http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/uci_etd/rss Recent eScholarship items from UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:12:40 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0992n5tv Enhancer-driven adeno-associated viral (AAV) reporters provide compact tools for targeting genetically defined neuronal populations, but their behavior in aging and Alzheimer's disease model contexts remains uncertain. This thesis evaluated four enhancer-AAV reporter datasets in young wild-type, aged wild-type, and 5xFAD mice: BiCHATe27 for cholinergic neurons, BiPVe3 for PV basket cells, BiPVe4 for PV chandelier cells, and BiSSTe4 for SST Martinotti cells. Cleared brain tissue was imaged by light-sheet microscopy and analyzed within paper-matched regions of interest. Reporter-marker specificity, sensitivity, reporter intensity, and raw cell-count burden were interpreted as descriptive pilot readouts. Corrected BiCHATe27 ChAT analysis, driven by marker-appropriate image-analysis changes rather than by a new imaging modality, restored young wild-type targeting estimates close to the AAV toolbox reference and suggested broadly stable targeting with reduced signal burden in... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0992n5tv Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Haoqi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7fs4m706 Engineered stone (ES) is a composite material consisting of crystalline silica, pigment, and binding resins, and has become one of the most common materials used in kitchen and bathroom countertops, alongside natural stones such as marble and granite. The rise in popularity of ES in countertops is due to its low maintenance and customizable design; however, fabricating ES countertops generates respirable particles that pose an occupational inhalation hazard to workers. ES particle exposure has been linked to silicosis, a progressive and irreversible fibrotic lung disease resulting from inhalation of crystalline silica. When silica reaches the alveoli, macrophages attempt to clear the particles through phagocytosis while initiating inflammatory responses. Persistent inflammation and cellular injury can promote fibroblasts activation and collagen production, contributing to lung fibrosis. Few studies examine how silica content in ES influences the development of silicosis. This... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7fs4m706 Wed, 7 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Choy, Elizabeth Hok Yee https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4st750xk This thesis examines two distinct three-mode degeneracy problems. First, a third-order exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD3) is synthesized in a linear three-resonator RLC circuit. Kirchhoff’s laws yield a six-state model and two physical coupling branches. An op- amp negative-impedance converter (NIC) is then substituted for the ideal negative resistance. Finite gain, bandwidth, output resistance, loading, and saturation cause the simulated circuit to depart from the designed linear EPD3 condition. In the transient simulation, the circuit develops a finite-amplitude oscillation with a dominant spectral peak near 1.178 MHz rather than at the designed frequency of 1.45 MHz. Second, an independent normalized nonlinear coupled-mode-theory model with saturable gain is analyzed. Eliminating the modal amplitudes and saturated gain gives a real- fifth order steady-state frequency equation. A numerical design produces a fivefold real root, defined here as an SS-EPD5. Active-mode frequency... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4st750xk Wed, 7 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 yan, weijian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/52f481m1 One of the most common approaches to addressing the pervasive housing affordability crisis throughout the U.S. has been to change laws and land use regulations in order to induce increased housing production. Increased production is meant to induce the “filtering” process whereby existing housing units “filter down” to lower income households over time, becoming Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH). Some remain skeptical that this process delivers beneficial outcomes to low-income and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) households in particular. Using a longitudinal panel of housing units from the American Housing Survey (AHS) from 2015 to 2023 along with two measures of affordability, I analyze how affordability amongst market-rate housing units in the U.S. shifts over time and how geographic, housing supply, housing cost trends, and household characteristics relate to filtering dynamics in the U.S. I find that filtering slows amongst units 50 years and older,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/52f481m1 Mon, 5 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cabello, Maxwell https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4ck1b60t Biophysical properties of the fibrous extracellular matrix (ECM) are critical regulators of cell behavior. Bulk measurements at single time points have often been used to investigate matrix stiffness as an instructive cue. However, our lab has demonstrated that local pericellular stiffness can be heterogeneous, anisotropic, and vary greatly from the measured bulk properties. Thus, we developed a multi-axis optical tweezers-based active microrheology (AMR) system which is capable of measuring ECM properties on a length scale relevant to cells.The fibrillar architecture of the native ECMs is well known to give rise to nonlinear mechanical properties that govern force transmission and long-range cell-cell communication. Despite this, direct comparisons of pericellular stiffening in fibrous and amorphous hydrogels remain limited. In this thesis work, I used multi-axis AMR to investigate how ECM architecture regulates the emergence of long-range stiffening and stiffness anisotropy.In... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4ck1b60t Thu, 1 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lanterman, Michelle https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dd0m4tp Issues of projectibility are central to the philosophy of induction. The basic problem goes like this. Inductive learning involves projecting regularities in past experience onto unobserved cases. But any body of experience can be described as exhibiting any number of regularities, and depending on which of these we project, induction will yield different beliefs and predictions. A principled procedure for identifying regularities that provide good guidance for belief and prediction—i.e., projectible ones—has proven elusive. Nevertheless, the impressive track record of human and animal learning suggests that nature has found ways to deliver us assumptions of projectibility that track stable, practically relevant regularities in many contexts. This dissertation uses computational models to show how simple natural adaptive processes might accomplish this critical task. Specifically, the goal is to explain how such assumptions might emerge from trial-and-error learning in kinds of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dd0m4tp Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Torsell, Christian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cq036f9 Cell-cell communication (CCC) is essential for coordinating important developmental processes, including tissue patterning. Although cells can communicate through well-characterized mechanisms such as endocrine, synaptic, juxtacrine, and paracrine signaling, these are not the only signaling modalities that exist in nature. Cells can also communicate via specialized filopodia, allowing for direct targeting. There are several subclasses of signaling filopodia, including airinemes, which are the focus of this dissertation. Airinemes are a unique class of specialized filopodia that mediate signaling during zebrafish pigment pattern development through the coordinated activities of xanthoblasts, macrophages, and melanophores. Airinemes originate as surface blebs (airineme blebs) on xanthoblasts that are recognized and extracted by migrating macrophages, which transport airineme vesicles and deposit them onto target melanophores. Despite previous work establishing the importance of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cq036f9 Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bowman, Raquel Lynn https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g63f945 Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) offer exceptional inference accuracy but remain severely restricted by high resource and power requirements. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) mitigates these memory bottlenecks by compressing weights to sub-4-bit regimes; however, existing Hadamard rotation-based methods that enable nearly lossless 4-bit weight and activation quantization (W4A4) does not push weight quantization below INT4, thereby limiting the memory size reduction potential of Hadamard transform. Furthermore, many GPU-based mixed-precision approaches lack native hardware support for integer to floating point multiplication and custom low-bit multiplication kernels. This requires runtime upcasting of integer weights and fails to leverage the resource saving potentials of low-bit representations during computation, leaving custom FPGA accelerators as the most efficient platform for low-bit mixed precision execution. To address these problems, this paper presents a projection-wise... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g63f945 Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tang, Zhenyu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93f032dv This work develops a targeted liquid–liquid extraction method for recovering rare earth elements (REEs) by combining the macrocyclic chelator Macropa with conventional organophosphorus extractants. A systematic baseline study was conducted to characterize the extraction and stripping behavior of four REEs- Neodymium (Nd), Samarium (Sm), Dysprosium (Dy), and Yttrium (Y) across three pH (2, 5, and 7) at a concentration of 1 ppm to reflect the low concentration found in Berkeley pit water, an acid mine drainage using four industrially available organic extractants (Cyanex 302, Cyanex 923, Cyanex 272, and D2EPHA), Stripping efficiency was optimized by comparing hydrochloric, nitric, and sulfuric acids, with sulfuric acid identified as the most effective stripping agent. Key parameters such as ligand concentration, mixing time, phase ratios, and acid conditions are optimized using synthetic solutions to achieve the selectivity trend for light and heavy REEs. This optimized... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93f032dv Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sawant, Maitreyi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7fv586nr As hydrogen becomes an important alternative fuel to fossil fuels, Proton Exchange Membrane Water Electrolysis (PEMWE) is a promising technology to produce hydrogen from water using sustainable energy resources. PEMWE cells operate with high efficiency, long lifetimes, and at a large range of current density. However, the final cost of hydrogen is expensive and economically unviable compared to hydrogen produced from fossil fuels. To reduce production costs, it is advantageous to run PEMWE at high current densities, which requires effective flow field design. In PEMWE, the parallel flow field is widely used due to its simplicity and low pressure drop; nevertheless, it struggles with mass transport and non-uniformity in current density and temperature distributions. This study aims to improve the mass transport performance of parallel flow fields while maintaining their advantage in pressure drop. In this master’s thesis, a full-scale, three-dimensional, two phases model was developed... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7fv586nr Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Phan, Thomas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4cq3t1nj Language–vision understanding has driven the development of advanced perception systems, most notably the emerging paradigm of Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT). By leveraging natural-language queries, RMOT systems can selectively track objects that satisfy a given semantic description, guided through Transformer-based spatial–temporal reasoning modules. End-to-End (E2E) RMOT models further unify feature extraction, temporal memory, and spatial reasoning within a Transformer backbone, enabling long-range spatial–temporal modeling over fused textual–visual representations. Despite these advances, the reliability and robustness of RMOT remain underexplored. In this paper, we examine the security implications of RMOT systems from a design-logic perspective, identifying adversarial vulnerabilities that compromise both the linguistic-visual referring and trackobject matching components. Additionally, we uncover a novel vulnerability in advanced RMOT models employing FIFO-based... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4cq3t1nj Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Liu, Haoyu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48j6v00p Vision contributes to the control of walking, balance regulation, orientation, and anticipatory control, which are important for spatial navigation. How the amount of visual information available, as distinct from its accuracy, shapes balance control during walking remains poorly understood. This study used virtual reality to determine how graded visual occlusion, imposed alongside visual and physical gait speed perturbations, affects gait and balance control during treadmill walking. Eight healthy adults (Age 20.6 ± 2.8 years) completed nine 5-minute walking trials on a split-belt treadmill in a custom virtual environment using a 3×3 design consisting of three walking conditions crossed with three levels of visual occlusion. During baseline walking, participants walked at 1.0 m/s with the optical flow matched to the treadmill speed. During optical flow trials, participants continued to walk at 1.0 m/s while we sinusoidally varied the relative translation speed of the visual environment... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48j6v00p Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Thorne, Michael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3tj368vh Glycans are essential transmitters of biological information. However, their complex and dynamic structures remain difficult to characterize, posing a major barrier to fully understanding their biological functions. Here, we demonstrate that hydrogen bonding auxiliaries positioned adjacent to the boron site of turn-on fluorogenic phenylboronic acid reporters serve as key modulators of sensitivity to mammalian sugars, providing a new design principle analogous to the hydrogen bonding networks found in lectin binding pockets. We show that these auxiliaries tune sensitivity both globally and for individual mammalian sugars and reveal a striking differential turn-on response between the anomeric forms of monosaccharides. The versatility of these selective and reversible molecular reporters is demonstrated through in-gel glycoprotein imaging, flow cytometry, and cell-surface visualization, establishing them as a generalizable chemical platform for interrogating mammalian glycans. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3tj368vh Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Yuwen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gp1g19m Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of severe vision loss in the elderly and one of the major contributors to this disease is the structural and functional breakdown of the Bruch’s membrane, and because of this, retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells degenerate shortly after. The Bruch’s membrane is viscoelastic in nature and RPE cells are sensitive to those mechanical cues, therefore scaffolds that replicate this behavior may better support RPE health than purely elastic counterparts. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) offers an adjustable, biologically inert platform for this need, however most methods for implementing viscoelasticity into PEG hydrogels rely on complex reactions. This thesis presents a viscoelastic PEG hydrogel made by combining PEG-propionaldehyde and PEG-amine (5 kDa each), which then crosslinks through dynamic imine bonds while also going through physical chain entanglement during gelation. Elastic PEG diacrylate (PEGDA) hydrogels served as controls.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gp1g19m Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nguyen, Christopher https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0nb9829x Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) is an ultrashort-chain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) that is small in molecular size, with strong acidity, high water solubility, and low hydrophobicity. These properties contribute to high environmental mobility and substantial analytical challenges. Other than direct environmental release, TFA also serves as the degradation endpoint for various anthropogenic precursors, such as fluorinated refrigerants, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and industrial chemicals. Conventional reversed-phase chromatography PFAS methods provide insufficient TFA retention because its small size, high polarity, negative charge, and low hydrophobicity limit interaction with C18 phases. This poor retention can cause early elution with matrix constituents and greater sensitivity to background contamination from various laboratory materials such as storage tubing and instrumentation used during dilution. Hydrophilic column chemistries, such as hydrophilic interaction... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0nb9829x Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 HSU, HUI-CHUNG https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cc9f1fh Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is a leading cause of death and long-term neurodevelopmental disability in neonates globally. Independent of etiology, high seizure burden is a significant risk factor for mortality in neonates. While prior EEG studies have shown that measures such as amplitude, power, entropy, and long-range temporal correlations can differentiate HIE severity grade, it is unknown whether these same measures can differentiate neonates who develop seizures in the first few days of life from those who do not. Understanding seizure risk in this population is critical for developing a treatment plan. Therefore, we investigated computational EEG markers of seizures in a retrospective cohort of 96 neonates with HIE who underwent therapeutic hypothermia (TH) at Children's Hospital of Orange County. Continuous scalp EEG was recorded throughout the cooling and rewarming period, and six categories of EEG metrics were computed across the 6-90 hour postnatal window:... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cc9f1fh Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 MacDonald, Alicia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/04g7r04b When do two theorems mean the same thing? Obviously the answer depends on how one understands meaning. In this dissertation, we approach meaning as a topic analysable into more theoretically refined concepts which serve as targets for scientific models. This "model-based" approach, which emphasises the informative role of models in enabling surrogative reasoning, is put forth in Chapter 1 and informs our assessment of accounts in the subsequent two chapters. In Chapter 2, we propose the folkloric account of meaning in mathematics, whereby the content of a mathematical statement is the class of logical models that make it true, with respect to a background class of models chosen to capture a particular mathematical setting of interest. In Chapter 3, we critique Soames' structured proposition account arguing with the use of examples that it fails to identify the differences which are most salient in mathematics. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/04g7r04b Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 May, Ainsley https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f22z5r5 This dissertation examines how first-generation Latina doctoral students use Instagram to navigate doctoral education and build supportive communities in response to persistent institutional barriers. Previous research has documented the challenges Latinas face in doctoral programs, including financial barriers, limited access to mentoring, unclear program expectations, and a lack of cultural representation. While institutional agents can provide important sources of guidance, their support is not always sufficient to help students navigate the hidden curriculum of doctoral education. Consequently, many Latinas turn to digital spaces to access information, develop relationships, and exchange resources that support their educational persistence. This dissertation investigates Instagram as a virtual counterspace through three related questions: (1) How do first-generation Latina doctoral students use Instagram to navigate the hidden curriculum of doctoral education? (2) How does... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f22z5r5 Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cabrera, Jennifer https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90k7r4ww Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most prevalent form of dementia and a leading cause of death. Disease hallmarks include chronic neuroinflammation and impaired clearance of toxic protein aggregates. We use exogenous CD200 to polarize microglia towards a state that measurably dampens inflammation and enhances uptake of amyloid-beta fibrils (fAβ42). Electron microscopy revealed the presence of single membrane vesicles in CD200-treated microglia associated with elevated LC3 expression. Together these data suggest CD200 enhances LC3-associated endocytosis (LANDO) which mediates cell surveillance and enables LC3-associated phagocytosis of fAβ42. Finally, we assess the effects of CD200 treatment on mitochondrial health. CD200 treatment protected microglia from Aβ-induced mitochondrial damage despite increased levels of free NADH/NADPH. Together, our data suggests CD200 treatment dampens inflammation, enhances LANDO-mediated cell surveillance and LAP-mediated clearance of Aβ, and protects... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90k7r4ww Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tran-Dao, Thuy-Khanh https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vh472z3 Advances in distributed electric propulsion (DEP) have enabled novel propulsor architectures and operating capabilities for short takeoff and landing (STOL) and vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft. The noise produced by these architectures is strongly dependent on propulsor design and operating state, while their expanded operating capabilities enable unconventional flight profiles within relatively small ground footprints. Together, these characteristics cause community noise to depend on both propulsor source noise and the aircraft operating states encountered throughout the flight profile. The potential operation of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) aircraft near populated areas further motivates an integrated approach to propulsor design, aircraft performance, and source- and community-noise assessment. The objective of this thesis is to develop a methodology for designing and evaluating propulsors and DEP architectures and to examine how propulsor geometry, arrangement,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vh472z3 Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yeung, Seraphin Ho-Juin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/525919v3 Biological populations are heterogeneous, spatially structured, and responsive to changing environments. These features are especially important in tumors, where treatment alters the relative fitness of susceptible and resistant cells, and in bacterial biofilms, where environmental flow affects cells differently according to their phenotype and local surroundings. This dissertation develops deterministic and spatial stochastic models to investigate how growth, evolution, and environmental change shape population dynamics and control. The first part of the dissertation considers treatment scheduling for melanoma containing treatment-susceptible and treatment-addicted resistant cells. A bilinear ordinary differential equation model is formulated in which treatment suppresses susceptible cells but promotes resistant cells, while treatment withdrawal reverses these effects. An optimal control problem balances cumulative and terminal tumor burden against treatment cost. Pontryagin’s... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/525919v3 Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zamora, Anthony https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3m238124 Southern California’s rapid urbanization and persistent housing constraints have intensified the spatial mismatch between residential locations and employment centers, contributing to long-distance commuting, congestion, and reduced quality of life for many workers. Employment opportunities remain concentrated in high-cost coastal and central job hubs, while housing affordability pressures continue to displace households toward inland and peripheral regions. These dynamics have produced some of the longest and most burdensome commute patterns in the United States, with significant implications for accessibility, equity, environmental sustainability, and workforce stability. This dissertation examines the extent of the jobs–housing imbalance in Southern California and evaluates how targeted housing and land-use interventions may influence commuting burdens and regional employment accessibility.This research is organized into three empirical studies that collectively develop an... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3m238124 Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gilbert, Elaine Nicole https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2114n800 Generative models with iterative methodologies are used to probe high-dimensional sub- spaces of the Minimal Super Symmetric Model (MSSM) in a variety of contexts. First, a dimensional reduction framework is used to sample theory points from a low-dimensional latent space and then de-code them back into theory parameters. Iterative density estimation sampling is used here to maximize efficiency as well as to filter by additional constraints post facto without further training. Next, an iterative usage of generative flows is used to produce models which can sample theory points under multiple simultaneous, without loss of search resolution. An initial flow is trained on a single constraint, after which a new dataset generated from that flow is used to create training data for the learning of two simultaneous constraints. This process is repeated up to seven simultaneous constraints, with high efficiency. Finally, we explore a new methodology which approximates an inverse mapping... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2114n800 Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Baretz, Jason Benjamin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hs38293 Educational technologies often overlook the cultural values, everyday practices, and lived experiences of historically minoritized communities, including Latine families. As a result, they may fail to recognize the cultural strengths families bring to learning or create meaningful opportunities for caregiver-child engagement. This dissertation examines how educational technology designed using culturally sustaining principles can support family learning by centering the perspectives and experiences of Latine caregivers and children.Across three interconnected qualitative studies, the dissertation examines educational technology through the lenses of design, interaction, and interpretation. Study 1 investigates how Latina mothers envision educational technologies that reflect their cultural values, family practices, and priorities for family learning. Study 2 examines caregiver-child co-use of Bizumia: World of Play, a STEM-based educational application designed using culturally... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hs38293 Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Salazar, Julie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63b5j7gr Language brokering, the informal translation and interpretation that many heritage bilinguals perform for their families and communities, offers a rich context for understanding how early life experience shapes language processing. Past research has linked brokering to more integrated conceptual representations across bilinguals' two languages and cognitive flexibility, but little is known about how variability in brokering experiences relate to individual language use patterns. This dissertation examines how language brokering shapes bilingual language processing and regulation and proposes brokering as an experience that refines cross-language integration and the cognitive mechanisms that support it.Study 1 tested this across Spanish-English and Mandarin-English heritage bilinguals in California and Spanish-English sequential bilinguals in Mexico. Brokering was unrelated to picture naming, while childhood, not adulthood, brokering selectively predicted semantic interference... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63b5j7gr Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mendoza, Guadalupe Aileen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/26x882bf Bilingual speakers constantly regulate the activation of their two languages, even when only one language is being used. Research on bilingual language regulation suggests that the characteristics of bilinguals’ interactional contexts shape how they engage domain-general cognitive mechanisms that support language regulation. Language, however, does not operate in an emotional void. Emotions can influence cognitive processes implicated in language regulation, while emotional processing itself may vary across a bilingual’s two languages and as a function of their language experiences. In this dissertation, we examine how emotional processing influences bilingual language regulation, as well as how bilingual language experiences may, in turn, shape emotional processing. The first study compared three groups of bilingual speakers with distinct language experiences and interactional contexts: Spanish-English late bilinguals in Mexico and two groups of heritage speakers (Spanish... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/26x882bf Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vargas Fuentes, Nicole Annette https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23t9f1gx Heritage bilingualism is the most common form of bilingualism, yet it remains the most understudied. The existing literature on heritage languages has mainly employed offline measures, but these measures might not accurately reflect heritage language knowledge. This dissertation employs online methods to examine Spanish heritage speaker’s knowledge of complex structures that are traditionally complex (i.e., clitic pronouns) or complex innovations (i.e., the use of –e as a gender-inclusive morpheme). Study 1 examined gender and number agreement in clitic pronouns by means of an acceptability judgment task with EEG recording. At the group level, both the behavioral and electrophysiological data showed heritage speakers processed gender and number together. Such a finding supports the representational economy claim (Scontras et al., 2018), in which heritage speakers shrink their feature inventory and prune their structure so that it includes fewer nodes. The bundling of number and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23t9f1gx Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Roman Irizarry, Alexandra https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kr6352v Modern chemical biology seeks genetic polymers with enhanced pharmacological and physicochemical properties for applications in therapeutics, diagnostics, and biotechnology. Reprogramming DNA polymerases offers a controlled, scalable, and surprisingly versatile method of synthesis, paving the way for the selection of functional polymers. However, the precision that makes DNA polymerases finely tuned, fast, and faithful molecular machines also limits their ability to accept noncognate substrates. This thesis examines the adaptability of hyperthermophilic archaeal B-family DNA polymerases toward polymers with unique benefits and challenges: phosphonomethylthreosyl nucleic acid (pTNA), threose nucleic acid (TNA), and RNA.pTNA is an orthogonal polymer intended to remain insulated from cellular DNA and RNA, raising fundamental questions about how it can be copied from a DNA template. Crystallographic analysis showed that an engineered DNA polymerase can organize canonical Watson-Crick... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kr6352v Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hajjar, Mohammad https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5rq738fm Artificial intelligence is transforming healthcare from episodic assessment into continuous and personalized monitoring. In practice, a monitoring system rarely ends at the sensor: physiological measurements, contextual observations, model updates, or learned representations may pass from a wearable device to a phone, an edge gateway, a cloud service, or an institutional platform for storage, collaborative learning, clinical interpretation, and model reuse. These flows make intelligent monitoring scalable and adaptive, but they also expand the privacy surface beyond conventional identifiers. This dissertation develops a continuous research program around this operational tension: it begins with user-aware data acquisition, adds privacy-preserving adaptive learning, and then progressively examines what sensitive information can remain in the data and artifacts that move through the healthcare AI lifecycle. The first part of the dissertation focuses on adaptive health monitoring.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5rq738fm Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Ziyu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sh317mc Human-in-the-loop (HITL) systems, from smart environments to conversational AI assistants, increasingly couple human preferences, behavior, and feedback into the computational loop. As these systems mediate decisions that affect people, three human-centered properties cannot be separated from performance: whether the system treats people fairly, whether it protects their privacy equitably, and whether it aligns with what individuals and groups actually want. This dissertation develops computational frameworks that build fairness, privacy, and personalization directly into HITL systems, covering cyber-physical systems and large language models (LLMs). The dissertation advances four contributions. First, it formalizes fairness in sequential, human-in-the-loop decision-making. FinA grounds fairness in the psychology of loss aversion, defining and minimizing an "adverse effect" through optimization, while FAIRO recasts the same goal as temporally abstracted sub-goals solved... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sh317mc Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhao, Tianyu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1rf316sm Humans and parrots are, among animals, uniquely able to move in time with a musical beat—a capacity termed beat perception and synchronization (BPS). Both are also advanced vocal learners, which has led to the proposal that BPS emerged as a by-product of the neural machinery for complex vocal learning. This dissertation examines rhythmic auditory-motor entrainment across three experiments, asking both where this capacity comes from and whether perceiving a rhythm itself engages the motor system.The first experiment tested a behavioral prediction of this speech-origin account: if rhythmic synchronization is grounded in the speech system, the vocal system should be at least as good at it as a non-vocal effector. Participants synchronized to isochronous rhythms at varying rates by finger tapping or by tongue clicking, a supralaryngeal vocal effector. Tongue clicking was as consistent as finger tapping and, on average, more closely aligned to the beat, leaving the speech-origin premise... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1rf316sm Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wan, Jie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p91w3r6 Solid-state nanopores provide a versatile platform for controlling ionic transport at the nanoscale and represent promising building blocks for biomimetic iontronic devices. However, while transport through isolated nanopores is relatively well understood, the behavior of small nanopore arrays cannot necessarily be predicted by treating individual pores as independent conductors. Ion concentration polarization (ICP), characterized by the formation of ion-depleted and ion-enriched regions adjacent to ion-selective nanopores, extends beyond the physical boundaries of a pore and can therefore mediate interactions among neighboring pores and surfaces. This dissertation investigates how ICP, nanopore geometry, surface charge, interpore spacing, electrolyte concentration, and neighboring electrostatic boundary conditions collectively govern ionic transport through single nanopores and small nanopore arrays.Ionic transport was investigated experimentally using nanopores fabricated in... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p91w3r6 Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cain, DaVante https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xf4j1pj βγ-crystallins are a diverse family of proteins characterized by a conserved Greek-key fold and found across a wide range of organisms. Although vertebrate βγ-crystallins are best known as structural proteins of the eye lens, members of this family are thought to have evolved from ancestral calcium-binding proteins. The Ciona intestinalis βγ-crystallin (Ciβγ) is particularly informative for understanding the evolution of this protein family because it retains calcium-binding properties while maintaining similar structural features to newer vertebrate lens βγ-crystallins. Understanding how calcium binding influences the structure and dynamics of Ci-βγ therefore provides insight into molecular properties that may have accompanied the evolution of the βγ-crystallin family. This dissertation uses nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to characterize the structural, calcium-binding, and dynamic properties of Ci-βγ. Backbone and side-chain resonance assignments were established... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xf4j1pj Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jimenez, Matthew Derek https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kq5k01x Databases organize, derive, summarize, and expose data through queries, views, logs, caches, and downstream applications. As a result, deleting a value from a database does not necessarily remove what the system makes knowable about that value. For example, an employee's salary may be reconstructed from title and work hours; a user's location may be recovered from posts, and derived statistics. The deleted value of a target cell may remain inferable from other dependent data after the cell has been set to null. Meaningful deletion may therefore require deleting more than just the value of the target cell. The need to define meaningful deletion is reinforced by data regulations, which grant users the right to have their data deleted but do not provide a precise system-level interpretation of deletion. This dissertation studies a strong inference-resilient interpretation of deletion: how can a system prevent re-inference of a deleted value while minimizing additional deletions?To... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kq5k01x Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chakraborty, Vishal https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3n39r3x8 A deployed machine learning system must be affordable to train, must treat demographic groups equitably, and must be able to forget data on request. These demands are studied by separate literatures, evaluated by disjoint metrics, and addressed by methods that share almost no machinery. This dissertation argues that the separation is an artifact of how the problems have been posed. Efficiency, group fairness, and the right to be forgotten are three demands on one object, the training dynamics of a learning system, meaning the gradients a model sees and the parameter updates it retains, and all three can be met by intervening on that object rather than by redesigning architectures. The claim is developed at three control points. At the data, a small synthetic dataset is optimized so that models trained on it follow the same optimization trajectory as models trained on a large one. For graph learning this jointly condenses the node count and the feature dimension, cutting... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3n39r3x8 Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Liu, Yezi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2kw1r5tm IntroductionHearing loss is common and treatable, but many individuals with hearing loss do not receive appropriate care. Spatial accessibility, having enough healthcare providers close enough to populations who need their services, is essential for hearing loss treatment. Ear and hearing care (EHC) healthcare providers (HCPs), including audiologists and hearing instrument specialists (HISs), are unevenly distributed across the United States, but the social, geographic, socioeconomic, and policy factors shaping this distribution remain poorly understood. This dissertation examines how place-based factors influence the spatial accessibility of EHC HCPs in the United States. Methods This dissertation includes three related studies. Chapter 2 was guided by the research question: What factors influence where geographically EHC HCPs choose to live and work among audiologists who relocate during their career? Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 audiologists who had relocated... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2kw1r5tm Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kirjava, Shade Avery https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1mg2f39n Does evidence of peer disagreement defeat a subject’s justification to believe? The literature has pursued this question within an intrapersonal frame: a solitary subject, her evidence, and the coherence of her first-order and higher-order attitudes. Within that frame, the disagreeing peer is a delivery mechanism for higher-order evidence, interchangeable with an altimeter reading or a reason-distorting drug. But disagreement is ordinarily encountered between persons: we learn that another disagrees by comprehending her conflicting assertion, and we respond within a norm-governed practice of asserting, challenging, and objecting. This dissertation investigates the epistemic significance of disagreement within that interpersonal frame. Two questions organize the inquiry, both centered on the hearer’s side of an assertoric exchange. When is comprehending a peer’s conflicting assertion epistemically significant, and why is it significant, when it is? And when does a hearer have warrant... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1mg2f39n Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ming, Russell https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0rs5c44m This Ph.D. dissertation reports on the development of Coriolis vibratory gyroscopes and pedestrian inertial navigation algorithms, toward self-contained localization in environments where satellite signals and pre-installed infrastructure are unavailable. The motivating application is the localization of firefighters during structure fires, where dense smoke, elevated temperature, and no prior knowledge of the building rule out most navigation methods. The rapid drift of a dead-reckoning INS can be curtailed by the Zero-velocity UPdaTe (ZUPT), which estimates the inertial sensor biases during the stance-phase of the gait cycle. The accuracy of ZUPT-aided INS is therefore bounded by two complementary limitations: the noise performance of the yaw-axis gyroscope, which ZUPT cannot correct and sets the ceiling on achievable accuracy, and the reliability of the zero-velocity updates and system integration, which govern how closely that ceiling is met. This dissertation addresses these... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0rs5c44m Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Parrish, Austin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6491n7fm Background: Childhood obesity disproportionately affects children from lower-income households, yet the early developmental pathways linking socioeconomic disadvantage to later weight outcomes remain incompletely understood. Self-regulation — a child's ability to control attention, behavior, and emotion — has been proposed as a potential mechanism, given its sensitivity to socioeconomic stress and its links to energy-balance behaviors. Additionally, adiposity rebound, the second rise in BMI typically occurring between ages 5 and 7, is an established early-life marker of obesity risk whose socioeconomic determinants remain unclear. This dissertation uses data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), a prospective cohort of 1,364 children recruited at birth from 10 US hospitals, to address three interrelated questions about how early socioeconomic conditions and self-regulatory capacities shape weight trajectories across childhood and adolescence.Methods:... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6491n7fm Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ko, Jessie W. Y. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6174b3wj Musical improvisation and video game play are often treated as distinct practices, yet both invite participants to explore possibilities within structured environments through voluntary participation, real-time decision making, feedback, iteration, and agency. This dissertation investigates how the exploratory nature of video game play can serve as a framework for the composition and performance of improvised music through the creation and analysis of Duet for Flute and Video Game. In Duet, a live instrumentalist and an audience volunteer encounter and transform musical materials together in real time. The game player requires no prior musical training, and the instrumentalist requires no gaming experience; both learn to engage with the work through acting, listening, observing, and responding. The dissertation argues that gameplay and improvisation do not merely exhibit parallel qualities within Duet, but transform one another. Gameplay foregrounds improvisation as interaction... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6174b3wj Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Larkin, Rebecca https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3vq8r23k The proportional hazards (PH) model is widely used in time-to-event analyses, including within the nested case-control (NCC) design, an efficient sampling approach often used to reduce data collection costs in rare disease settings. By including all events and a subsample of controls, the NCC design maximizes information while reducing the number of subjects requiring full covariate information. Since the NCC design uses fewer controls compared to the full cohort analysis, however, it also reduces the number of subjects from underrepresented groups included in the sample. This further exacerbates the issue of underrepresentation in clinical research and diminishes our ability to assess potential effect modification in these subpopulations. Additionally, while the NCC design has been extensively studied for univariate outcomes, its application to multiple event data remains limited.In this dissertation, we present novel statistical methods to bridge existing gaps in current methodology... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3vq8r23k Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nishida, Mikaela https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16q8p5zk Ambient artificial intelligence (AI) documentation tools convert patient–clinician conversations into draft clinical notes that clinicians review and modify before signing in the electronic health record (EHR). These systems are increasingly adopted as a response to documentation burden and clinician burnout, but real-world effectiveness depends on the amount of clinician revision required for AI drafts and on persistent barriers that limit uptake and sustained use. This dissertation presents a human-centered, multi-level evaluation of ambient AI documentation conducted within the University of California, Irvine Health (UCI Health).First, the implementation of ambient AI documentation was evaluated using a mixed-methods approach that paired EHR time-efficiency measures with pre- and post-implementation survey responses from outpatient clinicians at UCI Health across multiple specialties. Results indicated that time spent on documentation decreased, while note length increased... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16q8p5zk Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Guo, Yawen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/04c1c9rd Data brokers collect and sell people's personal information, often without their knowledge, to advertisers, employers, insurers, government agencies, and other third parties, creating risks that range from unwanted profiling to identity theft and stalking. Privacy regulations such as European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and Brazil's Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais (LGPD) are meant to provide consumers with agency over their data, granting them rights to access, delete, or opt out of the sale of their data. Effectively exercising these rights, however, is contingent on verifying that the person making the request is who they claim to be. This dissertation shows that identity verification, rather than protecting consumers, becomes a privacy threat. We establish this systematically through two large-scale studies covering the entire California data broker registry. The first study submits data access requests... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/04c1c9rd Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Van Kempen, Elina Marie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/00k6w7x5 The emerging field of practitioner-centered music theory and composition invites the performer’s body, identity, and aesthetics to become a vital component of musical analysis. My creative practice as a Japanese-American violinist-composer reimagines bow arm gestures through Japanese storytelling art forms such as Nihon-Buyō, Haiku, and Kamishibai to perform autoethnographic memories and stories as a form of creative insight. Narrative arm gestures from my childhood studies of Nihon-Buyō, utilize props such as a sensu (Fan), kasa (Umbrella), or simply the furisode (Long Sleeve of a Kimono) to allude to a butterfly, falling snow, or the presence of moonlight, informing my violin bow arm gestures to carry multidimensional, semiotic meanings. Combining the narrative arm gestures endemic to Nihon-Buyō with classical violin bow techniques, new epistemologies of bow arm gestures emerge. Serving not only as a fundamental element to desired sound production but also as a visual component... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/00k6w7x5 Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yoshida, Lisa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j578806 Microbial communities play an essential role in sustaining ecosystem processes and life on Earth. As such, the field of microbial ecology has gradually shifted from establishing taxonomic patterns of distribution to identifying the traits that dictate where different microorganisms live to isolating the eco-evolutionary processes that create and maintain these patterns. Yet our understanding of these matters still largely reflects broad taxonomic levels. For soil bacteria in particular, most studies rely on highly conserved markers (e.g., the 16S rRNA gene). However, genomic variation at these scales overlooks substantial trait divergence that is potentially ecologically relevant. As a result, our understanding of how closely related lineages, akin to bacterial species, partition the soil environment and assemble into communities remains limited. In this dissertation I aimed to address this gap by using the Curtobacterium genus, an abundant bacterial taxon in soil leaf litter,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j578806 Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Barron Sandoval, Alberto https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88z874mh Early-life adversity (ELA) is a risk factor for human affective disorders involving dysregulated reward behaviors. In our limited bedding and nesting mouse model, ELA induces anhedonia-like behaviors in adult male mice while increasing motivation for rewards in adult females, indicating sex-dependent disruption of reward circuit operations. Searching for potential underlying circuit mechanisms of these disruptions of reward behavior, we identified a novel projection from the basolateral amygdala (BLA) to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) that expresses the stress-sensitive neuropeptide corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), together with the neurotransmitter GABA. To test the contribution of this projection to reward deficits in adult male and female mice reared in ELA conditions, we conducted the following experiments: Adult male and female CRH-Cre mice raised in control or ELA conditions received bilateral excitatory or inhibitory Cre-dependent DREADDs in the BLA, with clozapine N-oxide... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88z874mh Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Taniguchi, Lara https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6n95x19d Cell state transitions can be modeled as critical transitions marked by an increase in gene-gene correlation among a subset of expressed genes. These genes, the cell state transition drivers, are of interest for their role in guiding the cell into a new state in response to some signal. Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) should allow us to measure these changes in correlation across a transition trajectory. However, the distribution of scRNAseq counts does not fit the expectations that traditional correlation analyses rely on, leading to millions of false discoveries. Here, I develop a method to accurately calculate and statistically validate gene-gene correlations from scRNAseq data. Then, I demonstrate that those same principles can be used to derive statistics for feature selection tasks and that using those statistics leads to better clustering results. Because critical transition theory predicts that correlations among driver genes rise as the cell approaches the tipping... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6n95x19d Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Silkwood, Kai Haskell https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4900569g The present dissertation examines the collateral consequences of proactive policing strategies, using the Los Angeles Police Department’s Operation L.A.S.E.R. as a case study. Rather than evaluating the program solely as a crime-control strategy, this dissertation asks how the intervention affected crime, educational outcomes, and neighborhood desirability in Los Angeles. The introductory chapter traces its development, expansion, criticism, and termination. Chapter 1 evaluates whether the 2015 expansion reduced crime without displacement into adjacent, non-treated census blocks. Division-, zone-, and block-level analyses find mixed evidence of crime reduction and little evidence of displacement. Chapter 2 examines whether exposure to Operation L.A.S.E.R. was associated with changes in assessment scores among Los Angeles Unified School District high school students. Active exposure was associated with lower assessment scores in nearly every all-student and student-subgroup analysis,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4900569g Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Apolinar, Cristian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3z38c2vp Electron microscopy provides direct access to nanoscale structure, but quantitative interpretation is difficult when specimens are dynamic, weakly scattering, surrounded by liquid or vitreous ice, or sampled incompletely. This dissertation develops a traceable framework that combines liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy (LPTEM), cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), molecular dynamics, multislice image simulation, and deep learning. Across four studies, each conclusion is matched to directly measured image observables and to the reference information actually available.First, electrochemical LPTEM was used to examine FFssFF-derived peptide coacervates through one three-cycle cyclic-voltammetry (CV) recording before electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and two three-cycle recordings after EIS in one liquid-cell field. Initial domains were approximately 100–500 nm in projected diameter. Recording A showed no prominent resolved CV peak and minimal morphological... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3z38c2vp Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Zhaoxu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vm1m6g5 This dissertation argues that photography functioned as an inadvertent infrastructure of Vietnamese nationalist imagining under French colonial rule—a byproduct of colonial administration rather than its aim. Examining French Indochina from the 1880s to the end of empire in 1945, it follows the camera through the three institutions Benedict Anderson identified as the engines of colonial nationalism: the census, the map, and the museum. Three case studies anchor the argument. The first traces photographic identification through the penitentiary, the immigration depot, and the taxation office, where the camera fixed the colonial subject as a filed and retrievable document. The second follows aerial photography into the cadastre, where the medium measured and taxed the land. The third examines the archaeology of Champa, showing how photography constituted “Cham art” as a twentieth-century colonial creation. Across these sites, the dissertation reconceives the colonial photograph... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vm1m6g5 Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Le, Kien Minh https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9737p69z This dissertation offers a history of women’s work as told through stories of women’s virtue. Through Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s representations of serving, laboring, and economically vulnerable women, I examine scenes in which women imagine, negotiate, and discuss their emotional, sexual, and domestic obligations to men in the company of other women. Methodologically, the dissertation combines feminist materialist historicism, histories of women’s labor, affective and social reproductive labor theory, rhetorical history, and Aristotelian virtue ethics to ask how capacities identified as virtue are produced through historically specific forms of work and social relation. To consider the political possibilities of these scenes, I treat literary representation as part of a record of the forms of discourse in which women participated in the production of political and ethical argument. Read alongside these traditions, the conversations among Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s women become... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9737p69z Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Goeppner, Sarah J https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88w5c587 The D-band (110–170 GHz) offers contiguous bandwidth that makes backhaul links exceeding 100 Gb/s attainable and enables sub-millimeter-resolution imaging and centimeter-resolution radar. Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology is an attractive platform for these transmitters because it enables monolithic integration of the analog front end, digital baseband, and control circuitry on a low-cost die.The first part of this dissertation introduces the design challenges of broadband D-band transmitters. At D-band frequencies, CMOS transistors operate near half of their maximum oscillation frequency, where available gain degrades rapidly, while their low breakdown voltage limits the saturated output power of a single-stage amplifier. Meanwhile, the antenna must maintain impedance matching over a wide bandwidth. Consequently, the communication range depends on both power amplifier (PA) output power and antenna gain.The second part of this dissertation presents a three-stage... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88w5c587 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maktoomi, Md Hedayatullah https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5z3363p7 Prediabetes is a chronic metabolic condition characterized by impaired glucose regulation and represents an early stage in the progression toward type 2 diabetes. Both genetic susceptibility and lifestyle factors – including diet, physical activity, and smoking – contribute to abnormal glycemia. Although type 2 diabetes has been extensively studied, less is known about the genetic and environmental determinants of prediabetes. Importantly, prediabetes presents a critical window for intervention, as maintenance or reversion to normal glycemia remains possible. This study investigates whether prediabetes has distinct genetic determinants compared to type 2 diabetes and whether smoking modifies these associations, providing opportunities to identify individuals at risk earlier in disease development. Multinomial (polytomous) regression models evaluated genetic associations for 22 candidate SNPs with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, as well as SNP-smoking interactions, using the multi-ethnic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5z3363p7 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ferdos, Sepideh https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vh1642h Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder with no current effective cure and the leading cause of dementia worldwide. Episodic memory decline is among the earliest cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and is closely linked to dysfunction of medial temporal lobe (MTL) circuits. Emerging evidence suggests that sleep physiology and cerebrovascular health may play important roles in maintaining MTL integrity and supporting sleep-dependent memory processes. However, the mechanisms through which sleep disturbances, vascular pathology, and MTL integrity interact to influence memory function in aging remain poorly understood. To address these gaps, a series of studies were conducted. In Chapter 2, longitudinal changes in non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep oscillatory dynamics critical for memory consolidation processes during sleep were examined in cognitively unimpaired middle-aged and older adults at risk for Alzheimer’s disease, using high-density electroencephalography... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vh1642h Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Berisha, Destiny Ermira https://escholarship.org/uc/item/848759v6 Artificial intelligence systems are traditionally designed to solve problems that have already been defined. However, a more general form of intelligent problem solving should also support the ability to generate new problems, represent them in computational form, validate their meaning, and connect them to appropriate solution methods. This dissertation develops Generative Problem Solving (GPS) as a framework for moving from predefined problem solving toward the systematic generation, translation, validation, and solution of computational problems. The first part of this dissertation introduces GPS-Relational, a grammar-guided framework for problem solving over relational databases. The framework translates natural-language problem descriptions into executable SQL by decomposing complex requests into relational components, mapping them to database schemas, and validating their semantic compatibility before constructing the final query. A formal grammar and Semantic Validity... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/848759v6 Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vaisi, Goli https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2ds6971z Neutrino oscillations represent one of the most active fields of research in particle physics, yet key features of its three-flavor model remain undetermined. This dissertation presents instrumentation and calibration work carried out on two next-generation neutrino oscillation experiments, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) and the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), each pursuing complementary approaches to precision oscillation measurements. On DUNE, this work addresses the readout electronics of the liquid argon Near Detector (NDLAr). The integration of the DUNE Timing System endpoint into the PACMAN controller firmware is described, along with the design and validation of an optical timing testbench used to confirm nanosecond-level clock synchronization. Building on this instrumentation, a charge-scale calibration analysis is presented using cosmic-ray minimally-ionizing particles in three generations of pixelated LArTPC prototypes, extracting... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2ds6971z Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mandujano, Roberto Carlos https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53w6x0zd An OLG model where currency choices are endogenously driven by income heterogeneity is developed to analyze the simultaneous impact of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) on financial inclusion and bank funding. Pre-CBDC, wealthier agents use deposits while poorer agents use cash, remaining unbanked. CBDCs with higher fixed costs and interest rates are adopted by deposit holders and increase inclusion by raising deposit rates. CBDCs with lower fixed costs and interest rates are adopted by cash holders, directly increasing inclusion and inducing more favorable inclusion-intermediation trade-offs. A US calibration allows us to quantify these trade-offs conditional on CBDC design.We study the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in a New Monetarist model where buyers are heterogeneous in their demand for liquidity and choose endogenously among cash, CBDC, and bank deposits. A CBDC that is competitive enough raises financial inclusion and lowers bank intermediation,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53w6x0zd Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 banet, jeremie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4mn9x5jg Peptides are strings of amino acids that fold and self-assemble. The folding and supramolecular assembly of these peptides are central their function. Amyloid beta (Aβ) aggregates into soluble oligomers responsible for neurodegeneration. However, the structures formed by these soluble toxic oligomers remains poorly understood because of their heterogeneity and metastability. Chemical model systems can be used to investigate the structures formed by these soluble oligomers. The folding and self-assembly of peptides is also involved in the activity of cyclodepsipeptide antibiotics. To better understand peptide folding and self-assembly, my thesis describes the synthesis and study of amyloidogenic and antimicrobial peptides.Chapter 1 outlines a systematic approach for studying peptide model systems using solution-phase NMR spectroscopy. The chapter begins with preparing peptide NMR samples starting from lyophilized peptide. Then the chapter describes selecting, running, and processing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4mn9x5jg Mon, 7 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhu, Jason https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ng02974 Speculative execution features allow Spectre attacks to leak sensitive data. Using Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs) to detect these threats at runtime is promising, but standard machine learning models fail in real-world use because they break down due to hardware differences, background noise, and traffic shaping. To address this, our dissertation presents a unified framework combining physical hardware analysis with adaptive machine learning, systematically mapping how Spectre signatures vary across different leakage channels and processors like Intel, AMD, and ARM. To resolve these hardware-induced domain shifts, we designed a hybrid model that pairs a Domain-Adversarial LSTM (DA-LSTM) to track time-based patterns with an XGBoost classifier for precise decision boundaries, leveraging Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) so the system can automatically adjust to new, unlabeled hardware without original training data. Live client-server pipeline evaluations prove that... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ng02974 Thu, 3 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kotha, Jaya Keshava Chandra https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p56804b This dissertation investigates three of the most elusive phenomena in modern astrophysics: black holes, dark matter, and neutrinos, studied through theoretical modeling and large-scale numerical simulation to confront a new generation of gravitational-wave, electromagnetic, and neutrino observations.The first part addresses the astrophysical population of merging binary black holes (BBHs) detected by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. Using the population-synthesis code SEVN combined with a galaxy-evolution framework spanning cosmic star formation, metallicity, and galaxy stellar mass, I construct a model for the volumetric BBH merger rate density and its dependence on primary mass, secondary mass, and mass ratio, finding that the observed primary mass distribution requires either a top-heavy initial mass function in low-metallicity dwarf galaxies or a substantial dynamical-capture contribution above ∼ 30 M⊙. I then examine mass ratio reversal (MRR), binaries in which the initially less massive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p56804b Thu, 3 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Smith, Tyler Benjamin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vr50940 Despite their inability to been seen with the naked eye, nanopores are ubiquitous to our cell membranes to regulate the passage of ions and molecules. Their superior selectivity, transport and sensitivity to external stimuli have inspired the innovation of solid-state nanopores for applications in single molecule sensing, label-free sequencing, filtration, energy harvesting, and more. Compared to macroscopic channels, nanopores exhibit these unique functionalities due to the large surface-to-volume ratio which facilitates the surface properties on the walls to dictate ion transport. It is imperative to understand the principles which govern transport at nanoscale interfaces to help solid-state systems replicate the superior capabilities observed in their biological inspirations. The solid-liquid interface in nanopores systems is well-understood for aqueous solutions which can often be described by a continuum model. However, standard descriptions fall short when applied to non-aqueous... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vr50940 Thu, 3 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Silva, Savannah https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3x43293m One-dimensional (1D) van der Waals (vdW) materials provide a unique platform that enables the understanding of how anisotropic bonding governs crystal growth and enables access to complex morphologies and emergent physical states. However, predictive synthetic strategies for directing their crystallization remain underdeveloped. This work establishes chemical design principles for directing the bottom-up crystallization of 1D vdW materials by controlling directional bonding, composition, and defect-mediated growth. Using modified chemical vapor transport, strong intrachain bonding—particularly Peierls-like metal dimerization—is shown to promote catalyst-free growth of ultralong, high-aspect-ratio nanowires in NbS3-I and MoI3. Building on this framework, compositional alloying and chalcogen deficiency emerge as complementary chemical design parameters that modify lattice flexibility and growth pathways that enable the formation of selfcoiled nanorings and screw-dislocation-mediated... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3x43293m Thu, 3 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lopez, Diana https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0c68b9w3 In this thesis, we study efficient attention in the dominant transformer architecture from a theoretical perspective. We then use this theoretical understanding to guide the design of models for problems in time-series forecasting, image processing, and video understanding. In Part I, we begin with the motivation for and an introduction to modern machine learning, starting with recurrent neural networks for processing sequential data and continuing to the current transformer-based approach. We discuss how image processing has progressed from relying mainly on convolutional neural networks, which respect image geometry, to the current paradigm of transformers in computer vision. We provide an overview of the chapters in this dissertation and explain how they connect to the core research question. We then present a unified theoretical analysis of the attention mechanism, laying the theoretical groundwork for the remainder of the dissertation. In Part II, we consider... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0c68b9w3 Thu, 3 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tran, Nhat Thanh https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8856539t Normative models are powerful tools for advancing cognitive science. But where do their norms come from, and how well do they align with other constraints on the target system? This dissertation examines these questions within the family of sequential sampling models used to study the speed-accuracy tradeoff in decision-making. Across three chapters, we show how relaxing a common assumption generates normative solutions that require within-trial variability in the value of two key parameters (drift rate and decision threshold), and—critically—that the dynamics of this variability are governed by observers’ evolving belief about the reliability of evidence bearing on choice.We begin by specifying a novel model formalizing the role of memory retrieval dynamics in biasing decisions when observers have uncertainty about prior probabilities, and show that it can reproduce dynamic effects of prior probability observed across different tasks, species, and neuroimaging modalities. Then,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8856539t Tue, 1 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Khoudary, Ari https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7w61g3s8 Xeno-nucleic acids (XNAs) are artificial genetic polymers with unnatural sugar and backbone structures that confer unique physicochemical properties, such as enhanced biostability and improved RNA binding thermodynamics, making them attractive for a wide range of applications. One such XNA is threose nucleic acid (TNA), which features a threose sugar ring with a 2′-3′ phosphodiester backbone linkage that confers high nuclease resistance while still supporting anti-parallel Watson-Crick base-pairing with DNA and RNA. Initially investigated as a plausible RNA progenitor, TNA research has since expanded towards its development as a molecular tool. This dissertation examines TNA across three studies that progress from the characterization of one of TNA’s special properties to the application of TNA towards specific functions. First, to examine the mechanistic rationale behind the chemical resilience of TNA, the degradation kinetics of TNA under acidic, high-temperature conditions... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7w61g3s8 Tue, 1 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lee, Erica https://escholarship.org/uc/item/49m7s1s8 Theoretical analysis of algorithms relies on idealized models of computers. This inevitably creates a gap between what is efficient in theory and in practice, motivating fine-grained models which better emulate real-world constraints. This thesis makes new developments in two such models. First, we consider the noisy primitives model. Here, each comparison, such as ''is a < b?'', independently returns the wrong answer with probability p < 1/2. This model has applications in quantum and distributed computing. We extend the model to various geometric problems with Boolean geometric primitive comparisons such as ''is point p above line L?''. We give optimal sequential and parallel algorithms that solve these geometric problems using new techniques in random walks and parallel divide-and-conquer. Second, we consider in-place models of computation, in which memory usage is restricted. We give the first sorting algorithm that is optimal in terms of the run-entropy... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/49m7s1s8 Tue, 1 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sridhar, Vinesh https://escholarship.org/uc/item/37s8j8rk Games are more than media for consumption; they are increasingly valuable educational tools and social platforms connecting players around the globe. The known benefits aside, harmful conduct prevails in online play, severely impacting players, gaming communities, and the games industry at large. Players’ understanding of social safety and their coping strategies with harmful conduct are influenced by the design and implementation of the safety infrastructure in online games. Therefore, improving these mechanisms can help reduce harmful behavior, enable proactive coping strategies, and develop healthier gaming environments. Safety infrastructure is a broader concept commonly incorporating policies, technological systems, and trust and safety teams. This work focuses on the technological components that directly shape player experience through structuring and moderating social interactions.In three studies, (1) I assess parental controls and in-game tools of social safety... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/37s8j8rk Tue, 1 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Romhanyi, Agnes https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1bq7v9mt Skeletal muscle is a highly regenerative tissue that is responsible for voluntary, contractile movement of the body. Endogenous muscle stem cells are responsible for regenerating skeletal muscle upon injury, although in diseased contexts this regeneration becomes impaired to the deficit of the patient. There remains a pressing need for the discovery of viable, long-lasting therapeutic treatments for patients with genetic congenital neuromuscular diseases as current standard of care fails to improve patient quality of life. Thus, the introduction of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived muscle stem cell therapies offers an exciting avenue to introducing an autologous healthy donor stem cell into a diseased patient. While this platform is promising, current research has found that iPSC derivations generate immature skeletal muscle stem cells, transcriptomically on par with embryonic human muscle stem cells. One major limitation of these stem cells is the ineffective retention... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1bq7v9mt Tue, 1 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Clock, Benjamin Boyd https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5663d2vb Proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) offer the opportunity to observe the interactions of fundamental particles at very high energy scales. The high collision rate and large number of final state particles produced per collision imply that the datasets produced by detectors such as the ATLAS experiment are large and high dimensional. The complexity of these datasets calls for the use of novel data analysis techniques which can exploit all of the available information to illuminate known interactions and search for new ones. This thesis presents applications of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to improve the physics results of the ATLAS experiment. It centers on a full-phase-space measurement of the Z+jets production cross section at the LHC, where the cross section is measured differential in the kinematics of every final state charged particle through the use of an AI-based unfolding algorithm. This is the first such measurement performed at the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5663d2vb Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Greif, Kevin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2fb38871 Bright Shadows is a three-part short-story collection that explores emotional conflicts and thematic issues arising out of contemporary spiritual questions. Carl Jung’s notion of the “shadow self” is the thematic foundation of all three stories, which all differ in genre, voice, and style, but are ultimately connected by an underlying question. This isn’t an intellectual question, but rather an emotional curiosity that is felt more than thought. What are the darkest parts of ourselves that we can access? How do these parts clash when they surface up into the daylight world? These are succinct ways of putting what Bright Shadows grapples with, but they aren’t complete. These stories arise out of struggles with addiction, time spent in rehab, and encounters with violence; however, these stories also chart the path through our darker struggles. They follow along with my own study of story structure at UCI, and story structure, I hope this collection shows, is the structure... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2fb38871 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Buczinsky, Zachary https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qj4f96b Recent industrialisation across Asia has produced increased air pollution emissions, altering the chemistry of reactive greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the troposphere. We compute the additional loss of methane (L-CH4) and net production of ozone (P-O3) attributable to urban and industrial emissions from South Korea during the May-June Korea-US Air quality (KORUS-AQ) mission. We build a three-stage hybrid modelling system (HMS) equipped with detailed chemical mechanisms to simulate the full life-cycle of emissions over several months (Chapter 3). The first stage processes the fresh emissions in the well-mixed boundary layer over terrestrial South Korea. The model fields of O3, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides are compared with surface observation data, which are interpolated and gridded in Chapter 2 to match the model discretisation. The second stage integrates the chemistry of the transboundary pollution plumes transported offshore, and the final stage disperses the residual pollutants.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qj4f96b Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wilson, Calum Patrick https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p06x09x Cohort studies of aging-related diseases often produce event-time data that are subject to left-truncation, since participants enroll after some baseline age while being free of the disease of interest, in addition to right-censoring due to variable follow-up. This dissertation develops a suite of semiparametric methods, organized around a two-part conditional modeling framework, for drawing valid inference from such data and for quantifying healthspan (the portion of life spent in good health) as an endpoint in aging research. The first project proposes a semiparametric sieve likelihood approach for fitting a linear regression model to a response subject to both left-truncation and right-censoring; the resulting estimators are shown to be consistent, asymptotically normal, and semi parametrically efficient, and the method is illustrated on data from the Canadian Study of Health and Aging and The 90+ Study. The second project introduces the Golden Health Index (GHI), the expected... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p06x09x Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Matthews, Spencer https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05j2m78q Alvin Ailey’s Cry is a modern dance masterwork of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s Repertory that has been performed many times since its 1971 premiere. What makes Ailey’s Cry so impactful to contemporary audiences is the cornerstone of this inquiry. This thesis explored Alvin Ailey’s Cry and its interpretation from various perspectives that led to the creation of my own choreography entitled Weathered. Along with experts’ analyses, I examined how audiences respond to Cry and integrated their insights into the development of a new choreographic work. My methodology utilized reception theory and a survey to uncover the moments deemed most impactful by voluntary respondents. These survey findings went on to serve as data points to inform my choreographical choices. I included two dancers plus myself to create three solos that built upon the themes that resonated widely through kinesthetic empathy entwined with the lens of their own lived experiences. I concluded that Ailey’s... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05j2m78q Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Logan, Tyra Janae https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gx8t5td Two-phase boiling is a highly effective heat transfer mechanism for high-power thermal management systems, but its performance is governed by complex, transient, and spatially distributed liquid–vapor interfacial dynamics. Conventional measurements such as temperature, pressure, and flow rate provide valuable system-level information, yet they do not directly resolve the bubble-scale and interface-scale processes that control heat transfer degradation, critical heat flux, flow instability, and regime transition. This dissertation develops a vision-based and event-based framework for characterizing, modeling, and diagnosing flow boiling heat transfer by transforming visual data streams into physically meaningful representations of interfacial behavior.First, a flow boiling experimental platform is developed to enable high-speed visualization under controlled thermal and hydrodynamic conditions. Building on this platform, a vision-based bubble digitization framework is established... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gx8t5td Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chang, Sanghyeon https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4w34f29n What happens when refusing to fight a war is framed not as a moral stand but as a betrayal of masculinity itself? This dissertation examines how Russian men who left after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine are constructed as both political and gendered failures. While exile is often understood as a legal or geographic condition, I argue that in the Russian context, it also operates as a tool of gender discipline. Through state media, propaganda, and popular discourse, Russian men in exile are portrayed not simply as conscientious objectors but as morally deviant, feminized, and queer-coded figures who have forfeited their claims to societal and state-recognized masculinity. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and media analysis, this project introduces the concept of the politics of gendered death: a media-driven process through which narratives, satire, and viral circulation recode refusal to participate in state-defined masculinity and war-making... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4w34f29n Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gasviani, Gvantsa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0r73x0hb Transgender and non-binary rights have emerged as one of the most rapidly evolving and politically contested areas of contemporary human rights, yet they remain comparatively understudied and are frequently subsumed within broader LGBTQ+ scholarship. Unlike many rights claims centered on equal access to existing institutions, transgender rights require states to reconsider the administrative and legal systems through which citizenship, identity, and personhood are recognized, making them a distinctive lens for examining institutional change. Latin America provides a particularly important setting for this analysis, having experienced some of the world's most significant advances in legal gender recognition alongside persistent violence, uneven public support, and growing political contestation. This dissertation examines how transgender and non-binary rights become institutionalized across legal, social, and political domains in Latin America. I argue that rights institutionalization... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0r73x0hb Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Garcia, Andrea Linette https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g89h8jx This paper reconstructs a triangulated intellectual and institutional circuit linking Berlin, Tokyo, and Calcutta between 1871 and 1914, arguing that a German-derived repertoire of national economic coordination traveled across imperial and colonial contexts as a portable anti-colonial resource. It introduces the analytical category Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (“economic community”) to name what German political economy offered late-developing and subordinated societies: an economy imagined not as a neutral field of exchange but as a nationally organised, communally grounded, and administratively coordinated order. Rooted in Friedrich List and the German Historical School, this model fused economic coordination with a moralised rhetoric of national belonging and was rendered portable through university networks, constitutional templates, military advisory missions, and the prestige of German administrative science.The paper advances three correctives to existing scholarship. Against... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g89h8jx Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vig, Daniel David https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98k717kd Adolescence is a sensitive period for development of addiction-relevant brain circuits that regulate cognition, drug reinforcement, and motivation. These processes must be carefully balanced to guide adaptive behavior, yet they are particularly vulnerable to disruption during development. Cannabis is one of the most commonly used illicit substances among adolescents, and early-life exposure to Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is associated with an increased risk for psychiatric disorders and later-life substance use. However, the mechanisms by which adolescent THC (AdoTHC) exposure produces persistent alterations across cognitive and motivational domains remain incompletely understood.Here, I explore whether AdoTHC exposure persistently alters brain circuitry and subsequent behavior across three domains: cognition, drug reinforcement, and motivation. Using a suite of behavioral paradigms assessing decision-making, drug reinforcement, and motivation in rats, combined with cell-type... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98k717kd Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Martinez, Maricela Xochil https://escholarship.org/uc/item/70k487g4 Neuroinflammation is increasingly recognized as a key contributor to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), yet the mechanisms linking systemic immune processes to brain structure and cognition remain poorly understood. This dissertation proposes that white matter (WM) microstructure represents a critical intermediate phenotype through which neuroinflammation influences neural circuit integrity and cognitive decline. To test this framework, this work utilized advanced diffusion MRI, specifically Neurite Orientation Dispersion and Density Imaging (NODDI), to characterize biologically meaningful features of WM microstructure within medial temporal lobe pathways. This dissertation first evaluated whether NODDI, a multi-shell, multi-compartment model, provided greater sensitivity to AD-related changes compared to traditional diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). The findings established that advanced diffusion-derived metrics offer enhanced sensitivity to AD pathology and cognitive function while... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/70k487g4 Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Parker, Dana https://escholarship.org/uc/item/41p753dx Natural disasters disproportionately affect older adult populations, who consistently account for a majority of disaster-related mortality. While prior research has emphasized the role of risk perception in motivating preparedness behaviors, less attention has been given to how psychosocial and structural factors shape these processes among aging populations. This dissertation addresses this gap by examining how risk perception, loneliness, and structural vulnerability interact to influence disaster preparedness among older adults in Japan. Guided by the Protective Action Decision Model, this research extends existing theoretical frameworks through the development of the Japanese Older Adult Preparedness Model (JOAPM), which integrates psychosocial and structural dimensions into traditional models of protective action. This approach conceptualizes preparedness as an emergent process shaped not only by cognitive evaluation, but also by social relationships and environmental... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/41p753dx Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fukurai, Mihoka https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0b35t7sd This thesis aims to address three main objectives: to better understand when, and how BPI holds in permutation models and in symmetric extensions; to develop a unifying relationship between variants of the Halpern-Läuchli theorem and BPI in symmetric extensions; to develop and expose simple dynamical perspectives on BPI in models without choice. Our approach to these questions is to introduce a characterization program, where we aim to provide conditions that are equivalent to BPI in permutation models and in symmetric extensions. By reproving known results, reworking known proofs, and proving new ones, we show how each of these characterizing properties offer novel perspectives on BPI, and how they address the three objectives listed above.The case of BPI in permutation models is studied in chapter 3. This work reproves and extends several results from [Bla87], [KPT05], and [Bla11]. These characterization theorems, and the proofs we offer to relate them, can be seen as simpler,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0b35t7sd Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ransom, Brian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w5966qx This research addresses the problem of cognitive asymmetry and the exclusion of popular knowledge in the Global South by examining the diachronic and material evolution of the editorial production of the Instituto Centroamericano de la Extensión de la Cultura (ICECU) and the Fundación Escuela para Todos over six decades (1966–2026). The study analyzes its emblematic publications: the Almanaque ICECU, the Libro Almanaque Escuela para Todos, and the current Libro Escuela para Todos. The central problem lies in unraveling how an informal education media device—initially conceived at the height of the Cold War’s developmentalist boom—managed to mutate its material architecture and discursive framework to resist extractive market dynamics, thereby becoming an interface for epistemic justice and sovereignty for subaltern communities in both rural and urban areas. To address this inquiry, a mixed-method research design was implemented, encompassing descriptive, analytical, and historical-diachronic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w5966qx Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Proctor, Anny Gysiellen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6613m1b8 This dissertation seeks to untangle how armed conflict exacerbates infectious disease risk through physical, environmental, social, and geographic factors. Across multiple conflict settings, I analyze how conflict intensity impacts cholera and cutaneous leishmaniasis risk in conjunction with relevant environmental factors, as well as suggest an additional tool for measuring conflict's effects on the built environment. I do this by 1) assessing the association between violent conflict events and cholera in Yemen, 2) exploring Earth observation tools for measuring conflict intensity and infrastructure recovery in Yemen and Ukraine, 3) analyzing how environmental and conflict-related factors modify leishmaniasis risk at an ecological scale, and 4) quantifying cutaneous leishmaniasis surveillance gaps in northern Syria. Together, this work provides insights on how armed conflict actively shapes infectious disease dynamics. It also presents a viable tool for measuring conflict intensity... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6613m1b8 Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tarnas, Maia C. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40d7w6zz Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia impacting almost 7 million people in the United States with cases projected to increase over 13 million by 2050. Numerous large genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have repeatedly identified AD risk genes associated with immunity and specifically expressed in myeloid cells, implicating neuroimmune processes and neuroinflammation as a major factor of AD etiology. Microbial infection has been broadly explored as a mechanism through which both genetic and environmental contributions interact together to influence AD risk and neuropathology. Pathogenic microbes that invade the CNS can cause significant neuroinflammation through CNS-resident immune cells and infiltration of peripheral immune cells such as monocyte/macrophages and T cells. Recent epidemiological studies using human datasets have demonstrated several viral pathogens tightly associated with different neurological diseases, while the strongest association... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40d7w6zz Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Javonillo, Dominic Ibarra https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r0015wc Rates of food insecurity in the military, which are higher than those in comparable communities, remain an ongoing issue. Adolescents with military parents may also struggle to cope with frequent moves and parental deployments. Using a state-wide database that included children of military personnel, we measured the association between skipping breakfast on the day of the survey and mental health screening data scores. Over 43% of students in our sample reported skipping breakfast. These students reported higher mean, median, and 90th percentile stress level scores (μ = 10.9, M50 = 10, M90=19) than the students who did not skip breakfast (μ = 9.4, M50 = 8, M90=16). Groups with increased levels of high distress (>90th percentile) included students who skipped breakfast (17.3%), females (14.4%), gender minorities (36.3%), American Indian/Alaska Native (16.0%), and Hispanic/LatinX students (13.1%). Logistic regression showed that skipping breakfast increased a student’s odds of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r0015wc Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hollis-Perry, Karine Monique https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0fc389qf This thesis is dedicated to studying the quantitative regularity of measures produced by actions of random dynamical systems and to applying these geometric estimates to products of random matrices. First, we consider smooth random dynamical systems defined by a distribution with a finite moment of the norm of the differential, and prove that under suitable non-degeneracy conditions any stationary measure must be Hölder continuous. This result is a vast generalization of the classical statement on Hölder continuity of stationary measures of random walks on linear groups. Second, we extend this framework to rougher settings by considering Lipschitz and Hölder continuous random dynamical systems defined by a distribution with a finite logarithmic moment, proving that under suitable non-degeneracy conditions every stationary measure must be log-Hölder continuous. Finally, we leverage these regularization properties to prove a Central Limit Theorem for non-stationary random products... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0fc389qf Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Monakov, Grigorii https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22k293r3 Flow Matching has limited ability in achieving one-step generation due to its reliance on learned curved trajectories. Previous studies have attempted to address this limitation by either modifying the coupling distribution to prevent interpolant intersections or introducing consistency and mean-velocity modeling to promote straight trajectory learning. However, these approaches often suffer from discrete approximation errors, training instability, and convergence difficulties. To tackle these issues, in the present work, we propose Straight Variational Flow Matching (S-VFM), which integrates a variational latent code representing the ``generation overview'' into the Flow Matching framework. S-VFM explicitly enforces trajectory straightness, ideally producing linear generation paths. The proposed method achieves competitive performance across three challenge benchmarks and demonstrates advantages in both training and inference efficiency compared with existing methods. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22k293r3 Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ma, Chenrui https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3nk3v85n One of the oldest and most recalcitrant questions in philosophy is whether free will and moral responsibility could exist in a deterministic universe. In recent years, empirical work has revealed that people’s intuitions about this question show a robust, yet puzzling, pattern. In this dissertation, I explain the pattern of intuitions human beings have about compatibilism and argue that this pattern reveals deep features of our representational architecture. My dissertation shows why we have the intuitions about compatibilism we do, how our species came to be so cognitively configured, and why philosophers want to (but cannot) argue their way out of the intuitions furnished by our representational structures. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3nk3v85n Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gibson, True https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jj8p42h Background: The immune response to acute psychosocial stress involves coordinated activity across multiple biological compartments, including barrier tissues that serve as the immune system’s first line of defense. While blood-based markers of the inflammatory stress response are well-characterized, less is known about how barrier tissue defenses like those in the oral cavity respond to acute psychosocial stress among adolescents. Understanding the salivary immune response to acute psychosocial stress may provide insight into stress-related disease processes and early signs of immune dysregulation among adolescents.Method: Adolescents (N=94, Mage=13.87, SDage=1.55, 43.62% female) completed the Trier Social Stress Test for Children. Saliva was collected immediately before and 20-, 30-, 45-, 60-, and 90-minutes post-stress initiation; blood was collected immediately before and 60- and 90-minutes post-stress initiation. Inflammatory biomarkers measured included C-reactive protein... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jj8p42h Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Antici, Ellie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/28n7h9b5 Research consistently highlights that early familial influences play a critical role in shaping individual perceptions and attitudes toward mental illness. Intergenerationally transmitted beliefs can profoundly impact the development of stigma, symptom concealment, perceptions of legitimacy, and willingness to engage with mental health services. Despite this, few tools exist to systematically assess the broad range of familial mental illness perceptions across generations. The present study addresses this gap by developing and validating the Intergenerational Perceptions of Mental Illness Scale – Individual Scale (IPMIS-I), a novel self-report measure designed to assess both individuals’ positive and negative perceptions. Initial item development was guided by seven core themes identified in the literature, and the scale was tested across three undergraduate samples (total N = 696) at the University of California, Irvine. An exploratory factor analysis (n = 300) revealed a four-factor... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/28n7h9b5 Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hegwood, Ceouna https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pt7b0bc This thesis began with a question that emerged from my own artistic and personal experience: How have both my Asian and American identity shaped who I am as a dancer, choreographer, and artist? Even though I am an adoptee, I have rarely questioned the stability of my identity on my own. Instead, other people have prompted that inquiry, asking whether I wished to know my “origin story” or find my birth parents. These questions revealed how identity is often understood through assumptions about lineage, cultural authenticity, and biological connection. I grew up constantly navigating between American and Chinese cultural environments. As a result, my identity shifts depending on context – where I am, who I am with, and how I am perceived by others. This project asks what it means to understand identity when belonging is not fixed. I propose that identity is not something to be recovered or resolved, but something continually negotiated through history, context, and movement. Through... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pt7b0bc Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cook, Ashley Cecilia Siyuan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42p79680 Both Sides, Now: An Embodied Inquiry into Identity, In-Betweenness, and Belonging explores artistic identity, cultural displacement, and belonging through choreography, autoethnography, and embodied research. Accompanied by the choreographic work Both Sides, Now, this thesis examines how my experiences as a Taiwanese-born dancer living and working in the United States have shaped my artistic practice and understanding of identity. Drawing from my background in Chinese classical dance, ballet, and modern dance, this research investigates how multiple training systems and cultural contexts coexist within the body and contribute to experiences of in-betweenness. Autoethnography, reflective writing, interviews, and choreographic research are used to explore themes of migration, cultural translation, identity, and belonging. A description of the choreographic process positions it as a form of embodied inquiry, using movement to examine the experience of existing between cultures, places,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42p79680 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chiang, Haihua https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kw5h4pk This dissertation studies the prominent symbolic function of stage properties in the dramaturgy and politics of Shakespeare’s English and Roman history plays. It argues that Shakespeare crafts a visual landscape on stage that further complicates political readings of the genre. Rather than solely attending to what can be found in historical sources and static documents, this dissertation turns scholarly attention back to the live event of the drama to examine what is seen on stage. “Visible Bullets” argues that stage properties are deployed deliberately and subversively throughout the history plays, and this use may prompt audiences and readers to (re)consider theatricality on stage, as well as the role and impact of theatricality in power and politics. “Visible Bullets” combines dramaturgical and New Historicist methods to study the visible political landscape of Shakespeare’s history plays both in the early modern period and in our time. This research methodology is described... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kw5h4pk Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Parise, Emily Catherine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4ck4s0t3 When supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of massive galaxies actively accrete material, they power the luminous sources known as active galactic nuclei (AGN). Through the energy released by this accretion, the AGN interacts with the gas in its surroundings across a wide range of spatial scales. On scales of several kiloparsecs, the narrow-line region (NLR) traces gas in the host galaxy that has been photoionized by the AGN, and its kinematics encode the influence of the central engine. At even larger scales, Lyα emission traces the cool gas in the circumgalactic medium (CGM), which constitutes the reservoir that fuels SMBH growth and star formation. Historically, imaging and long-slit spectroscopic observations have provided complementary views of AGN environments, with the former revealing the spatial distribution of the gas, and the later yielding spatially resolved kinematics along a single direction.Integral field spectroscopy (IFS) simultaneously provides spatial... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4ck4s0t3 Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Remigio, Raymond https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jt6m27d This dissertation proposes the Andean principle of Yanantin (the complementarity of opposite forces) as both a methodological framework and a lived epistemological position for the practice of Integrative Arts in contemporary transmedia opera. Through philosophical reflection, ethno-archaeo-musicological research, and the creation and performance of POEM-RITE: The Primeval Poet, it argues that Indigenous knowledge systems constitute academies in their own right that recognize other-than-human beings in nature as active participants in the production of knowledge. Identifying these contrasts between Indigenous and Western epistemologies opens the field for the application of Yanantin as a creative and scholarly methodology, one grounded in the author's own formation as both an academic artist and carrier of Indigenous ceremonial traditions.The sequence of the first three chapters, presented as a WHY/WHAT/HOW framework, explaining the development process of OEM-RITE: The Primeval... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jt6m27d Thu, 9 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 CAVERO FARFAN, FABRICIO https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3s87p0bh The primary sources of inspiration for this short story are George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman; Gear, Hill, and Liendo’s Working Through Narcissism: Treating Its Sadomasochistic Structure; Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality; Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father; René Girard’s The Scapegoat; Alex Johnson’s translation of the Diamond Sūtra; the fixed-point theorems of John Forbes Nash Jr.; Jianzhi Sengcan’s “Xinxin Ming”; Heinz Kohut’s “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z”; Leo Tolstoy’s essays on nonviolence and non-activity; William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn’s theory of object relations and the moral defense; Karl J. Friston’s work on the free energy principle and active inference; Silvan Solomon Tomkin’s work on script theory; and Peter Fonagy’s work on mentalization. As with Man and Superman, this story is intended as both comedy and philosophy, and it is tantamount to propaganda for a particular view of human existence: the view that the Self is a hallucination imposed... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3s87p0bh Thu, 9 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Comerci, John Thomas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2303t3mh Establishing a clear timeline of events is legally critical in child maltreatment cases, yet temporal questions can be particularly confusing for child witnesses. "When" questions are inherently ambiguous in that they can request either simultaneous or sequential information, whereas other temporal terms (before, after, while, during, as, first, last, then) carry a clear referent. Despite the potential for misunderstanding, the prevalence of ambiguous "when" questions in legal proceedings and their effects on children's responses have received little empirical attention. The present study examined attorney use of temporal questions in courtroom transcripts involving 60 child witnesses aged 4 to 12 years. Questions were coded for category, format, and children's responses. Generalized linear mixed models examined how question category and format predicted children's responses. Non-ambiguous temporal term questions were most frequent (51%), followed by anchored "when" questions... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2303t3mh Thu, 9 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lundon, Georgia M https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1qj3852d A recurring challenge to combatting the significant problem of commercial sex trafficking, especially of minors, lies in identifying actual victims. Public campaigns have increased awareness of the occurrence of trafficking, but the depiction of victims often invoke stereotypes that fail to match characteristics known to be associated with experiences of trafficking, such as high levels of mistrust of authorities, prior victimization, delinquent histories, and uncooperativeness. We examined the extent to which the latter characteristics (i.e., delinquency and uncooperativeness) impact the general public’s ability to identify minor victims of trafficking and to whom the public attributes responsibility when such characteristics are present. A total of 425 adults read vignettes alluding to trafficking that varied references to delinquency (present vs. absent) and cooperation (high vs. low) of a minor victim and rendered decisions about what happened and who is to blame. When minors... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1qj3852d Thu, 9 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kim, Sarah Calista https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0574q9v9 The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the convergence and divergence among meta-aspects of positive emotion measures drawn from Affect Valuation Theory, Emotion Goals, Prioritizing Positivity, and Valuing Happiness. Meta-aspects of positive emotion include how people idealize, desire, prioritize, aspire for, or are concerned about how intensely or frequently they feel positive emotion. Across two studies, this dissertation tested whether scores show convergent or divergent associations with one another, with a broad nomological network of affective science criteria, and with self-reported health-related quality of life.Study 1 examined the convergence and divergence of meta-aspects of happiness measures across two large samples: university students and online survey participants. The focal measures were the moderate-arousal positive affect subscale of the Affect Valuation Index, the happiness subscale of an Emotion Goals Measure, the Prioritizing Positivity Scale, and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0574q9v9 Thu, 9 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Martin, Logan Trevor https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dc7f3tg This thesis examines how Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen uses visual doublings and spatial layering to engage with the uncanny legacies of Japanese imperialism in his site-specific video installation, Hotel Aporia. Originally commissioned for the 2019 Aichi Triennale and installed within the historic ryokan Kiraku-tei in Toyota City, this work assembles a cast of Japanese intellectuals and cultural makers connected to the Japanese Empire, including Kiraku-tei’s landlady, the Kamikaze Kusanagi Unit, Kyoto School philosophers, cartoonist Ryūichi Yokoyama, and filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu. Through fragmented voices, blurred faces, overlapping projections, and visceral sounds and vibrations, Ho transforms the ryokan into a spectral infrastructure where viewers encounter the contradictions and repressions embedded within postwar memory. Drawing on theories of the uncanny by Ernst Jentch and Sigmund Freud, alongside Ignacio Adriasola’s concept of “the uncanniness of the double,” this thesis... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dc7f3tg Wed, 8 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 McCants, Myra Mariana