation increases nationalistic sentiment among White Americans. In Studies 1 and 2 (N = 202; Study 2 preregistered), White Americans who considered the implications or benefits of a White chef’s use of soul food endorsed higher nationalism than controls. Mediation analyses suggested that this effect was partly accounted for by increased White racial identification. Study 3 (N = 265; preregistered)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8h57n656 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Oliinyk, Stephanie Lyudmila https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cn5s2dv Packaged and restaurant foods make up a significant portion of the US diet and contribute to the overconsumption of saturated fat, sodium, and added sugar, making these food sources prime targets for promoting healthier choices. Yet the lack of salient nutrition information in these settings poses a barrier to consumers in being able to make informed decisions. Currently, packaged foods are mandated to include quantitative nutrition information (i.e., the Nutrition Facts label) and chain restaurants must display quantitative calorie information. However, quantitative nutrition information is not well-understood by the public. To address the lack of conspicuous nutrition information and to promote healthier dietary behaviors, policymakers have considered easy-to-understand interpretative labels on the front of packaged foods and on restaurant menus. Thus, in an effort to provide evidence to inform policy, this research aimed to (1) assess public support for added-sugar warning... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cn5s2dv Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lemmon, Brittany Nicole https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bt1300x Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. Menopause represents a key cardiometabolic shift for women. Estrogen loss leads to visceral fat accumulation, dyslipidemia, insulin resistance, and vascular dysfunction, accelerating CVD risk. The aim of this dissertation was to examine how specific Mediterranean dietary components influence cardiometabolic outcomes in postmenopausal women. I integrated clinical, mechanistic, and translational perspectives. Chapter 1 reviews CVD pathophysiology, vascular function, and menopause as a sex-specific CVD risk factor. It details surrogate vascular outcomes, such as flow-mediated dilation (FMD) and peripheral arterial tonometry (PAT), alongside epidemiological and clinical evidence for Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) adherence in CVD prevention. Mechanistic pathways, including oxylipin signaling, flavonoid metabolism, and gut microbiome interactions, are also discussed. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on walnuts as a Mediterranean... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bt1300x Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yim, Sun Jung https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8754d03j The relationship between ethnomusicology and music cognition has had a complicated past, and today few scholars are integrating the fields. As developments in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience continue to advance within the field of music cognition, ethnomusicologists have turned their attention to regional particularism. This dissertation demonstrates how the cognitive sciences and ethnomusicology can complement each other by examining the neurological and cognitive mechanisms of perception and action in the South American traditions of Afro-Brazilian capoeira and Andean sikureada. Capoeira is a rich holistic art form with over a century of detailed existing scholarship that incorporates unique timbres and groove-based rhythms while requiring complex motor predictions and actions to perform. I provide empirical evidence of how individual components of the berimbau instrument, namely the pedra, staff, and cabaça, each contribute to the overall timbre, and how the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8754d03j Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rossi, Alex Gabriel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85h321nf The first chapter considers optimal treatment allocation in the presence of spillover effects in both take-up decisions and outcomes. When there are two layers of spillover effects, I allow an individual's outcome to depend on other individuals' compliance types in the neighborhood. I construct estimators of the welfare function and the budget constraint, then based on the characteristics of the target population, I propose treatment allocations that maximize the estimated welfare subject to the estimated budget constraint, or minimize the estimated cost subject to a welfare target. I show that the proposed allocations achieve asymptotic welfare efficiency and weak feasibility. In an anti-conflict experiment in public middle schools in New Jersey, I estimate the minimum allocation required to achieve various targets for the average expected outcome. The results show that failing to account for both layers of spillover effects can lead to a suboptimal level of treatment allocation. ... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85h321nf Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tuo, Yuan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wb6m990 The Arch of Constantine is a literal and symbolic monument of art history. It was the final triumphal arch constructed in the city of Rome, but the first to depict the victory of a Roman Emperor, Constantine (206-337 CE), over another, Maxentius (306-312 CE). As a result, Constantine had to develop a visual language that justified his unprecedented rise to power, while reflecting the political, religious, and social transitions of the late imperial period. Because expressions of gender and sexuality were intertwined with politically sanctioned religions (the Imperial Cult and Christianity), a queer approach can be taken to Constantine’s construction of masculinity; specifically how he redefines masculinity through his appearance next to Antinous (110-130 CE), the feminized male lover of the Emperor Hadrian (117-138 CE), in the Arch’s four Hunting Tondi.Using Judith Butler’s theories on gender performance, I will discuss how Constantine both reinforced his expression of masculinity... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wb6m990 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Madrid, Madeline Maria https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vz7p4zw Citywide school choice policies have been implemented across the U.S. with the goal of improving equitable access to high quality education for all public school students. However, a family’s ability to choose what school to send their children to means little if they cannot conveniently reach it. This study examines who has convenient access to high, average, and low performing high schools within 30 minutes in San Francisco, Denver, and Indianapolis. These cities were selected for their population size, population density, and comparable school choice policies. School performance was measured using Math and English proficiency rates and standardized test scores. Results for each city were divided into terciles. 30-minute transit isochrones were generated for each school and census demographic data was overlaid using areal interpolation to calculate location quotients. Historical HOLC redlining maps were also overlaid on tiered isochrones to examine whether transit access patterns... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vz7p4zw Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mudita, Bara https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vr1408h Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+ ) and its derivatives are essential metabolites participating in redox reactions and cellular signaling, regulating metabolism. NAD+ homeostasis is closely tied to mitochondria activity and autophagy, though the underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. We previously showed that NatB complex mediated N-terminal acetylation of two major NAD+ biosynthetic enzymes, Nma1 and Nma2, is important for the proper maturation of these proteins. Consequently, the NatB mutant nat3Δ exhibits elevated NAM release and reduced NAD⁺ levels. However, how the elevated NAM release and reduced NAD⁺ levels in nat3Δ cells connect to mitochondrial function and autophagy remained unclear. To address this, we further study the nat3∆ mutant with another NatB substrate, the tropomyosin Tpm1. We show that overexpression of TPM1 and NMA1 in the nat3∆ background partially restores respiratory growth and autophagy defects. In hst1Δ cells, used to distinguish the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vr1408h Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lee, Lan-Hsuan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7r29r3ft This study, The Great War Against the Real: Representations of Depersonalization and Derealization in World War One, examines amputation, prosthetics, and disfigurement. It is centered on how traumatic injuries are linked to altered states of consciousness on and off the battlefield. Drawing on literature, philosophy, psychology, and history, I investigate how depersonalization and derealization emerge not only as medical or psychological phenomena but also as recurring aesthetic and conceptual motifs in cultural representations of the First World War. I use the terms depersonalization and derealization to interpret moments of the war that are represented as dreamlike, robotic, or otherwise dissociated from sentiments of reality.The first chapter provides a theoretical framework for depersonalization and derealization through philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Apter, and Trigg, before applying these concepts to historical and literary accounts of amputation. I pay particular... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7r29r3ft Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lancaster, Ian Thomas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7qj6625p Adequate nutrition during the first 1000 days of life is critical for infant survival and health. The early-life benefits of breastfeeding and nutrient adequacy, as indicated by dietary diversity (DD), on infant growth are well established. However, the long-term impacts of breastfeeding and diet diversity, particularly on developmental outcomes of children in low- and middle-income countries, are less clear. This dissertation aimed to fill this gap using data from the International Lipid-based Nutrient Supplements (iLiNS)-DYAD-Ghana randomized controlled trial, in which 1320 pregnant women received one of three nutrient supplements [iron folic acid (IFA) and placebo, multiple micronutrients (MMN), or small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements (SQ-LNS)] until 6 months postpartum. Dietary data were collected at multiple time points from birth to 18 months of age using 24-hr recalls and comprehensive child development assessments were conducted during the follow-up studies... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7qj6625p Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kwon, Katherine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7q1749fw My dissertation studies the short- and long-run effects of several major historical and contemporary American housing policies, drawing on new data and quasi-experimental methods. In Chapter 1, I study the effects of mid-century public housing on neighborhoods. I assemble a new national dataset of over one million units built between 1935 and 1973 and link it to neighborhood data from 1930 to 2010. Using a matched difference-in-differences design, I find that public housing raised Black population shares by roughly six percentage points and lowered median incomes and rents by about 15 percent. Children from low-income families raised in these neighborhoods also experienced lower upward mobility than those in comparable areas. In Chapter 2, with Tianfang Cui, I study the effects of the mid-century federal Urban Planning Assistance Program, which subsidized urban planning in thousands of small municipalities. Using newly digitized program records and a triple-differences... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7q1749fw Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bressler, Beau https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7p25n0dc In this dissertation I focus on a sodium glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitor, empagliflozin (EMPA), which is used to treat type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and more recently heart failure (HF). In clinical trials SGLT2 inhibitors improved cardiovascular outcomes in HF patients regardless of their diabetes status. Preclinical studies demonstrated EMPA’s effects also in ex vivo perfused hearts and isolated cardiomyocytes. However, cardiomyocytes do not express SGLT2, thus the mechanism of EMPA’s direct effects in cardiac myocytes is unknown. EMPA has been shown to inhibit the late sodium current (INaL) in a transverse aortic constriction (TAC) model of HF with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF). Cardiomyocytes from a murine model of HF with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) also exhibited enhancement of the INaL, and importantly, was reversed with EMPA pre-treatment (~4hr), but interestingly this was not observed with acute (~3min) treatment. The same effects were also seen... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7p25n0dc Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Edwards, Tory https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m41377x This dissertation is a collection of computational investigations into unique and unusual chemistry of organic and organometallic reactions. The goal of most studies described herein is to understand how and why molecules react, and ideally leverage that understanding to guide rational design of future chemistry.Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to physical organic chemistry, describing fundamental theoretical concepts like approximations, quantum chemistry, transition state theory, and catalysis. Chapter 2 explores a computational tool used to quantitatively and qualitatively investigate pericyclic reactions, a unique class of reactions characterized by aromaticity in the transition state. Here we employ nucleus-independent chemical shifts and normalized multicenter bond orders to characterize the degree of cyclic delocalization for a series of reactions. We include well-established pericyclic reactions and pseudopericyclic reactions as positive and negative controls, respectively.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m41377x Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 DeSnoo, William https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7k2951gv Sustainable aquaculture depends on the producers’ ability to maintain animal health and prevent disease. Achieving this requires a proactive, multi-layered approach to disease management, as healthy animals are fundamental to both production success and long-term industry viability.Effective disease management resembles a three-tiered approach: comprehensive protocols to prevent pathogen entry, good-husbandry strategies to reduce the likelihood of pathogen infection, and effective antimicrobial treatments to combat the pathogen if it evades all other procedural and immune defenses. While antimicrobials are available for use when disease outbreaks occur, concerns regarding the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria and the environmental impacts associated with antimicrobial product usage have prompted the industry to prioritize disease prevention strategies. In California, the aquaculture community demonstrate awareness of disease risks and commonly implement... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7k2951gv Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wright, Alex https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7jx315s1 Glycolysis is a fundamental metabolic pathway that supports cell growth, division, and survival, yet its kinetics at the single-cell level remain poorly understood. This dissertation uses live-cell fluorescent biosensors to reveal that glycolysis is a highly dynamic, heterogeneous, and tightly regulated process. In my original work I found that NAD+ is a major control point for dynamic fluctuations in response to abrupt change in nutrition environment at the single cell level.The introduction reviews the sources and significance of cell-to-cell metabolic variation, covering the roles of the cell cycle, circadian rhythms, signaling pathways, and intrinsic metabolic oscillations. It also surveys the landscape of single-cell metabolic measurement technologies, with particular attention to genetically encoded biosensors. The second part of the introduction provides a detailed account of glycolytic regulation, heterogeneity, and the existing methods for measuring glycolytic flux, with... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7jx315s1 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Abbate, Christina C. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7j04v0pm The identity of dark matter is one of the most profound mysteries of nature. While its specific properties (e.g. mass, spin) are unknown, there are numerous hints from both a cosmological and particle physics perspective that motivate certain models for dark matter and by extension, detector paradigms to search for it. The topic of dark matter is the subject of Chapter 1 of this thesis. Another class of fundamental questions of nature are associated with the neutrino, such as the origin of their mass or whether neutrinoless double beta decay is a phenomenon that exists. The answer to these questions may contain the secret to numerous mysteries of the universe, such as why there is more matter than antimatter. Similarly to the topic of dark matter, the nature of these questions motivates the paradigm of detectors well-suited to find their corresponding answers. The topic of neutrinos and their associated mysteries is the subject of Chapter 2 of this thesis. A commonality... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7j04v0pm Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kingston, James William https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7gg5k876 Learning-based locomotion has made humanoid robots capable of terrain behaviors that are difficult to obtain with hand-designed controllers alone. A short traversal demonstration, however, does not establish that a learned policy is reliable enough for broad deployment. A locomotion controller must be examined under commands, terrain variation, perception limits, and export/runtime differences before its capability can be understood. This thesis studies that problem through an exploratory implementation and analysis of a human-commanded perceptive locomotion pipeline for the Unitree G1 robot.The guiding question is whether a learned humanoid locomotion policy can move toward robust, command-executable walking: a human operator supplies bounded body-frame velocity and yaw-rate commands, while the policy uses proprioception and depth input to produce joint target offsets. The work combines terrain-aware reinforcement learning, keyboard and gamepad command streams in MuJoCo, IsaacLab-to-MuJoCo... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7gg5k876 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lai, Weijie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7c72m4bj With highly concentrated wealth, a robust agricultural economy, and policies aimed at social equity and climate resilience, rural California is an ideal investigative ground for thinking through land reform and relationships in a reparative and restorative State. California’s converging equity and climate policy regimes have the potential to create a deep transition in land stewardship and governance. Public speakers at the State’s reparative public processes, the Truth and Healing Council and the Reparations Task Force, want Californians to orient to the State as a Native and Black place, and counter erasure of their land stories. After hearing and analyzing 75 hours of their testimonies, I use decolonial theories of water to think of Black and Native spaces as universal, interpenetrating and eternal. This sets a decolonial spatiotemporal framework for thinking about land relations and undoing settler colonialism in California planning and environmental governance. Native, Mexican,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7c72m4bj Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Raya, Marisa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bp8p9hn Molecular-level characterization of biological systems is vital in our understanding of both healthy and disordered biological states. Understanding what molecules exist in these systems and how they are impacted in different circumstances allows us to obtain deeper insight into what may underlie biological function, or even disease pathology. This dissertation utilizes different analytical methods to understand biology at the molecular level. Chapter one introduces the importance of the different biomolecules characterized in this work, including proteins, lipids, and sugars as well as the main techniques that were used in this work. Chapter two focuses on the structural characterization Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein (GFAP) intermediate filament wild-type and mutant complexes through use of solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) towards understanding how mutations impact proper protein functioning. Chapter three, four, and five focus on the use of matrix-assisted laser... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bp8p9hn Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Osumi, Kayla Mia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72s456cv This thesis explores the use case of a Peltier module as a heating solution to electronic assemblies exposed to temperatures below their operating temperature range. In aerospace applications, electrical systems can be exposed to rapidly changing environments, and Peltier coolers are one of the potential thermal solutions that can keep pace with the dynamic ambient temperature to ensure electrical systems can remain in operation. This work aims to expand the use case of a Peltier module and provide a solution applicable to any electronic assembly attempting to operate in an unsuitable environment. A VNX+, or VITA90, chassis design was used as motivation for the chassis assembly designed in this work, and a Peltier module was selected based on clamshell dimension restrictions, SWaP (size, weight, and power consumption) principles, and hand calculations. The hand calculations were used to build a thermal model in Ansys to visualize a temperature distribution, and resulted... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72s456cv Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Askin, Murat https://escholarship.org/uc/item/70t9n29k This dissertation examines whether sustainability-related food labels and claims help consumers make more informed decisions in modern retail markets. Food labels can transform unobservable credence attributes, such as organic production, local origin, and ethical production practices, into search attributes. Yet consumers increasingly encounter many labels and claims simultaneously, including certified labels, retailer displays, manufacturer claims, and price promotions. These signals may complement one another, but they may also compete for consumers' attention, can reinforce prior beliefs, or strategically restate information already conveyed by labels. Across three empirical studies, this dissertation analyzes how consumers respond to multiple sustainability messages in terms of perceived quality, willingness to pay (WTP), and actual purchasing behavior. The first chapter examines how consumers update relative quality rankings and valuations of labels and claims after... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/70t9n29k Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lee, Hyun Jung https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zw4h9s3 The horseracing industry has strict regulations regarding the presence of chemical substances in equine athletes at the time of competition. Metformin, a commonly prescribed diabetes medication in human medicine, is considered a prohibited substance in horseracing, as there is no accepted therapeutic use for this compound in young, fit horses. Recent metformin detections in post-race blood and urine samples resulting in adverse analytical findings and severe disciplinary action against the trainers of the horses involved necessitates further study of this drug in horses. This thesis aims to characterize the pharmacokinetic behavior of metformin in the horse and explore environmental contamination as a means of exposure to inform regulation of metformin in horseracing.In the first study, a pharmacokinetic (PK) study of metformin was performed utilizing twelve horses. Metformin was administered orally and intravenously in a balanced, randomized, two-way crossover design. Serum drug... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zw4h9s3 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jacobs, Megan Eileen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vc1v1w3 Whole orchard recycling (WOR) is an increasingly adopted management practice in perennial agroecosystems that incorporates wood chip biomass into soils during orchard re-establishment. This one-time organic amendment repurposes trees at the end of their productive lifecycle and increases soil organic matter (SOM) contents with lignocellulosic carbon (C). Here, temporal responses of soil microbial community, particulate organic matter (POM), and mineral associated organic matter (MAOM) compositions to WOR were elucidated in fine sandy loam soils. This dissertation integrates (Ch. 1) amplicon sequencing, (Ch. 2) POM and MAOM fractionation, spectroscopy, stable isotope analysis, and (Ch. 3) genome-resolved metagenomics to characterize how WOR influences soil microbial communities and SOM composition across 4- and 15-year time scales in almond orchards within the Central Valley, California, USA.Across a four-year time series, following WOR application to a commercial almond orchard,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vc1v1w3 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Robles, Helix Antonio https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tj4f092 Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a highly lethal liver malignancy often characterized by multidrug resistance, leading to significant challenges in advanced systemic treatment. In HCC and other cancers, aberrant expression of the genes governing the processes of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK) can alter therapeutic drug exposure, efficacy, and safety. Elucidating the mechanisms underlying variable drug disposition in cancer is critically important to overcoming multidrug resistance and developing therapies that are safe and effective. Novel approaches in cancer therapy and DMPK research are needed to address these shortcomings and expand the scope of druggable targets. In pursuit of this goal, research efforts have uncovered posttranscriptional gene regulation by endogenous microRNAs (miRNAs) as important regulatory factor in countless cellular processes, including natural DMPK function, multidrug resistance, and cancer progression. Historically, recombinant... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tj4f092 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cronin, Joseph Matthew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sr0x03r Accurate temperature is critical for thermal time–based phenological simulation modeling. In flooded rice systems, the presence of standing water modifies surface energy balance and canopy temperature. Temperature data from meteorological stations or gridded temperature data derived from these measurements may not capture the canopy-level microclimate of flooded agroecosystems. Our objective was to quantify differences between these two temperatures and how they impact modeled growing degree day (GDD) accumulation through the season. We evaluated temperature-source effects using nine years of observations from eight rice production sites (62 site-years) in California’s Sacramento Valley, comparing PRISM gridded temperature to canopy-level and floodwater In-field sensor measurements. A threshold-bound (cardinal temperature) GDD model was developed for PRISM-based phenological prediction of days to heading. In-field water temperatures differed systematically from canopy-level air... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sr0x03r Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Daniel, Lewis Edgar https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rs490vv This thesis presents a new control system that enables domestic refrigerators to respond to hourly dynamic electricity prices. A dynamic thermal model was developed to simulate the heat exchange behavior, incorporating heat gain through the walls, compressor cooling, automatic defrost, and the effect of thermal mass. The dynamic thermal model characteristics were derived from measurements of a household refrigerator’s temperature and power profiles. Based on utility-supplied day-ahead, hourly dynamic prices, the proposed price-responsive mode pre-cools the refrigerator’s contents before a peak period and schedules defrost events within a flexible time window, aiming to minimize operating costs through load shifting. To quantify the cost savings, a default mode was developed as a baseline that mimics the physical refrigerator’s operation through conventional thermostatic control and fixed defrost events. Using Southern California Edison’s hourly dynamic prices, simulation results... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rs490vv Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Almeseri, Abdulaziz N A E https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qk9x79f Two, separate, thrusts of research are explored in this dissertation: the photodynamics of phytochromes and cyanobacteriochromes; and preliminary observations of time-on-task on student performance in general chemistry. These topics are not directly related, but rather represent a subset of the breadth of research undertaken.Chapter 1 provides introductory material of both photoreceptor research and chemical education sufficient to understand the importance and impact of the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 describes the common experimental setup for transient absorption spectroscopy (TAS) utilised in later chapters to probe the photodynamics of chromophores in both forward and reverse photoreactions. The technique of cryokinetics, TAS resolved over time and temperature scales, is also summarised as a means to attain greater resolution of intermediates within photocycles. Chapter 3 recounts the methodology used to control variables and observe outcomes regarding time-on-task of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qk9x79f Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Anilao, Auddy Guerrero https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qb889b1 Refractory complex concentrated alloys (RCCAs) are a relatively novel field of alloys that retain high strength at elevated temperatures, but their creep properties have been scarcely reported. This work investigates the tensile creep behavior of NbTaTi, NbTaTiV, and NbV alloys. In these alloys, lattice distortion increases along these compositions’ gradient of V concentration because all of the component elements have similar atomic sizes except for V, which is smaller in these BCC alloys. Higher concentration of V in the composition is correlated with an improvement in the creep resistance of the alloy. The increase in V is also associated with a transition to edge dislocation-controlled deformation behavior of the alloys under creep. Further work was done with NbV to study the effects of isolated, maximized lattice distortion on overall strength. Extreme lattice distortion in NbV further increased the tensile yield strength compared to other Nb-Ta-Ti-V system alloys, showing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qb889b1 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lau, Michael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pk0m0rw High-risk neuroblastoma (NB) remains one of the most lethal pediatric malignancies, with treatment resistance representing a critical barrier to improved clinical outcomes. Autophagy-mediated drug resistance, wherein cancer cells exploit lysosomal machinery to sustain metabolic homeostasis under therapeutic stress, is a primary driver of this resistance. Bisaminoquinoline 13 (Baq13) is a self-assembling one-component new-chemical-entity nanomedicine (ONN) that induces lysosomal dysfunction and autophagy blockade with 30-fold greater antiproliferative potency than hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). To systematically evaluate Baq13's potential as a chemosensitizer in NB, this study investigated its combination with standard-of-care agents Vincristine and Cisplatin across multiple treatment schedules in SK-N-SH and BE(2)-C cell lines. Combination efficacy was assessed via MTT-based checkerboard titration matrices analyzed with the Highest Single Agent (HSA) synergy model. Additionally, qPCR... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pk0m0rw Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 liu, zexi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p43n6qg This dissertation studies how producers, consumers, and markets adjust to policy, infrastructure, and environmental constraints. The three chapters address consumption-based production standards in U.S. agricultural markets, electricity service quality and household appliance adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa, and weather-driven supply dynamics in U.S. fresh produce markets. A common theme is that observed market and welfare outcomes are shaped by structural features that aggregate data alone do not reveal. The first chapter develops a partial equilibrium framework to analyze consumption-based production standards, regulations that condition market access on how goods are produced rather than where. The model features vertically differentiated products, heterogeneous producer compliance costs, and trade between the regulating jurisdiction and external suppliers. I calibrate the model to California's Proposition 12 and the U.S. shell egg market and simulate the welfare effects... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p43n6qg Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Yuhan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6nt3v5nx Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are well-known microbial symbionts that support nutrient and water uptake, soil structure, and ecosystem resilience. Although research across diverse cropping systems has advanced our understanding of AM fungi, their dynamics across environmental gradients, phenological stages, and management practices remain poorly understood in perennial woody crops such as grapevines. This dissertation employs amplicon sequencing and microscopy to evaluate AM fungal colonization, diversity, and community composition in western U.S. vineyards. The first chapter surveyed 11 vineyards spanning a broad edaphoclimatic gradient from Oregon to California’s Central Coast, comparing AM fungal communities across regions, rootstocks, and scions. Our findings suggest that AM fungal communities in grapevines are structured at multiple scales, where broad environmental gradients establish baseline differences in community composition and plant-level traits may refine patterns... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6nt3v5nx Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rodriguez, Amanda Nicole https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6mp9z6wn In this thesis, we apply combinatorial models to various problems concerning representations of classical Lie groups. Crystal graphs, developed by Kashiwara, encode many important features of their corresponding Lie group representations, including invariant subspaces, weight spaces, irreducible subrepresentations, and characters. Our first application of crystal graphs analyzes the invariant subspace of a tensor product of the spin and vector representations of the special orthogonal group, which Westbury showed is captured by the highest weight elements of weight zero in the corresponding crystal graph. We construct an injection from the highest weight elements of weight zero to chord diagrams which intertwines the promotion action on the invariant tensors with the rotation action on chord diagrams. Our second application of crystal graphs gives a novel approach to an outstanding open problem by Thrall to find a combinatorial description of the multiplicities appearing in the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6mp9z6wn Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Simone, Mary Claire https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m68s5xz Consensus protocols are foundational to the reliability and security of large-scale distributed data management systems. The rapid success of blockchain technologies, notably Bitcoin and Ethereum, has driven significant research interest in consensus protocols. Unlike traditional distributed databases, which assume replicas are either correct or crashed, blockchain systems operate in a Byzantine environment where replicas can exhibit arbitrary, potentially malicious behaviors aimed at maximizing profit at the expense of others. This added complexity demands more sophisticated consensus mechanisms. The first Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocol, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), introduced over two decades ago, was a pioneering advance in distributed consensus. Despite its success, PBFT faces several challenges, including a complex and costly recovery mechanism, which has inspired substantial research into alternative protocols and optimizations. Recently, rotational... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m68s5xz Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kang, Dakai https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kg5d5wv Background: Benign breast disease (BBD) is a common breast biopsy finding encompassing a diverse spectrum of diagnoses ranging from normal variations in breast tissue to proliferative changes with or without atypical features. Women with certain BBD diagnoses are known to have an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, with risk varying by histological degree of cancerous-like features within the benign lesion. However, risk estimates have primarily been quantified for established high-risk lesions, and risks associated with many other BBD diagnoses remain incompletely characterized. Methods: This dissertation evaluates the association between specific BBD diagnoses and subsequent risk of invasive breast cancer and ductal carcinoma in situ in a large, population-based cohort from the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium. Using time-to-event and competing risk methods, we characterize heterogeneity in risk across individual diagnoses within conventional histologic categories... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kg5d5wv Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sattayapiwat, Olivia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k4363hm Persistent inequities in enrollment, engagement, retention, and degree completion continue to shape the educational experiences of Black men in American higher education, particularly at predominantly White institutions. Nationally, Black male undergraduates experience some of the lowest baccalaureate completion rates of any demographic group, reflecting long-standing structural barriers, racialized campus climates, and uneven access to culturally affirming support. The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) reflects this broader national challenge. Despite its reputation as a highly ranked public research university, institutional data reveal persistent disparities in retention and graduation outcomes between Black male undergraduates and their peers, particularly when compared to White and Asian students who experience higher rates of degree completion. Acknowledging these disparities, UC Davis launched the Black Leadership Ambassadors for Culture and Knowledge (B.L.A.C.K.)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k4363hm Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Carter, Kayton Chappell https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gt2g206 This dissertation studies lattice points in convex sets, objects lying at the intersection of discrete geometry, integer programming, semigroup theory, and number theory. A unifying theme is Ehrhart-type quasipolynomial behavior: many of the counting and structural functions we consider are eventually described by finitely many polynomials, one per residue class modulo a fixed period. Such functions appear in algebra as Hilbert functions, in number theory as theta functions, and in geometry as Ehrhart functions counting lattice points; the results of this dissertation are therefore of interest to researchers across several fields.The first main contribution (Chapter 2), joint with De Loera, Xu, and Zhang, addresses the integer structure of non-polyhedral convex cones. Classical Hilbert basis theory provides a finite integer generating set for any rational polyhedral cone, but fails for non-polyhedral cones such as the positive semidefinite cone and the Lorentz cone L n , both... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gt2g206 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Marsters, Brittney Maye https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6fb2713q Land use decisions lie at the intersection of climate, markets, and institutions. Policies designed to conserve forests or sequester carbon, markets created to govern commodity supply chains, and climatic shocks that alter the profitability of land management all shape how land is used, which in turn leads to environmental consequences. Yet these forces rarely operate in isolation, and their interactions often produce outcomes that are heterogeneous across agents or unintended by policymakers. This dissertation examines three such interactions in Latin America, using quasi-experimental methods to identify causal effects of climate shocks, market-based conservation policies, and land-use regulation on deforestation, land markets, and freshwater provision.The first chapter studies how droughts differentially affect deforestation on public versus private lands in the Brazilian Amazon. Climate change has increased the frequency of drought events in the Amazon. Deforestation worsens... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6fb2713q Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pimenta, Bruno https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6d66w7gf New statistical methods and data resources have been introduced to improve plant breeding. However, evaluating their utility remains challenging. This dissertation examines how statistical models and emerging data types should be assessed and integrated within quantitative genetics. In the first chapter, I evaluate the benefit of the Usefulness Criterion for parental selection and show that estimating within-family genetic variance provides meaningful benefit only under limited conditions, as variation in predicted progeny mean typically dominates Usefulness Criterion. In the second chapter, I demonstrate that commonly used cross-validation estimates of phenomic prediction accuracy are biased due to environmental correlation between traits of interest and phenomic data, and are not the accuracy parameter in the breeder’s equation. In the third chapter, I propose a two-step prediction method that first uses phenomic data to predict phenotypes, which are then incorporated into genomic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6d66w7gf Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Fangyi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6bt10569 The last two decades have seen much progress in the field of scattering amplitudes. A big reason behind this revitalization of the program approximately 50 years after the initial formalization of quantum scattering has been our improved understanding of the rich mathematical structure behind amplitudes. In particular, mathematical properties of scattering amplitudes are being used to push calculations further and these new calculations are in turn used to look for new patterns. This virtuous cycle has been very fruitful especially in the context of N “ 4 Super Yang-Mills, which is a favorite playground for particle theorists. In this dissertation, we will be reviewing some of our novel contributions to this program. In particular, we explore: mathematical properties of diagrams that show up in a modern treatment of N “ 4 Super Yang-Mills amplitudes, consequences of a property called integrability on the perturbative side, and a novel diagrammatic technique for obtaining partial... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6bt10569 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Oktem, Umut https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6bd2b2n5 The quest for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a quest for robust machine reasoning—the ability of a model to transcend simple pattern matching and perform multi-step logical inference. This dissertation argues that the bottleneck of current machine reasoning lies not just in model scale, but in the nature of the underlying representations the models utilize. We explore the evolution of these representations from static linguistic indices to dynamic, latent multimodal spaces, and finally to learned internal attention policies. The first part of this work addresses the limitations of categorical representations in Natural Language Processing. We introduce LITE, a framework that reformulates entity typing as a Natural Language Inference (NLI) problem. By mapping diverse entity types into a semantic hypothesis space rather than fixed indices, we demonstrate that models can achieve superior generalization to unseen concepts, establishing that reasoning is more... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6bd2b2n5 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Bangzheng https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6b9299p1 Dbl Rho guanine-nucleotide exchange factors (RhoGEFs) promote normal cell function by regulating small GTPases, yet their misregulation can contribute to cancer progression and metastasis. Among these, the phosphoinositol-3,4,5-trisphosphate (PIP3)-dependent Rac exchanger (P-Rex) subfamily, which includes P-Rex1 and P-Rex2, plays a central role connecting GTPase response to signaling through Gβγ and PIP3. Although P-Rex1 has been extensively characterized, the molecular mechanisms governing P-Rex2 regulation and the broader determinants of differences within the P-Rex family remain poorly understood. Taking an integrative structural biology approach, these gaps have begun to be investigated. Cryo-EM helped resolve the first structure of full-length P-Rex2 to moderate resolution, revealing P-Rex structure is well-conserved between the two proteins, but the position of the N-terminal module relative to the C-terminal core is considerably different between the two, indicating potential... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6b9299p1 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Anderson, Lauren Kristie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/61b0t99p From the 16th century cartas sent back to the Iberian Peninsula by the Spanish to 20th century works by Clarice Lispector, horses walk, trot, and canter across the pages of many Latin American classics. In the subsequent five chapters, I explore representations of equines and the horse/human relationship as depicted in selected works of a diverse literary corpus in both Spanish and Portuguese. In Chapter 1, I analyze early colonial accounts to demonstrate that while the horse was frequently framed as a fearsome bioweapon, it was neither invincible nor exclusively advantageous to Spanish forces. Indigenous actors not only adapted to but also appropriated equine power, complicating traditional conquest narratives. In Chapter 2, I analyze the 19th century feminist and abolitionist novel Sab by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda and trace how the horse is both symbol and metaphor that can foster discussions on race and class. Furthermore, there is an affective relationship between horse... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/61b0t99p Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Houck, Leigh Marlene https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5v4385sp We present Nugget, an open-source, portable framework for targeted sampling that defines representative samples at the LLVM IR level and analyzes and validates them on real hardware rather than in simulation. Because the unit of work is LLVM IR rather than machine instructions, a single interval analysis applies to every ISA, and the resulting samples compile into lightweight executables (nuggets) that validate natively and are then used in simulation. As a simulation baseline, we contribute and have upstreamed the first full-system implementation of LoopPoint in gem5, a methodology whose reliance on slow analysis, full-baseline validation, and binary-specific samples motivates Nugget’s design. Across SPEC CPU2017, NPB, and LSMS on AMD Ryzen and Ampere Altra hardware, Nugget’s interval analysis runs 577× faster than gem5 functional simulation, adding 3× overhead over native execution for single-threaded workloads and 34× for multi-threaded ones. We show that Nugget allows researchers... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5v4385sp Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Qiu, Zhantong https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5v357015 In recent years, the demand for reduced emissions and improved fuel economy has motivated the electrification of heavy-duty off-road vehicles. Purely electric construction machinery have a substantially higher cost than their diesel counterparts, the greatest share of this cost arises from the large capacity battery. These machinery require considerable instantaneous power for tasks such as digging and transporting materials which often contributes to premature battery aging and thus increased costs. Instead, implementation of a parallel electric-hydraulic hybrid (PEHH) powertrain has been shown to reduce overall energy consumption and increase battery life. These benefits are heightened with advanced control methods that optimally deploy on-board energy sources. The repetitive cyclic motion of a wheel loader is particularly conducive to designing predictive control. This work presents the optimal powertrain component sizing and optimal energy management strategy (EMS) development... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5v357015 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Haas, Meridian Leanne https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5nw6w4cw This research aims to understand how and why some parents in the US nonprofit sector worked remotely in the post-pandemic era. Based on interviews conducted with forty-eight mothers, twenty-two fathers, and one nonbinary parent, I analyze the daily routines and feelings of parents who worked at home. I address three specific research questions: 1) How do remote work arrangements in the post-COVID-19 era have both positive and negative impacts for organizations and for employees within the nonprofit sector? 2) In what ways do the remote work arrangements of parents shape their households’ divisions of childcare and related labor in the post-pandemic context? 3) How, if at all, do parents use their work flexibility to adhere to or challenge dominant US parenting norms? I use the nonprofit sector as a case study to illustrate the ways in which organization-level variation in remote work shaped parents’ experiences. I also argue that parents learned to leverage their flexibility... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5nw6w4cw Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Searl, Emily https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5h50r38v The purpose of this dissertation is to classify symplectic fillings for certain links of singularities. We study braided wiring diagrams, representations of complex curves, and a set of equivalence classes on these diagrams called Markov moves. We work in the braid group to classify braided wiring diagrams up to Markov moves and use these results to classify symplectic fillings via [PS23]. We first define braided wiring diagrams and an invariant called the braid monodromy, which assigns a braid to a curve. In addition, we provide some background from symplectic topology and algebraic geometry to explain why braided wiring diagrams can be used to classify symplectic fillings. More specifically, de Jong and van Straten introduced a relation between the deformation theory of complex plane curves and the deformation theory of a class of complex surface singularities. The techniques used in this paper were applied in the symplectic topology setting in [PS23]. We then review Markov... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5h50r38v Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ogami, Sari https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fv0n0ck This thesis revisits the work of Frank Chin to consider what it might mean for Asian American literary scholars to take seriously his investment in Confucianism. While previous critiques of Chin’s ideas emphasize the heteropatriarchal and masculinist dimensions of his cultural nationalism, I critically close read the religio-philosophical components of his arguments. I expand Patricia P. Chu’s schematization of Chin’s extinction, emasculation, and authenticity theses by taking a more diachronic view of his essayistic writings and by tracing the development of what I call his genre thesis and his religio-philosophical thesis. Through his religio-philosophical thesis, Chin eventually arrives in “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake” (1991) at an anti-Christian conceptualization of Confucianism that grounds a supposedly secular and universalist Asian American historiography, literary practice, and subjectivity. However, his construction of an areligious, universal... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fv0n0ck Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Du, Bowen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fp6x023 Domestic cats, Felis catus, play an interesting role in human society, both as companion animals and as predators of local wildlife. Cats are one of the most commonly kept companion animals, surpassing dogs in many areas around the world, and are frequently directly managed by caretakers. However, cats are also one of the most widespread mesopredators with the ability to impact vulnerable prey species, and when outdoors (both owned and unowned) can cause prey population decline or even extinction. This has led to much discussion among scientists and the public on the proper management of owned cats, and whether possible benefits for their welfare warrant the provisioning of free-roaming outdoor access. The objective of this dissertation was to assess the role of management decisions and human-cat interactions on cats’ hunting behavior, bringing together the perspectives of behavioral ecology, conservation ecology, animal welfare, and anthrozoology.Many efforts have been made to... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fp6x023 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chung, Hee Jin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f33j7s9 The essays show that the effects of macroeconomic shocks depend on the design of macroeconomic policy, demographic composition, and the margins along which firms and households adjust.Chapter 1 studies how the effects of U.S. government spending have changed over time. I construct a defense spending news measure for 1947–2019 by combining sentence-level newspaper text analysis with daily stock returns of major defense contractors. Using this measure as an instrument for aggregate government spending, I show that output multipliers vary from about 0.8 to 1.5 across postwar episodes. This variation is driven mainly by private investment: procurement-intensive, persistent, and back-loaded spending plans crowd in investment more strongly and generate larger multipliers. Chapter 2 examines the firm-level effects of U.S. federal procurement by linking transaction-level procurement contract records from 2000–2024 with daily stock prices and quarterly firm financial statements. We show... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f33j7s9 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Park, Hyunseo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cn5f15f Rights-based fishery management is designed to improve biological and economic outcomes by limiting access to fisheries and reducing incentives for overfishing. However, it can also create concerns for coastal communities if locally owned permits leave the community. Existing literature has focused mainly on permit transfers, where permits are sold from local to non-local owners. Less attention has been given to permit migration, where permit holders retain their permits but move away from their original communities. This research examines potential economic drivers of permit migration in Alaska salmon fisheries by analyzing how fishery revenue shocks are associated with the number of out-migrating permit holders. Using fishing-related data from the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission and community-level socioeconomic data from the Alaska Local and Regional Information database from 2000 to 2015, this study constructs a community-year panel of permit migration, local and non-local... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cn5f15f Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yamashita, Tsugumi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5c62f1c0 Since the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, which based the legality of cannabis products on the concentration of delta-9-THC, the market for hemp-derived cannabinoid compounds has greatly expanded. Other psychoactive cannabinoids, such as the isomer delta-8-tetrahydracannabinol (Δ8-THC), are commonly being used in cannabis products but have previously been difficult to differentiate in both a qualitative and quantitative manner in blood samples sent to forensic toxicology laboratories. The cannabinoid market also continues to change and expand, with different isomers and new semi-synthetic derivatives being produced and becoming available for purchase. In this study, a chromatographic method was created to detect and quantify the separate presence of the five most commonly seen cannabinoid compounds in whole blood using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) as well as indicate the possible presence of 12 less common cannabinoids, such as exo-THC, tetrahydrocannabiphorol... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5c62f1c0 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Weed, Melanie Joy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59t3f9mf Within the west-central Sierra Nevada, archaeologists have long debated the effects of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) on the indigenous culture, owing largely to the scant archaeological evidence produced during this period. More broadly, climate events are frequently included within arguments surrounding the reorganization of culture or their inexplicable decline. Within this region, the argument leans towards the former, however, this has led to further questions regarding the nature of this cultural reorganization. The previous cultural pattern of greater residential-than-logistical mobility, and a greater reliance on pine nuts than acorns as a storable staple seems to end around the same time as the droughts start. This dissertation examines the relationships among diet, mobility, and drought in the west-central Sierra Nevada over the last ~4000 years. It asks two related questions: how settlement structure, residential mobility, diet, and climate articulated through time,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59t3f9mf Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hull, Bryna https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51f5j05n With the growing deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs), it becomes crucial to understand their interactions with human-driven vehicles (HVs) and the resulting aggregate properties of mixed-autonomy traffic systems. Although numerous studies have shown that AVs can be deployed to improve overall traffic system performance, these strategies often rely on centralized coordination or shared system-level objectives. It therefore remains unclear whether system-level benefits can be attained when driving agents, including AVs and HVs, act out of self-interest, a trait common to real-world traffic. This dissertation examines whether AVs can bring benefits to all driving agents in mixed-autonomy traffic systems when they are all self-interested. The research is centered on the concept of collective rationality (CR), which originates from game theory and behavioral economics and describes the possibility that driving agents form cooperation at the collective level while pursuing individual... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51f5j05n Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Di https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51c440z3 Esta tesis examina las implicaciones éticas, narrativas y subjetivas del testimonio mediado a partir del análisis de Seguir viviendo. El testimonio de una víctima de pedofilia (2020), libro escrito por Ana Luengo a partir de mi relato de abuso sexual infantil. Desde una doble posición —como sujeto de la experiencia narrada y como investigadora que analiza críticamente dicha narración—, el proyecto explora qué ocurre cuando una experiencia traumática es narrada por otra voz y cómo se transforman las relaciones entre autoría, verdad y subjetividad en ese proceso.La investigación dialoga con los estudios autobiográficos y testimoniales, así como con reflexiones contemporáneas sobre memoria, trauma y ética desarrolladas por Philippe Lejeune, Paul de Man, Manuel Alberca, Dori Laub, Leonor Arfuch y Judith Butler. A través de estos marcos teóricos, la tesis problematiza la idea de una autobiografía transparente y propone entender el testimonio como una construcción relacional atravesada... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51c440z3 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pulido, Sandra Stephanie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/50g759v1 This dissertation is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with demobilized women from the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). It follows their reincorporation and orientation processes in Medellín and highlights their capacity to adapt to the unknown. First, it traces women caught within the limbo of war and peace, covering their experiences in the jungle, where they waged war for decades. It follows by observing their disorientation in the city, where they struggle to cope with what they left behind. The document then observes the making and unmaking of kinship throughout female ex-combatants’ lives. It looks at the dream to build a normative family—which kept them going during war—from where that dream originated, what family meant to them before taking up arms, and what it means now. Making and unmaking kinship gave ex-combatants the strength to survive war and the courage to endure the post-conflict. It continues by looking at the adaptations ex-combatants... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/50g759v1 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Trujillo Gomez, Anamaría https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4z0517hm This dissertation investigates the genetic diversity of non-dormant alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) using a mid-diversity 3K DArTag platform. Maintaining allelic diversity within germplasm collections is a crucial prerequisite for effective alfalfa breeding. Chapter 1 reviews the significance of non-dormant alfalfa production in Mediterranean climates and the utility of DArTag technology for genomic and genetic diversity studies. Chapter 2 uses the DArTag platform to assess the genetic diversity of 376 bulked GRIN accessions from seven geographic origins using 2,769 SNP loci harboring microhaplotypes. Microhaplotypes reduced monomorphic loci from 32% to 4% relative to target SNPs, with high genotyping reproducibility across replicate pools (mean r² = 0.92). STRUCTURE analysis identified five clusters corresponding to geographic regions, with AMOVA confirming significant among-population differentiation. Chapter 3 evaluates DArTag markers for genome-wide association studies (GWAS)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4z0517hm Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nonkum, Kreingkrai https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4x70f06s This investigation delves into visual hybridity and imperial mimicry through the case studies of four “sculpture-clocks” produced in Guangzhou, southern China, during the Qianlong reign (r. 1735–96). Through visual and comparative analysis of motifs—or ‘shapes’—on the sculpture-clocks, such as the hulu gourd, fireworks, and pineapple, I argue that the Qing empire sought to portray itself as eternal—and thus longer-lasting than its European counterparts. Such claims of sovereignty, however, should not be taken at face value. This study complicates the narrative of Qing claims to power by discussing how English sculpture-clock producers—and by extension, the British empire—actively participated in and benefited from the production and sale of these luxury objects. This study therefore enables us to better understand how imperial claims to dominion are articulated through material culture, while acknowledging that these claims are inherently one-sided. These Sino-European encounters—as... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4x70f06s Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Grace https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sk551v5 “Towards a Green Millennium” explores the evolution of environmentalism, anti-environmentalism, and broader environmental politics in the 1980s and 1990s. In doing so, it seeks to answer two related questions. First, how did environmentalism, once seemingly universal in its appeal in the 1970s, become so intensely polarized by the beginning of the twenty-first century? And second, why did practically all the participants in those environmental conflicts, including those we would normally label anti-environmentalists, claim the title of environmentalist? This dissertation argues that the answers to these questions lie in the changing nature of environmentalism itself. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked a moment of transition, ending the rough bipartisan consensus of 1970s environmentalism and throwing open the question of what it meant to be an “environmentalist.” The common markers of understanding of what characterized environmentalism began to break down as different... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sk551v5 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fleetwood, Zephaniah Cole https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rk64818 Contemporary cities are characterized by spatial inequalities, contested territories, and transitional urban environments that challenge conventional understandings of place and belonging. While creative placemaking has been widely recognized for its potential to activate public spaces through arts, culture, and community participation, limited attention has been given to the role of liminal spaces; those in-between, uncertain, and transitional environments that exist outside fixed spatial and social orders. This study introduces liminal placemaking as a distinct conceptual and practical framework for understanding how socially engaged design can cultivate belonging within such spaces.Grounded in postcolonial and poststructuralist spatial theory, this research draws on the work of Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, Doreen Massey, Edward Soja, and Kim Dovey to conceptualize liminality as both a cultural and spatial condition characterized by hybridity, negotiation, and becoming. Using... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rk64818 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hashemi, Maryam https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rf003j8 Memory B cells are antigen-specific lymphocytes generated in response to infection (e.g., viral) that provide long-lasting protection against reinfection. Despite lower avidity compared to the total memory B cell population, they can respond to variants of the same virus and, through cross-reactivity, may also contribute to the neutralization of novel viruses. However, current methods for assessing adaptive immune responses have limited ability to determine whether an individual possesses protective immunity against viral infection and frequently fail to detect these low-avidity populations. To address this limitation, we developed an avidity-based serial fluid shear selection strategy. In this method, a series of microfluidic channels are arranged sequentially with increasing widths, generating progressively decreasing shear stresses along the fluidic path. This serpentine design enables the separation of cells based on binding avidity, capturing highly shear-resistant (high-avidity)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rf003j8 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Okafor, Victoria Chisom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4mp014n4 This dissertation studies how immigration policies shape the integration of migrants, natives' political preferences, and migration flows. To do so, it examines three distinct policy types (regulatory, reception, and integration) in the context of the Venezuelan displacement crisis in Brazil and South American transit migration to the United States. The first chapter examines how the reception of Venezuelan refugees in urban shelters affected crime, public education, and voting behavior in Boa Vista, Brazil. Exploiting the quasi-random placement of refugee shelters in a difference-in-differences framework, I find no evidence that shelters worsened crime or congested local public schools. However, proximity to shelters increased support for far-right candidates and reduced votes for the incumbent governor by 2 to 4 percentage points. These political effects are driven entirely by shelters hosting Indigenous Venezuelan refugees, who exhibited lower integration levels, higher... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4mp014n4 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Brito, Carlos https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4k76b2v6 The relationship between covert spatial attention and the oculomotor system remains a central topic in cognitive neuroscience, particularly regarding the functional role of microsaccades— small fixational eye movements once considered to be stochastic noise. This dissertation investigates whether microsaccades serve as an overt index of covert attention and how they modulate early visual processing in humans. Grounded in the Premotor Theory of Attention, which posits shared neural substrates for attentional shifts and saccade planning, the present research comprises three visual-spatial cuing studies utilizing simultaneous high-resolution eye tracking with eye-position-contingent stimulus presentation and electroencephalography (EEG). Study 1 (Chapter 2) examines microsaccade dynamics across two experiments varying in cue predictiveness: one utilizing high-validity (80/20) predictive cues and another using non predictive (50/50) cues. The results demonstrate that predictive cues... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4k76b2v6 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Holcomb, Lee Adams https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4j18n67p This dissertation studies skill investment, job creation, and labor market policy under search frictions. In each chapter, workers or firms make sunk investments in frictional labor markets, and private incentives diverge from the social value of those decisions. The central question across all three chapters is not whether to intervene, but where: which side of the matching process bears the relevant distortion, and what instruments are needed to correct it. The green transition is often analyzed through the lens of technology adoption and capital reallocation, but its political economy turns on workers and jobs. Chapter 1 asks whether production subsidies alone are sufficient to implement the green transition, or whether worker-side support is also needed. I develop a two-sector Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model in which green workers invest in sector-specific human capital before matching with firms. Since training is sunk at the time of wage bargaining, workers capture... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4j18n67p Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Adhikari, Shisham https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gh866pv X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) have enabled cutting-edge research across disciplines such as structural biology, ultrafast chemistry, condensed matter, plasma materials science, and nuclear physics. Cavity-based XFELs (CBXFELs) represent the next generation of these systems, offering significant performance improvements but requiring extreme precision in beam positioning. This imposes stringent demands on diagnostic platforms in terms of spatial and temporal resolution. Diamond-based quadrant sensors have emerged as a promising solution for high bandwidth positional beam sensing. However, fully leveraging these capabilities requires a precise and coherent method for timing the measurement of each element in the quadrant array. This thesis outlines the design of an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) frontend for digitization of the outputs of a diamond quadrant sensor. Fabricated in TSMC 65 nm CMOS, it incorporates an on-chip delay-locked loop (DLL) to generate... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gh866pv Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 McHale, Sean Patrick https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4923b9bm In this Ph.D. thesis, we delve into various aspects of Quantum Computing and Quantum Field Theory. In the first part, we study one of the most resource-intensive components of a fault-tolerant quantum computer (FTQC): the creation of a logical magic state. We propose a novel low-overhead logical magic state preparation (MSP) protocol via code-switching between color codes and provide the first experimental demonstration of such technique for color codes using a trapped-ion quantum processor. We also introduce the first scalable method for simulating a large class of logical MSP protocols under the influence of circuit-level Pauli noise on a classical computer. Finally, we also develop a noise learning technique for adapting in real-time prior estimates of noise channels associated with quantum gates on a quantum computer, to avoid the repetitive use of costly off-line characterization techniques. In the second part, we analyze Quantum Field Theories (QFTs) through... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4923b9bm Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Daguerre, Lucas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48s174rw Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a debilitating condition characterized by a gradual decline in kidney function, resulting in decreased glomerular filtration, increased permeability of the filtration barrier, and deficits in secondary renal functions such as vitamin D activation and erythropoietin production. This functional decline leads to secondary complications, including the accumulation of uremic metabolites, chronic acidosis, systemic inflammation, vitamin D deficiency, and low hematocrit. Through these mechanisms, CKD exerts profound systemic effects on extrarenal tissues, particularly within the musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems. This dissertation explores the specific effects of CKD on tendon, bone, skeletal muscle, and cardiac muscle, and evaluates the efficacy of uphill treadmill exercise as a therapeutic intervention using an adenine-diet-induced CKD rat model. We report the first experimental evidence of tendon dysfunction in CKD, providing a novel platform... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48s174rw Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hayden, Christopher Michael Thomas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48j0n83s In American public schools, Amritdhari youth, students who wear turbans and other Sikh religious markers, face a paradox: they are among the most visible students, yet among the least represented in curriculum, policy, and equity conversations intended to protect them. This phenomenological qualitative study examines how Amritdhari Sikh high school students in California's Central Valley experience belonging, identity affirmation, and marginalization in public schools, and how they draw on cultural and spiritual resources to navigate these environments.Eight Fresno County high school students participated in semi-structured interviews. Drawing on Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005), Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (Gay, 2000), and Spiritual Epistemology (Dillard, 2006; hooks, 1994), this study used RADaR methodology (Watkins, 2017) to analyze data addressing three qualitative research questions.Findings reveal that participants experienced conditional belonging alongside the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48j0n83s Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sahota, Mandeep Kaur https://escholarship.org/uc/item/45h4t6mj This dissertation studies interacting electron models for quantum matter from two perspectives with different approaches respectively. The first part of this text focuses on rigorously proving Lieb-Robinson bounds for continuous space integer quantum Hall systems perturbed by short range two-body interactions. A Lieb-Robinson bound is an operator norm inequality that implies a finite rate of information propagation in a quantum system, a low energy analogue to the relativistic limit given by the speed of light. Many results of this nature have been obtained for lattice systems, but over the last several years, progress has been made in identifying classes of continuous space models that admit propagation estimates. In this thesis, we prove Lieb-Robinson bounds for two-dimensional continuum fermions in a constant, perpendicular magnetic field using the strategy of Gebert et al. \cite{gebert:2020}, and use this result to prove strong continuity of the Heisenberg dynamics in the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/45h4t6mj Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hingorani, Rahul https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42h186sb Transition metal micronutrients, including iron, copper, and zinc, are essential regulators of metabolic and signaling processes in mammalian systems. While intracellular metal biology has been extensively studied, comparatively little is understood about how extracellular metal pools are regulated and how their dysregulation contributes to disease. This dissertation investigates the speciation, trafficking, and functional consequences of extracellular metal redistribution in metabolic and hepatic disease contexts. First, this work characterizes extracellular metal pools and highlights the importance of metal speciation, rather than total metal concentration, in determining biological activity. Using biochemical, analytical, and in vivo approaches, it demonstrates that high glucose intake induces hepatic iron overload independent of dietary iron excess, revealing a mechanistic link between carbohydrate metabolism and systemic iron redistribution. This iron accumulation contributes... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42h186sb Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Caceres, Amanda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42f3v0vz In pistachio orchards, the choice of pruning style and cover crop application often differ based on needs of the field and the growing region. However, the effect of these orchard management selections on resulting solar radiation in the canopy and the annual yield is rarely researched. This study investigated the application of two pruning styles and a cover crop or bare soil drive row treatment in a mature pistachio research orchard near Parlier, California in 2022 and 2023. Solar radiation measurements of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and shortwave radiation in the treatment blocks were collected to estimate near-infrared radiation (NIR) throughout the orchard. The shortwave radiation components were measured above the orchard canopy, below the canopy base, and reflected from the orchard floor in order to examine how transmitted and reflected radiation changed given the pruning and drive row treatments. To equip the orchard with numerous solar radiation sensors,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42f3v0vz Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Clay, Jenae Marie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/41w1h1sj This dissertation is an exploration of the ways in which the emergent medium of actual playdraws from and is partially inspired by the nineteenth-century literary movement known as Romanticism. Actual play records player-performers actually playing a table-top roleplaying game (TTRPG), a recording that is either streamed live during the moment of play or distributed after the fact to its audience. These series position their player-performers in a role that is simultaneously heroic (the characters they play are heroes) and artistic (the performers themselves see and describe themselves as legitimate storytellers). This positionality is reminiscent of the ways in which Romantic writers like William Wordsworth and Lord George Gordon Byron helped to construct the figure of the poet-as-hero. Furthermore, actual play relies on a cultivation of intimacy with its fans that draws from Byronic models of celebrity. This dissertation uses these parallels between the Romantic period and actual... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/41w1h1sj Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Davila Corujo, Abraham Luis https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40r9h7s4 Sulfonimidamides (SIAs) are non-naturally occurring aza-substituted analogues of the sulfonamide functional group. As a result of their unique properties, in combination with their high metabolic and chemical stability, the introduction of the SIA functional group into biologically active compounds has become an increasingly attractive target for medicinal chemists. More specifically, cyclic SIAs have emerged as intriguing motifs for drug design. Despite their promising medicinal potential, cyclic SIAs remain underexplored due to the limited number of methods for their construction and the difficulties associated with controlling the configuration at the stereogenic sulfur center. Chapter 1 describes the general properties of SIAs and an account of the important developments leading from their initial discovery to more recent innovations. Chapter 2 describes two different approaches for the enantioselective desymmetrization of SIAs. SIAs are uniquely suited for desymmetrization... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40r9h7s4 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Toth-Williams, Garrett Logan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40m8w1gb In the mid-hills of Nepal, improved farmyard manure (FYM) practices are being promoted to support crop productivity, soil health and climate resilience. However, little is known about farmer adoption, particularly with respect to recent socioeconomic changes including increasing out-migration and labor shortages. This mixed-methods study integrated survey data (n=413 and n=82) and semi-structured farmer interviews (n=21) to (i) assess current FYM management strategies and adoption of best FYM practices, (ii) analyze farmer perspectives to identify barriers and opportunities for achievement of best practices, and (iii) interpret the results within a sustainable livelihoods framework to identify opportunities for targeted farmer support. Key trends were identified across four major FYM processes: 1) FYM availability is limited by reductions in large livestock, 2) farmers prioritize livestock shed improvements to increase efficiencies but this also presents some trade-offs, 3) there... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40m8w1gb Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lyon, Heather https://escholarship.org/uc/item/408372kv After decades of investigation into the genetics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a consensus in the field persists that ASD likelihood is too heterogenous to be diagnosed by a single set of genetic variants. A growing catalogue of environmental exposures have been found to associate with ASD likelihood, though the biological mechanisms driving potential interactions between these exposures and ASD remain elusive. This dissertation investigates epigenetics, specifically DNA methylation, as a potential biological mediator between environmental exposures linked to ASD, with the aim of identifying epigenetic signatures of these prenatal exposures and examining their overlap with and relevance to ASD neurodevelopment. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the known genetic and epigenetic etiologies of ASD, discussing previously discovered epigenetic markers linked to ASD development to frame expected findings in later chapters. Chapter 2 reports whole genome bisulfite sequencing of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/408372kv Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Williams, Logan Allan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3x43k9t5 Soft matter assemblies, such as lipid bilayer membranes, liquid crystalline multilamellar phases, and cytoskeletal protein networks, are stabilized by collective interactions near the kBT scale, rendering them sensitive to environmental perturbations. This dissertation provides experimental evidence that structural reorganization of such assemblies is not governed by the strength of the environmental perturbation but by the physical mechanism of the stressor. Across two broad categories of environmental stressors, chemical and physical, three geometrically distinct model systems are investigated to assess this claim and capture evidence.In the first system, this dissertation reviews the theoretical framework connecting molecular packing geometry to membrane morphology before developing the pH-responsive bolaamphiphile GC18:1 as an experimental case study. When GC18:1 is inserted into DOPC giant unilamellar vesicles, it converts a chemically inert host membrane into a pH-responsive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3x43k9t5 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vyas, Archan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wt494nh Edwardsiella piscicida, one of the etiologic agents of piscine edwardsiellosis, is an emerging pathogen in global aquaculture that has been associated with disease outbreaks and significant losses among many economically important food and sport fish species in the United States, such as ictalurid catfish (Ictalurus spp.), largemouth bass (Micropterus nigricans), and rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss). With increasing concern for antimicrobial resistance, this presents an urgent industry-wide need for effective disease management strategies, such as vaccines. Not only does E. piscicida pose a threat to the health of wild and captive fish populations, but its emergence among popular food and recreational fish species carries an unknown public health risk. Additionally, as a disease primarily of warm-water conditions, with outbreaks in temperate and cold-water species occurring primarily with temperatures ˃20°C, changing climate patterns and rising global water temperatures could... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wt494nh Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jacobsen, Kim Li https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wg154tm Little is known about effects of temperature (T) on whole-plant hydraulic conductance (Kplant) in intact plants, due to the conflating influence of changes in water potential that often occur when temperature is changed, because of shifts in evaporative demand and/or stomatal conductance. This study aimed to isolate the effect of temperature on Kplant from that of water potential in intact plants. Whole plant transpiration was measured by mass loss, water potential was measured in transpiring leaves, and source water potential was estimated using plants that had been bagged for at least 24 hours to prevent transpiration. Kplant was then calculated from these measurements using Darcy's Law. We measured Kplant under the following conditions: (Condition 1) 20°C at ~40% RH (VPD = 1.4 kPa); (Condition 2) 30°C at ~75% RH (VPD = 1.06 kPa); (Condition 3) 30°C at 40-50% RH (VPD = 2.33 kPa). Conditions 1 and 2 were designed to vary temperature while minimizing changes in water potential.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wg154tm Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rackson, Theresa Marie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wf0r6jh Agricultural nitrogen and irrigation management in California are salient, controversial, and evolving policy priorities in a state grappling with water quantity and quality challenges. This research uses geospatial data, survey data, and interviews to analyze the impact of university extension and other information sources on learning and adoption of nitrogen and irrigation management practices among California farmers. The first chapter demonstrates the importance of farmer attention to soils in supporting efficient management practice use while noting that advisors should not assume that farmers share their definitions of agronomic and biophysical concepts. The second chapter analyzes the execution and impact of an extension educational intervention. Based on participant self-reports and staff interviews, the program succeeded in furthering learning and plans to adopt best management practices despite being limited in certain ways by farmer institutional trust. The third chapter... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wf0r6jh Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zufall, Elise J. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3w009649 Governments have long recognized air pollution as a negative externality with significant economic and health costs. Fine particulate matter has been linked to various negative health outcomes (cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, premature death). More recently, researchers have found that pollution also impairs cognition and mental well-being. These consequences are harder to observe and are usually absent from standard cost-benefit analyses. This dissertation argues that as a result, the true social costs of air pollution are likely underestimated. This dissertation examines different ways in which air pollution can lead to cognitive decline. I study the effect of pollution exposure on fatal traffic crashes, crash frequency and severity, and mental health. The main challenge to estimate causal effects of air quality is that pollution exposure is not randomly assigned. I address this using instrumental variable strategies, exploiting exogenous variation in wind direction... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3w009649 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Firsova, Irina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rc7612r Monte Carlo methods have been strong tools in numerous fields. Their simple formulation is easy to implement to many problems and can be adapted from the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method into any number of related techniques, including the quantum realm. This dissertation first presents three such cases in condensed matter physics. We begin by introducing electron-phonon interactions and building up the phonon models relevant to us in Chapter 2, then covering the groundwork for classical Monte Carlo methods along with how to adapt them for quantum systems in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 utilizes the MCMC formulation to study how “synthetic dimensions” within a classical model can be modeled and simulated. From there, Chapter 5 brings us into quantum systems in order to study the interplay present within a combined Holstein and Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. Chapter 6 goes through the optical Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model on a triangular lattice to examine the effects of geometric... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rc7612r Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Casebolt, Maxwell Bernard https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q35v7qb This dissertation comprises three essays that examine, on the one hand, how local governments respond to additional resources from the central government and, on the other hand, whether an innovative pedagogical methodology improves student outcomes. The three essays focus on the context of Paraguay, where municipal fiscal capacity remains limited and municipal budgets are highly dependent on central government transfers. At the same time, educational challenges persist in this context, making the evaluation of pedagogical innovations particularly relevant. The first chapter studies the effects of intergovernmental transfers on local public finance outcomes. In Paraguay, municipalities receive transfers that come mainly from the exploitation of two binational hydroelectric dams. These transfers are partially earmarked for investment purposes. To estimate the causal effects of these hydroelectric dam revenues, I leverage a legally predefined allocation formula used to distribute... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q35v7qb Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Meza Arrua, Sara Maria Ines https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q23x6pm Existing permissioned blockchain systems fail to simultaneously satisfy the essential properties required for real-world deployment: security against long-range attacks, scalable smart contract execution without prior knowledge of read/write sets, availability under network partitions, high system-level performance, and ease of use as a research testbed.This dissertation addresses these gaps by designing, implementing, and validating a unified, deployable permissioned blockchain fabric composed of four interdependent innovations. First, Power-of-Collaboration (PoC) secures any existing PoS/BFT system against long-range attacks. PoC makes ledger rewriting computationally expensive (like PoW) but replaces competitive mining with collaborative mining, eliminating resource waste. Second, Thunderbolt scales smart contract execution without requiring prior read/write knowledge. It integrates Execute-Order-Validate for single-shard transactions with Order-Execute for cross-shard transactions... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q23x6pm Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 chen, junchao