http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/ucla_etd/rss Recent eScholarship items from UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:59:48 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7pz4q164 Understanding emotion dynamics is important in order to ascertain transdiagnostic mechanisms underlying anxiety and mood disorders. Emotional inertia, the stability of emotion over time, and emotion network density, a measure of the interconnectedness of emotions, both represent the persistence of emotions over time. Previous literature suggests that emotional persistence, particularly of negative emotions, is related to depression, anxiety, and difficulty with emotion regulation. However, this research is limited in that studies examining idiographic network density, longitudinal relationships, and transdiagnostic, continuous, or objective outcome measures are scarce. Additionally, existing studies present mixed findings on the implications of positive emotional persistence. This dissertation contains three studies designed to address these shortcomings and examine relationships among emotional persistence and transdiagnostic psychological well-being in adults with moderate-to-severe... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7pz4q164 Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Losiewicz, Olivia Marie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/77c4n985 Boundaries and defects host localized interactions of the dynamic degrees of freedom and provide the certain conditions on the field at the location of them. In guage theories and gravity, the dynamics of the large gauge degrees of freedom is localized on the boundary and are best described within the covariant phase space formalism using the symplectic form and boundary action. When the gravitational effects are strong, these large gauge degrees of freedom dress the on-shell matter action, which can be described using Hamiltonian formulation by integrating out these edge modes. We present the two efficient methods of computing the symplectic form associated with the boundary degrees of freedom. We then consider the near-extremal charged black holes in 4d, where the gravitational effects are enhanced at low temperature and study the Hawking radiation at near-horizon AdS2 using the Hamiltonian formulation, with emphasis on comparing this to the JT gravity. Extending this perspective... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/77c4n985 Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kim, Seolhwa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34m6k6ck This dissertation examines the early history of Chinese people traveling and migrating overseas (c. 800–1127 CE). Despite the political, cultural, and economic significance of ethnic Chinese communities across much of the world today, as well as international interest in China’s involvement in the greater domain of maritime Asia, very few attempts have been made to understand the origins of Chinese people living and traveling beyond Chinese borders. Through the examination of primary sources written in Classical Chinese, Kanbun, Arabic, Old Malay, and Old Javanese, as well as the material record of shipwrecks and former port cities, this dissertation explores the earliest records of Chinese people living and trading outside of China, the regions where they were active, the communities they formed or joined, their reasons for traveling long distances, and how their migration was viewed both within and beyond China. Such an analysis reveals that Chinese people were active across... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34m6k6ck Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sattler, Gregory https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xz8x8ph Treatment engagement challenges are among the most persistent barriers to effective youth mental health treatment, with a substantial proportion of youth and families terminating services before achieving expected clinical gains (Becker & Chorpita, 2023). Despite growing recognition of the multidimensional, dynamic, and transactional nature of treatment engagement, relatively little is known about the within-session therapist behaviors that may occur in the context of and inadvertently contribute to engagement challenges. This dissertation examined therapist “missteps,” or inadvertent, less optimal, or noncollaborative therapist behaviors, across two studies using observational data from the Reaching Families Study, a multisite cluster-randomized trial focused on improving use of evidence to target low treatment engagement in publicly funded youth mental health settings (Chorpita et al., 2025). Study 1 sought to first understand how therapists misstep by examining the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xz8x8ph Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Park, Hyun Seon https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1r2627ss Accumulating evidence suggests a neuroinflammatory subtype of psychotic illness. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) can indirectly assess neuroinflammation via measurements of neurometabolite biomarkers: myo-inositol (mI) for glia; choline (Cho) for membrane turnover; creatine (Cr) for energy metabolism; N-acetylaspartate (NAA) for neural integrity; and glutamate and glutamine (Glx) for glutaminergic neurotransmission. Previous MRS studies of psychoses show mixed findings, which could reflect most: 1) only comparing metabolite levels between cases and controls rather than also examining associations with symptoms and cognitive deficits; 2) intermixing different psychoses (e.g., schizophrenia vs. affective psychoses) rather than stratifying them, a common research practice that echoes transdiagnostic approaches like NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which posits similar cellular pathologies across diagnostic categories for deficits with neurobehavioral functions. The present... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1r2627ss Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ruby, Eugene https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j4586t2 Background: Depression is highly prevalent among Korean Americans, and stigma continues to contribute to delayed help-seeking and persistent symptoms. Help-seeking behaviors are often influenced by family members and social networks. Culturally tailored, evidence-based interventions targeting these groups remain limited. Objectives: This quality improvement project aimed to evaluate the impact of a single-session, culturally tailored, Korean-language psychoeducation program in reducing depression stigma among Korean American caregivers, family members, and friends of individuals with depression. Methods: The quality improvement project used a one-group pretest–posttest design. The psychoeducational program was delivered across four cohorts, with two cohorts participating in in-person sessions and two cohorts participating in virtual sessions. Korean American adults aged 18 years and older who self-identified as caregivers, family members, or friends of someone with depression... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j4586t2 Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kim, Eun Young https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1959j62j Digital anti-Black girlhood is a complex form of multi-layered oppression enacted in digital spaces deeply rooted in sexist and racist stereotypes specifically targeting adolescent Black girls. Black teenage girls are subjected to experiencing digital anti-Black girlhood through posts, comments, and direct messages from peers, adults, and strangers, which may negatively shape their wellness, self-perception, and self-esteem. Although growing research focuses on online racism, there is minimal empirical research investigating gendered racism intersectionally on social media experienced by Black girls qualitatively. Thus, it is imperative to explore gendered racism in online spaces. This qualitative study employed constructivist grounded theory, photovoice, and Black Girl Youth Participatory Action Research (BGYPAR) to explore their experiences and implications of racialized sexism on social media. One-on-one virtual semi-structured interviews were conducted with a diverse sample... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1959j62j Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Henderson, Domonique https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ph6t8gr Collisions of heavy nuclei at ultra relativistic energies are used to study properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), a state of matter theorized to be the state of the universe approximately one microsecond after the Big Bang. This requires an enormous temperature exceeding 1012 K, and results in deconfinement of quarks and gluons from their constituent hadrons. In the extremely high temperatures created by the fireball from these collisions, pair production of strange quarks is observed to be enhanced relative to its production in smaller collision systems. The increased strangeness present in the QGP medium persists through chemical freeze out and results in an enhanced yield of strange hadrons, with strange baryons (hyperons) demonstrating greater enhancement than strange mesons. This produces an enhanced ratio of hyperon to meson production in the final state.The sPHENIX Experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL) Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is a next... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ph6t8gr Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Marshall, Thomas Ross https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pz7b2t9 Among more than 120 countries to endure an average 15 years of civil conflict since 1989, more than 85 have turned to legal interventions to punish and/or pardon armed actors. Within this period, civil wars have killed more than 10 million persons—roughly 90% civilians—dying mostly at the hands of government forces. As peace- and policymakers grapple with equally historic 140 ongoing armed conflicts and hundreds of thousands of annual fatalities—paralleling democratic backsliding’s re-reversed of the democratic third-wave and (transitional) justice cascade that brought both to three of four nations—transitional justice’s 21st-century conflation of justice for (victims of) past repressors amid political transitions, with wartime prosecutions and amnesties of tens and hundreds of thousands of fighters, respectively, has confounded both phenomena. Peacemakers and democracy advocates have been left without internally or externally valid evidence on justice to guide peace and democratization.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pz7b2t9 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 vanSonnenberg, Erik Clinton https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66p8w3xx Wetlands are the largest natural contributor of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere. The anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM) is a major sink to methane in coastal wetland sediments and is typically sulfate-dependent. Anthropogenic activity may feed nitrogen pollution into nearby coastal wetlands yet its effect on AOM is poorly understood. This study utilized isotope-labeling experiments with in vitro sediment (0–3 cm) slurry incubations to identify how nitrate in nitrogen pollution may affect coastal wetland AOM. Nitrate generally suppressed AOM, but its effect was pathway-specific: while sulfate-dependent AOM was suppressed, nitrate/nitrite and sulfate-independent AOM (e.g. iron and humics substances-dependent AOM) was not. Overall, nitrate/nitrite and sulfate-independent AOM potentially accounted for over half of AOM across the nitrate-amended incubations. Contrary to prior assumptions that sulfate-dependent AOM dominates in coastal wetland sediments, these... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66p8w3xx Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vetushko, George https://escholarship.org/uc/item/47q1j407 Psychotic spectrum disorders, including schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder with psychotic features, represent complex neuropsychiatric conditions characterized by overlapping symptomatology and substantial clinical heterogeneity. Traditional categorical diagnostic approaches often fail to capture the nuanced neurobiological mechanisms in these disorders, particularly during early psychosis when diagnostic instability is high. Dimensional approaches, exemplified by frameworks such as the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), offer complementary perspectives by examining symptom dimensions that transcend diagnostic categories, potentially revealing shared neurobiological correlates and novel understanding of symptomatology. Multimodal neuroimaging provides unprecedented opportunities to investigate brain-behavior relationships across multiple levels of neural organization. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) enables examination of white matter microstructural... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/47q1j407 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Haley https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83q2t9h8 This project examines the lived experiences of Latina-identifying working-class women to explore how racialized, gendered, and cultural expectations shape the forms, meanings, and invisibility of their labor. Drawing on oral histories, testimonios, and memory work, this project centers the experiences of a Latina mother and daughter to reveal how labor is learned, inherited, and reproduced. This research argues that Latina women’s labor extends beyond formal employment and must be understood through the everyday practices of care and sacrifice that are rendered invisible. By situating personal collective memories and narratives as legitimate sites of knowledge, this thesis demonstrates how women's narratives expose the structure that relies upon their labor while simultaneously obscuring its value. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83q2t9h8 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 López, Alicia Inés https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xn0h393 The metabolic programs supporting human cortical development remain poorly characterized despite their relevance to inborn errors of metabolism and neurodevelopmental disorders. Radial glia, the primary neural stem cells of the developing cortex, must coordinate rapid proliferation, biosynthesis, and differentiation, placing specific demands on metabolic pathways. Understanding which metabolic enzymes regulate radial glia specification and how they interface with gene regulatory programs remains as an unresolved question. This dissertation addresses it through two complementary approaches: a comprehensive atlas of metabolism across human cortical development, and a genome-scale functional screen identifying metabolic regulators of cell fate.To generate a metabolic atlas, we applied Seahorse Assays, nutrient tracing, metabolomics, and immunofluorescence to 31 human primary cortical tissue samples spanning gestational weeks 6 through 20, organized into five developmental periods.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xn0h393 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Soto, Jose Alberto https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1vv0f793 Tongan Latter-day Saint (LDS) faith communities simultaneously have indigenized their faith-based space with United States roots and transformed themselves as a result of the Anglo American faith vā (space, space between) they consume. An established Tongan LDS vā is where the Indigenous community navigates a sense of community within larger LDS Church postwelfare structures. This is the space where Tongan LDS communities seek justice and equity during disaster shock events such as COVID-19 and daily crises of safety and security. Third-sector, community-based, faith-based organizations and institutions fill the socio-spatial support gaps not provided by the state and are often the first to respond to such events. This study is informed by key theories of race and Indigeneity to illuminate the relationship between race and faith. It focused on Indigenous Tongan LDS ward and stake congregations in three specific states where there is a critical mass, namely California, Hawaiʻi,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1vv0f793 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Soakai, Sarah Lautaha https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3f10x5g1 We give new quantitative bounds for a number of problems in arithmetic combinatorics.First, we answer a question of Erdős about sets of integers with distinct subset products. Given a set A ⊆ {1, . . . , N} such that, for any distinct B, C ⊆ A, ∏ b∈B b ≠ ∏ c∈C c, we show that |A| ≤ π(N) + π(N1/2 ) + O(N5/12), where π is the prime counting function.Next, we obtain an improved bound for Roth’s theorem on three-term arithmetic progressions. If A ⊆ {1, . . . , N} has no nontrivial three-term arithmetic progressions, we prove that |A| ≤ exp(−(log N) 1/6−o(1))N.Third, we give an improved bound for the Freiman-Ruzsa theorem. Given a finite subset A of an abelian group G with |A + A| ≤ K|A|, we show that for any ε > 0, there exists a constant Cε such that A can be covered by at most exp(Cε log(2K) 1+ε ) translates of a convex coset progression with dimension at most Cε log(2K) 1+ε and size at most exp(Cε log(2K) 1+ε )|A|. This falls just short of the polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3f10x5g1 Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Raghavan, Rushil https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5m55q74b Filipino American-owned coffee shops employ multiple forms of giving. Ron Dizon and his shop, Teofilo Coffee Company, provide a space unlike extractive, corporate coffee shops. Building on community and ethnic pride, partnerships and collaborations with organizations that share a dedication to fostering relationships. This coffee shop reconstitutes “giving back” as a practice of regard for what makes consumption possible. More specifically, Teofilo offers a space to learn more about colonial and imperial history and highlights the impact of consumerism on the farmers. This thesis foregrounds Teofilo as an ethnic entrepreneur contending with its diasporic privilege while negotiating the constraints of the State. The interview with Dizon and analysis of the State-produced documents expose the entanglement of all actors in the global coffee trade and consumption. Within and against the State’s role in determining our participation in coffee consumption, I see Teofilo Coffee... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5m55q74b Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ribancos, Lauren Casey Sese https://escholarship.org/uc/item/911967j4 Reconstructing evolutionary histories and estimating the rate of evolution from molecular sequence data is of central importance in evolutionary biology and infectious disease research. This thesis develops a flexible Bayesian phylogenetic inference framework that accommodates changing evolutionary rates over time by modeling sequence character substitution processes as inhomogeneous continuous-time Markov chains (ICTMCs) acting along the unknown phylogeny, where the rate remains as an unknown, positive and integrable function of time. The integral of the rate function appears in the finite-time transition probabilities of the ICTMCs that must be efficiently computed for all branches of the phylogeny to evaluate the observed data likelihood. To circumvent computational challenges that arise from a fully nonparametric function, I first parameterize the rate function as piecewise constant with a large number of epochs. This makes the transition probability computation relatively... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/911967j4 Thu, 9 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Datta, Pratyusa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xz399zd This thesis aims to answer the question: What is the impact on the lived experiences of Asian American students in response to the closure and eventual rebranding of the Asian Pacific Islander Desi Student Engagement suite at the University of Florida to the Center of Belonging and Engagement? Through a policy analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s and the Manhattan Institute’s conservative anti-Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy memos as well as Florida’s “Higher Education” Senate Bill 266, the study assesses the political landscape of anti-DEI policies, sentiment, and implementation. The use of critical university studies provides a theoretical framework to approach understanding the site of the neoliberal University as a site of institutional harm and oppression. With the use of semi-structured interviews, I generated themes through reflexive thematic analysis on the lack of administrative transparency, emotional responses of students, loss of a counterspace, political... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xz399zd Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jumapao, Othelia N https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8km5k0pq Medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (MRONJ) is a complication of antiresorptive therapy whose earliest stages are difficult to recognize, because current diagnostic criteria require clinically exposed bone. Bisphosphonates preserve the radiographic appearance of bone even as the underlying tissue becomes nonviable, which can conceal disease during the interval before bone exposure. This study tested the hypothesis that, during early MRONJ development, antiresorptive treatment preserves alveolar bone structure while osteocyte death and bone necrosis progress, producing a temporal dissociation between radiographic appearance and tissue viability.Ligature-induced experimental periodontitis was established in rats treated with zoledronic acid or vehicle, with the contralateral non-ligated side of each animal serving as an internal control. Maxillae were collected at 72 hours and at 1, 2, and 4 weeks after ligature placement. Alveolar bone structure was assessed by micro-computed... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8km5k0pq Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Parnia, Aran https://escholarship.org/uc/item/84j936jh Pulse wave (PW) Doppler echocardiography is an essential tool in assessing diastolic function of the heart and specifically measures the frequency shift of ultrasound waves upon blood flow through the mitral valve. The changes in the velocity of moving blood is displayed as a distinct E and A wave per cardiac cycle, where the E wave represents the peak velocity of blood flow resulting from left ventricular relaxation in early diastole, and the A wave represents the peak velocity during left atrial contraction in late diastole. In healthy diastolic function, the E wave velocity is greater than the A wave velocity, and each wave displays a distinct peak with a brief diastasis period between both peaks, representing the trough between the two apexes. A recurring problem scientists face is the challenge of fused E and A mitral inflow waves due to high heart rates in murine models and inconsistencies in fusion resulting from technician technique variability. This limitation of diastolic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/84j936jh Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shahbazian, Sera Dura https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6mr6n9mc UV laser ablation is explored as a processing step towards diamond thinning compatible with wafer bonding and advanced packaging. Diamond remains among the most challenging wide bandgap materials to process due to its hardness, thermal conductivity, and inert chemical nature. Single crystal thin film diamond is uniquely attractive for next generation power, RF, and heat-spreading technologies. Traditional thinning relies on mechanical lapping that is slow or on Smart-Cut™ ion implantation, which has had limited success. Ultraviolet (UV) laser ablation provides an alternative that can remove over ten microns per minute.Experiments were performed with a 330 nm UV Laser over a 5x5 mm area, focused at 10 µm below the substrate surface. Parameter sweeps which indicate regimes for high ablation efficiency include high power, low number of raster passes, and pattern geometry with raster lines spaced microns apart. This process succeeds as a coarse removal step, surfaces resulting from... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6mr6n9mc Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sandhu, Terrindeep Singh https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rq2v0zz Anti-money laundering (AML) in cryptocurrency networks represents one of the most challenging problems at the intersection of financial security, legal compliance, and machine learning. Bitcoin's pseudonymous design has been widely exploited for illicit financial activities such as ransomware, dark-market transactions, and money laundering. However, the open and immutable nature of the Bitcoin blockchain simultaneously creates an unprecedented forensic opportunity in which the full history of every transaction is publicly available as a traversable graph. Consequently, the development of automated methods to detect these illicit transactions is imperative for global financial security.This thesis uses a comparative framework for detecting illicit Bitcoin transactions using the Elliptic Dataset. The thesis establishes machine learning baselines including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, and Multilayer Perceptron, and then we subsequently also conduct a systematic comparison... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rq2v0zz Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Kathleen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dh7m1x6 Individuals who receive an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) following a life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia often face substantial challenges, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite their clinical significance, research examining whether these symptoms differ from PTSD symptoms following external trauma (e.g., assault, accidents) and evaluating evidence-based PTSD interventions in this population remains limited. This dissertation comprised two studies designed to characterize the psychological experiences and treatment needs of these individuals and evaluate Written Exposure Therapy (WET), a brief trauma-focused intervention, in this population.Study 1 used semi-structured interviews with individuals who had received an ICD and reported heightened cardiac trauma-related PTSD symptoms (N = 6). Reflexive thematic analysis examined the alignment of participants’ descriptions with DSM-5 PTSD criteria and the Enduring Somatic Threat (EST) model of medically... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dh7m1x6 Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Meinhausen, Corinne https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48x2p7j2 Background: Black women experience disproportionate health burdens driven by chronic exposure to stressors shaped by intersecting racial and gender inequality. Allostatic load (AL), a biomarker of cumulative physiological wear and tear, captures the long-term health impact of chronic stress. Identifying psychosocial factors that contribute to AL is important for understanding how social and structural stressors shape physiological health among Black women. Goal-striving stress (GSS), defined as the psychosocial stress associated with striving toward goals while facing constrained opportunities and systemic barriers, may capture an important yet understudied dimension of stress within this population. This study examines the relationship between GSS and AL among Black women.Methods: Data were drawn from the Nashville Stress and Health Study (NSAHS, 2011-2014), an epidemiological community sample of non-Hispanic Black and White adults ages 22–69 in Nashville, Tennessee. Analyses... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48x2p7j2 Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bradley, Angelica https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kg785pb Background. Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) affects over 34 million adults in the U.S., with a significant impact on Hispanic communities, who face higher complication rates and access barriers. Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support (DSMES) can improve glycemic outcomes and self-efficacy, but participation remains low, especially among underserved populations. The rise of digital technologies and social media may present new opportunities for culturally relevant diabetes education and support.Aims. (1) Examine the effectiveness of Social Media Use for Self-Management Education and Support for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Adults: Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis. (2) Assess the quality of TikTok-based T2DM information in English and Spanish using the Association of Diabetes Care and Education Specialists' seven self-care behaviors (ADCES7) framework. (3) Analyze TikTok content about T2DM in English and Spanish using thematic analysis and computational psycholinguistics.Methods.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kg785pb Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Diaz, Lisa Marie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k8r776 The problem of designing a low-noise broadband phase locked loop (PLL) becomes exceptionally intriguing as more and more electronic devices have been integrated to achieve Internet of Things. This thesis investigates a broadband sampling PLL architecture incorporating a noise-shifting Colpitts oscillator to improve phase-noise performance.The sampling phase detector is first analyzed from both mixer-based and time-domain perspectives. Phase-noise generation in LC oscillators is then reviewed using phasor-based and impulse sensitivity function (ISF) interpretations. Several baseline oscillator topologies, including cross-coupled LC, noise-filtered cross-coupled, Colpitts, and Clapp oscillators, are compared under common design constraints. A g_m-boosted noise-shifting Colpitts oscillator is designed and evaluated. ISF and noise modulation function simulations show that the proposed topology reduces the effective ISF near the zero crossings, explaining its improved phase-noise performance.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k8r776 Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gao, Yunxiang https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21j688ph Shot volume is a fundamental indicator of attacking involvement in soccer because shots occur more frequently than goals and provide a more stable measure of opportunity. This thesis develops a statistical framework for predicting player-level shot output in Premier League matches using player match logs and match-level team context. The model predicts shots per 90 minutes from long-term shooting rate, recent form, non-penalty expected goals, shot-creating actions, team possession, team attacking form, opponent defensive form, venue, and position. Out-of-sample validation compares a shooting-only baseline, expanded linear model, count models, and a quadratic linear specification. The final approach translates predicted shots per 90 into expected match-level shot totals using expected minutes and then maps those totals to Poisson probabilities. A case study for Bukayo Saka against Chelsea illustrates how the method produces interpretable probabilities for over/under shotlines.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21j688ph Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Grover, Matheus Daniel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1549v749 Double Concerto is a work inspired by an instrumental genre which would not exist, had it not been for the husband-and-wife duo of Heinz and Ursula Holliger, for whom dozens of works for oboe and harp have been written by several of the greatest composers of the last century, including Elliott Carter, Hans Werner Henze, André Jolivet, Witold Lutosławski, Frank Martin, Alfred Schnittke, Tōru Takemitsu, and Isang Yun. This work is modeled off of the instrumentation of Lutosławski’s own Double Concerto (oboe, harp, two percussionists, and twelve strings), composed in 1980; although not a structural derivative of Lutosławski’s work, Double Concerto endeavors to expand on the tonal and textural qualities inherent with such an ensemble, with each movement pursuing different sonorities and compositional processes. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1549v749 Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Schreiber, Thacher Paul https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0wc0n4tc Watts, Los Angeles, California, is a culturally vibrant community burdened by environmental injustice. This dissertation describes collaborative research that supports community goals in addressing environmental concerns. It presents the positioning of this research in the relevant disciplines (Background), a framework we co-developed and co-published to support participatory action research and community-university partnerships (Chapter 1), a policy brief we co-authored on exploring the probability of pipes containing lead in Watts (Chapter 2), a report we co-authored documenting lead contamination in the Watts public housing developments and private properties and press coverage of the research (Chapters 3 and Appendix), a paper showing how racial and spatial identity impact environmental justice organizing in Watts (Chapter 4), a co-developed memorandum of understanding between UCLA and the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC) and the Better Watts Initiative (BWI)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0wc0n4tc Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hoague, Danielle Shelley https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98r5g5nk Sleep disorders are a major public health concern with many known comorbidities, such as heart disease, depression, and anxiety. Women are more susceptible to sleep disorders such as insomnia. Previous studies have shown that males exhibit more resilient recovery phenotypes following sleep disruptions.1 There is a significant overlap in regulatory brain regions involving sleep and stress, particularly in the hypothalamus. We hypothesize that the resilience to sleep loss typically observed in males is a component of the sleep recovery response following psychological stress. The Four Core Genotype (FCG) is a mouse model that allows us to elucidate sex differences in sleep by separating genotypic and phenotypic aspects of sex. Brain regions responsible for homeostatic mechanisms of sleep and stress will be isolated from the hypothalamus following either one hour of sleep deprivation (GH) or restraint stress (RS). We performed fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) to visualize... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98r5g5nk Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kahan, Mackenna https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rw4622q Under the 47th presidential administration, immigration has become increasingly criminalized through intensified ICE arrests, and workplace safety efforts have been reduced through budget cuts and decreased federal enforcement from OSHA. While immigration enforcement and its economic and political impact on workplace safety have been studied over the years, there is a gap in understanding whether a relationship exists between immigration enforcement and OSHA complaints.Drawing on the Theory of Work Adjustment and the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study hypothesizes that increased immigration enforcement may have spillover effects on occupational health and safety regulation outcomes. This may lead to a chilling effect, reducing workers’ willingness to report workplace violations and resulting in a decline in OSHA complaints and subsequent inspections. A secondary data analysis was conducted to examine whether an increase in ICE arrests from 2024 to 2025 is associated with declines... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rw4622q Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Young, Josephine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8230631x Three-dimensional (3D) printing has transformed digital dentistry, enabling chair-side and laboratory fabrication of provisional crowns, bridges, and definitive restorations from photopolymer resins. Surface glazing of these printed restorations is performed to seal the oxygen-inhibited layer, improve color stability, polish, and wear resistance. However, the compatibility of commercially available glaze coatings with newer 3D-printable resin chemistries is incompletely characterized, and clinically meaningful delamination of the glaze layer remains an under-reported failure mode.This in vitro study evaluated the shear bond strength (SBS) and failure mode of five commercially available light-cured glaze coatings applied to a 3D-printed permanent crown and bridge resin (EZPRINT Crown & Bridge 2.0; Aidite). 150 standardized disk specimens were fabricated and randomly assigned to three groups of thirty (n = 30): Group ID380, ID NANO GLAZE 380 nm (ID America); Group ID460, ID... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8230631x Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ghulman, Moayyad https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7q21j0g6 This thesis examines how institutional characteristics are associated with median earnings ten years after entry across U.S. colleges and universities using institution-level data from the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard. The analysis includes institutional control, predominant degree awarded, geographic region, location type, open-admission status, in-state tuition, median student debt, Pell Grant share, federal loan share, undergraduate enrollment, and completion rate. Missing predictor values were addressed using multiple imputation by chained equations. Multiple linear regression, log-linear regression, and random forest were used to evaluate these relationships. Across models, institutional control, predominant degree awarded, Pell Grant share, and completion rate emerged as important correlates of earnings outcomes. The log-linear model provided improved diagnostics and the preferred basis for interpretation. Overall, the findings suggest that earnings outcomes... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7q21j0g6 Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhuravleva, Daria https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kj73711 This thesis investigates the applicability of Peer Elicitation Games (PEG) to the task of AI-generated text detection. PEG, introduced by Chen et al., is a training-free, game theoretic framework that aligns a team of large language models and has them interact in a peer evaluation setting; reward utilities are computed using a determinant-based mutual information score which provably incentivizes truthful reporting without requiring ground truth. This study adapts the PEG framework to a binary bot detection task by applying it to a corpus of 10000 texts (5000 human-written and 5000 AI-generated), utilizing eight general-purpose instruction-tuned language models across four scaling configurations (3, 6, 7, and 8 models). We find that PEG does not reliably improve bot detection accuracy above the random baseline in any configuration. Majority vote accuracy ranges between 46.47% to 50.16%. Through this study, we identify main failure modes in this study that led to the inability... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kj73711 Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hui, Christy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7fb5z5hg Vestibule is an original score composed for a three-movement dance production, created in collaboration with choreographer Kate Myers. This project extends the practice of composing for visual media beyond its home in film and television, treating dance as a visual medium with its own scoring logic. Drawing on minimalism and tactile sound-design sensibilities of experimental electronic music, the score integrates foley-based and ambient textures as core compositional material. The three movements trace stages of a personal journey: "Rooting," the most kinetic and production-forward movement, depicts the necessary disorder preceding growth; "Flowing" opens into a spacious, meditative ambience built from organic sound textures before introducing synthesizer and strings; and "Beaming" releases into joyful energy before settling into a warm, bittersweet string finale centered on acceptance. Vestibule reflects the potential of cross-medium collaboration and the challenge of embracing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7fb5z5hg Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Miedziak, Grace Lauren https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6g3427zv This thesis investigates whether permanent magnets can replace electromagnetic coils in a reconnecting plasmoid thruster, where magnetic reconnection drives Alfvenic plasma outflows and thrust scales as ? = ? 2?/?0, decoupling exhaust velocity from propellant ion mass. The magnetic topology required for plasmoid-unstable reconnection at ? ≳ 104 was reproduced using an optimized array of discrete permanent dipoles, formulated as constrained sparse regression over candidate magnet locations. Two algorithms were implemented in SIMSOPT: Greedy Permanent Magnet Optimization, which produced a binary layout of 178 magnets across 6 concentric rings at a fixed dipole moment of 11.3 A · m2 , and Relax-and-Split, which allowed continuous dipole strengths between 11.3 A · m2 and 61.2 A · m2 for closer field matching at higher fabrication cost. Both solutions reproduce the large-scale field reversal topology required for current sheet formation with good agreement against the NIMROD coil reference.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6g3427zv Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mergia, Yohannes Teshome https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66b7z4t1 This qualitative study explored early childhood teacher perceptions on the use of shepherding and rewarding touch in hypothetical routine transition scenarios. The study sought to understand what early childhood teachers thought about the use of each touch type, and the considerations they believed the teacher in the scenario made before using each touch type. Fourteen participants currently employed in classrooms with 3-to-5-year-old children were interviewed online using the Zoom video conferencing application. The study revealed that participants regarded affectionate-rewarding touch more highly than controlling-shepherding touch even though they believed shepherding touch was used more commonly in early childhood settings. The temporal environment in early childhood settings and power were themes that explained why shepherding touch was so much more common. Participants also shared their perspectives on the social-emotional and behavioral implications of each touch type, discussing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66b7z4t1 Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Drmandjian, Vartuhe Rose https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64q454tm Chronic sleep disruption is a major risk factor for anxiety, depression, and stress-related disorders, yet the behavioral consequences of sleep loss in females remain significantly understudied. The majority of preclinical sleep-stress research has been conducted in male animals, yet the field lacks an effective understanding of how sleep deprivation shapes stress susceptibility in females, who experience higher rates of insomnia and affective disorders. The purpose of this project is to determine whether chronic sleep deprivation induces social avoidance behavior in female mice and whether the severity of sleep loss modulates these behavioral outcomes. Using a graded sleep deprivation paradigm (six h/day or 12 h/day for 10 days), we assessed social interaction behavior before and after sleep disruption using an automated tracking system with a novel CD-1 male mouse stimulus. We compared time spent in the interaction zone, number of approaches, and total distance traveled before... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64q454tm Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fletcher, Janette Asha https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58j715f7 Wildfire risk has become an urgent concern across the western United States, with California experiencing unprecedented fire seasons over the past two decades. Los Angeles County is a particularly compelling study area: its unique geography of coastal zones, dense urban development, and mountainous terrain creates highly heterogeneous fire regimes, further amplified by Santa Ana winds, prolonged droughts, and expanding development at the wildland–urban interface (WUI). High-profile events such as the 2019 Getty Fire, the 2021 Palisades Fire, and more recent incidents in 2025 have demonstrated how rapidly wildfires can ignite and spread within this region. Wildfires are inherently spatio-temporal phenomena whose risk is shaped by both environmental conditions and past events, making space-time statistical models—which jointly account for location and timing—especially well suited to this problem.In this thesis, I first develop exploratory analyses using kernel density estimates... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58j715f7 Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ramaseshan, Ashwin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nb9x2c5 Secure multiparty computation (MPC) allows mutually distrusting parties to jointly evaluate a function while keeping their inputs private. The recent protocol of [GLOS25] is, at the time of writing, the most asymptotically efficient constant-round MPC protocol known under minimal cryptographic assumptions. Although that work does not consider randomized encodings (RE), we show that RE are compatible with the underlying round-collapsing compiler framework. Using RE, we propose a candidate extension of the baseline protocol in the honest-but-curious honest-majority setting that reduces the κ factor in the communication complexity to κ o(1) when the circuit C has depth bounded by o(log κ). For constant-depth circuits, we remove the κ factor altogether. We then discuss the limitations of this result: the depth restriction restricts our new protocol to low-depth circuits and it is unclear whether optimizations such as the transpose protocol for SIMD circuits carry over from garbled... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nb9x2c5 Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Huang, Jason https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48q797c0 This thesis is in collaboration with WagerWire and focuses on NFL futures markets, where wagers on outcomes such as Super Bowl winners and season win totals must account for long forecasting horizons and substantial uncertainty. This thesis develops a quantitative framework for NFL futures forecasting built around an optimized Elo rating system combined with Monte Carlo season simulation, with application to WagerWire’s secondary marketplace for futures tickets. The proposed Elo model incorporates margin-of-victory adjustments, a decaying K-factor, and a market-anchoring mechanism that considers market-betting closing lines. Preseason ratings are initialized using a combination of regressed prior-season Elo, Super Bowl futures odds, and sportsbook season win totals. Core model parameters are optimized through grid search using soft-label log loss against devigged closing odds across 11 NFL seasons, from the 2015-2016 through the 2025-2026 season. These game-level probabilities... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48q797c0 Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wong, Nicholas Gambuzzi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/46p5h47f As AI systems take on more of the cognitive work of science, a foundational question arises: how can human and AI reasoning be made legible to each other? This thesis argues that any productive human-AI scientific collaboration must employ an intermediate representation (IR) that makes each party’s reasoning visible, structured, and contestable.We present Syrup, a system in which humans and AI collaboratively reason about scientific papers through a shared concept-role graph, a network of concepts and their argumentative roles that both parties can inspect, restructure, and negotiate. Through design probe studies with researchers conducting paper revision and reading, we find that Syrup supports different modes of reasoning and facilitates human-AI communication.We situate the system within an investigation of representation consistency. An early two-step LLM graph-extraction pipeline tested whether such a representation could be canonically extracted; its failure modes shaped... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/46p5h47f Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Simon, Michael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zx1979p The mitochondrial proteome is a dynamic environment that undergoes significant remodeling under stress conditions such as depolarization and aging, contributing to mitochondrial dysfunction implicated in neurodegenerative disease, metabolic disorders, and cardiovascular pathology. Despite its biological importance, comprehensive characterization of the mitochondrial proteome under stress conditions remains challenging, as traditional approaches such as subcellular fractionation and co-immunoprecipitation are limited by their inability to capture transient interactions and condition-dependent protein associations in their native cellular context, necessitating proximity-dependent labeling approaches. While the recent development of biotinylating enzymes TurboID and split-TurboID have emerged as powerful proximity-dependent biotinylation tools for proteome mapping in living cells, a direct comparative evaluation of their performance for outer mitochondrial membrane (OMM) proximal... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zx1979p Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sargsyan, Anna https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jx9x6cj Once thought of as a children’s toy, video games have developed into a valuable storytelling tool, adapting and creating stories that routinely permeate popular culture. As their influence has grown, so has the variety of stories being told through the medium. This includes stories centering Black diasporic experiences through folklore and cultural values. Yet, as Black presence in video games has increased, concentrated efforts to silence their voices through hate movements have emerged to a point where they have now grown to influence global politics.Most notably, Steve Bannon, the former Chief Political Strategist to Donald Trump, recognized the potential of radicalizing and weaponizing white male gamers as far back as 2005 within World of Warcraft communities. Bannon’s subsequent appointment as the head of far right website Breitbart News in 2012 put him in an ideal position to follow through on a far more ambitious project of radicalization which manifested as the GamerGate... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jx9x6cj Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jackson, Joshua Christopher https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b4401z6 The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the rise of streaming services, have had a substantial impact on theatrical box office performance. Studios are no longer solely focused on producing high-quality films but must also market them effectively to encourage audiences to attend theatrical screenings. One of the most important components of a film's marketing campaign is its official trailer. This study examines the relationship between audience reactions to trailers and eventual box office success by conducting sentiment analysis on YouTube comments associated with official movie trailers. Results indicate that positive sentiment is positively associated with commercial success, while also suggesting that additional factors contribute to theatrical performance. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b4401z6 Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Juarez, Alysa Renee https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2qq0n7qx Light is the dominant environmental cue for circadian entrainment, yet the relative contributions of spectral composition and illuminance to daytime entrainment remain incompletely resolved. We tested the hypothesis that short-wavelength–enriched daytime light would promote more robust circadian regulation than longer-wavelength light in wild-type C57BL/6J mice. Adult male and female mice were exposed to one of six daytime lighting conditions that varied in spectral composition and intensity: 7000 K blue-enriched white light, 4500 K white light, or red light, each delivered at either 50 or 10 photopic lux. Daily locomotor activity was monitored using running wheels to assess entrainment under stable 12:12 light:dark conditions. Mice were subsequently challenged with a series of photic manipulations, including re-entrainment to phase shifts, negative masking, photic phase shifting in constant darkness, exposure to constant light, and entrainment to a skeleton photoperiod. Under... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2qq0n7qx Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Caihan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gc5k9b4 Hydrofluorocarbon-based plasmas are widely used in semiconductor manufacturing for SiO2 etching and chamber cleaning; however, many of these chemistries have high global warming potential (GWP) and long atmospheric lifetimes, leading to regulatory phasedown by the Environmental Protection Agency. This work investigates CF3–X plasmas (X = H, F, I) with the goal of reducing, abating, or replacing high-GWP hydrofluorocarbon chemistries. Reduction was studied through adding secondary gases such as O2 and Ar. Abatement was evaluated using downstream O2 plasma for decomposing reactive species in the exhaust. Replacement examines lower-GWP CF3I plasma, where its limited kinetics data prompted the use of Machine Learning (ML)-assisted automatic differentiation (AD) inverse modeling to determine unknown iodine-related surface kinetics, leveraging halogen descriptors such as C–X bond dissociation energy, Si–X bond energy, and electronegativity (χ). CHF3/O2/Ar plasma was evaluated... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gc5k9b4 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lin, Chi-Yun https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zq0952f Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that invoke external tools introduce a new attack surface: indirect prompt injection, where malicious instructions are embedded in retrieved documents rather than the user’s input. This thesis empirically evaluates four mitigation strategies—prompt-level defense, rule-based sanitization, tool-use restriction, and attribution gating—applied individually and as a full stack, against five attack types across three large language models (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-turbo) in a controlled 17,278-run experiment.The full mitigation stack reduces the attack success rate from 40.6% to 0.2% while preserving benign utility (90.6% to 90.2%) and improving latency. Among individual layers, rule-based sanitization is the strongest (3.2% ASR) while attribution gating provides negligible protection (40.9%). We introduce a novel attack category, information pollution (A5), in which the sentinel value is embedded as factual domain data rather than... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zq0952f Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 WANG, ZHIXIAN https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8w645330 Amyloid proteins play a role in the pathology of numerous diseases, from dementias including Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease to Type 2 Diabetes. Amyloid proteins are characterized by a propensity to misfold into highly ordered β-sheet fibril structures. However, the early-stage oligomers of amyloid proteins have recently gained support for being the toxic species in amyloid pathology. Despite decades of research, no robust description of the early stages of oligomerization has been defined for any amyloid. α-synuclein, involved in Parkinson’s Disease, and islet amyloid polypeptide (amylin), implicated in Type 2 Diabetes, form two case studies demonstrating the utility of native and top-down mass spectrometry for elucidating early-stage oligomerization pathways and how the interactions of amyloids with homologous proteins impact aggregation. α-synuclein is a synaptic vesicle-associated protein whose homolog, β-synuclein, has been implicated in modulating α-synuclein... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8w645330 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Heidersbach, Zoe Jacqueline https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nk6c682 Sleep is a fundamental process to biological life, with extant organisms demonstrating functionally comparable forms of sleep across the entire tree of life; its ubiquity underpins its necessity, having emerged several hundred million years prior and remaining conserved into present day. Despite being a core component of our physiology, sleep is often disregarded—both in daily life, but especially within human health and disease, and particularly in Myotonic Dystrophy Type 1 (DM1), for which sleep and cognitive disruptions remain both the most severe reported symptoms and the least understood. In this study, we characterize changes to sleep architecture and sleep recovery resultant from knockout of Muscleblind-like protein 2 (Mbnl2), an alternative splicing regulator implicated in the etiology DM1. We report light phase-specific increases to REM proportions, REM sleep fragmentation, aberrant reductions in alpha and theta power spectra consistent with clinical symptoms, and disrupted... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nk6c682 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Capuno, Christian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n86x84d This dissertation tells the story of how Atlanta got its arts center. Opened in 1968 along Atlanta’s famed Peachtree Street, the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center was the culmination of a near decade-long struggle by city leaders to establish cultural roots and was the first of its kind in the US to house “all the arts under one roof.” Drawing on extensive archival research conducted at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Archive, this dissertation details the development of the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center from conception to completion, including the segregation-tinged battle over an arts center in Piedmont Park, the strategic merging of the Art Association and Symphony Guild into the Atlanta Arts Alliance, Inc., and the legal and logistical battle over the McBurney Estate, an existing Art Association property whose bequest came with strings attached.Ultimately, I position the arts center as a physical manifestation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n86x84d Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Brunson, Kerry https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mz348dc Burnout among healthcare workers has important implications for well-being, stability, and quality of care, yet large-scale measurement remains difficult using traditional survey-based methods. This thesis investigates the use of natural language processing and machine learning to identify burnout-related language in Reddit comments from healthcare- related communities. Reddit data from 2016 to 2024 were collected from multiple subreddits and labeled as burnout or control using a rule-based framework.The study evaluates Logistic Regression with TF-IDF features, a Simple Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network (BiLSTM), and fine-tuned BERT models. To address class imbalance, models were assessed under both a full imbalanced setting with class-weighted learning and an undersampled 3:1 control-to-burnout setting. Logistic Regression provided a strong baseline, the Simple RNN showed limited performance, and the BiLSTM and BERT produced the strongest... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mz348dc Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nusratty, Setara https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cn96472 The nonlinear optics of plasmas (NLOP) is a fundamental topic within plasma physics. A sub-area of NLOP is laser-plasma interactions (LPI) that involve three-wave coupling. Three wave LPI processes are of interest for inertial fusion energy (IFE) and are a fundamental nonlinear plasma physics research area. Stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) is one LPI of interest where an incident pump laser decays into a scattered electromagnetic wave (EM) and an electron plasma wave (EPW). There is much interest in SRS backscatter where the direction of the scattered EM wave is opposite that of the pump. Much previous research on SRS has involved the study of how plane waves propagate in plasmas. However, in IFE the lasers are broken up into multiple finite-width and length speckles which are related to Gaussian-limited laser pulses, which can be decomposed into Laguerre-Gaussian modes. A Laguerre-Gaussian mode can have orbital angular momentum (OAM).The interaction of finite-width Gaussian... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cn96472 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chase, Sarah Elizabeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8074k84r A Festival of Light is a new musical drama that reimagines the Chanukah story through a contemporary lens while remaining rooted in Jewish history, liturgy, and tradition. The drama opens amid the turbulent world of the Jewish people living under Greek rule, setting the stage for the cultural and religious pressures that would ultimately spark the Maccabean revolt. It then turns toward the profound grief of a people confronted with the desecration of their Holy Temple, a moment rendered in music of mourning and longing. From this darkness emerges the priestly Maccabee family, who lead the Jewish people in battle against their Greek occupiers. When they return victorious to the Holy Temple, they witness the miracle of light itself: the sacred Menorah burning against all odds, a symbol of hope that has endured for millennia. The work concludes with a jubilant finale celebrating the modern holiday of Chanukah and the enduring relevance of its themes for contemporary Jewish life.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8074k84r Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fogelman, Yoni B https://escholarship.org/uc/item/74z5m1pc What information science methods and tools support media preservation and information access methods in independent and creator-owned studios? How might these tools be made to align with the ethos and ideals behind the management and longevity of these studios? How does Critical Role as a case study lend itself to critiques of existing IS tools and methods? In my work, I survey existing literature to answer questions of how library and information studies might contribute to the sustainability and future of creator-owned, independent studios. Using Critical Role as a case study, I explored Critical Role’s media production work and formulated ideas on how to address the information resource gap regarding long-term preservation efforts for their media assets with Linear Tape-Open, and structuring records in a formal content library with Critical Code Studies and Object-Oriented Programming ontologies. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/74z5m1pc Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chapuis, Abigail https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kw094p0 This study constructs a canine epigenetic age clock from buccal swab whole-genome bisulfite sequencing using a k-mer haplotype encoding framework. A three-level hierarchical ensemble was applied across eight genomic loci, with five model families evaluated at each level; the best-performing model achieved a mean absolute error of 1.005 years and median absolute error of 0.419 years (Pearson r = 0.946), with a k = 2 control confirming that co-methylation patterns across neighboring CpGs carry age-related information beyond single-site methylation state. Locus importance and marginal predictive rank diverged in the genome ensemble, suggesting the model exploits complementary information across loci. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kw094p0 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Alexander Mingpu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gz664jh Numerous studies have explored the relationship between built environment characteristics and transit ridership. However, little research has tested whether the number or size of station-adjacent commercial establishments have an independent association with rail ridership. Using negative binomial regression, I analyze the association between rail station alightings and the number of commercial establishments in three size categories: less than 700 square feet, 701–2,000 square feet, and 2,001–5,000 square feet. I also test whether these relationships vary by distance from the rail station (within a quarter-mile and a half-mile buffers) and between weekdays and weekends. I find no statistical significance between the number of small and medium-large commercial establishments within a half-mile of a station and rail a lightings. A marginal association is observed between medium establishments and rail alightings at the half-mile on weekends, though the relationship is substantively... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gz664jh Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hua, Michael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dg4n261 A deep and pervasive mystery in vision science is how the visual system constructs enduring symbolic representations of object shape from transient and sub-symbolic registers of local contrast energy. Here, I focus on investigating the issue as it bears on the perception of smooth, 2D contour shape. A growing body of evidence suggests that smooth contours may be encoded using constant-curvature approximations that efficiently capture their essential geometry. In this dissertation, I investigate the possibility of specialized operators that could implement such encoding, along with the spatial properties that govern their operation, using a combination of computational modeling and psychophysical experimentation. Chapter 1 reviews evidence from several lines of research supporting the hypothesis that constant curvature serves as a fundamental primitive of smooth 2D contour representation. Chapter 2 details the implementation and evaluation of the Arclet Model: a biologically plausible... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dg4n261 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Phillips, Austin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6bf7x4zj Sleep and circadian disruptions have been linked to neuronal genome instability, aberrant retrotransposon activity, and cognitive deficits. Recent studies have demonstrated increases in double stranded DNA breaks (DSBs) after learning, along with an uptick in LINE-1 retrotransposon activity; but how sleep loss influences DNA damage, LINE-1 retrotransposon behavior, and memory remains unclear. We tested the performance of wild-type (WT) and Bmal1 muscle‑overexpressing (Bmal1 mOE) mutant male mice on a hippocampal‑dependent novel object location recognition (NOLR) task after 12 hours of sleep deprivation (SD). We then compared how SD and/or SD+NOLR affected the expression of c‑Fos, a marker of neural activity, γ‑H2AX - a phosphorylated histone variant that localizes at DSB sites, and LINE‑1 ORF1p - the nucleic acid chaperone protein of retrotransposon LINE-1 in the hippocampal regions: dentate gyrus (DG) and CA3. WT mice exposed to SD had impaired NOLR performance, whereas both... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6bf7x4zj Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rajhans, Abhas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/68x6n4zk The rapid simulation and characterization of solid-state semiconductor quantum dot devices and architectures has been a challenging problem of growing interest as quantum technology scales. Fundamentally, quantum mechanics allows for information to be encoded through quantum superpositions and entanglement, procedures with no classical counterpart. For a certain class of problems, this enables exponential speedup, and lets us tackle problems that are inaccessible to a classical computer. Existing modalities (e.g. trapped ions, superconductors, semiconductor quantum dots, etc.) each boast distinct advantages and drawbacks, with no single platform exceptionally dominant. The mature silicon-based semiconductor industry that underpins modern technology comes from decades of accumulated fabrication expertise and infrastructure. As a result, semiconductor quantum dots based on these Group IV materials have an advantage through their compatibility with the existing chip fabrication industry.Approaches... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/68x6n4zk Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nodel, Ron https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6883q6s7 Background: Workplace violence (WPV) is a significant threat to nurse safety, particularly in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) medical-surgical settings where patients often present with complex psychiatric, medical, and social comorbidities. Although behavioral emergency responses (“Code Green” activations) are intended for true crises, anecdotal and unit-level data suggest many are initiated prematurely due to limited staff confidence in managing escalating patient behavior.Objectives: The purpose of this quality improvement project was to evaluate whether advanced de-escalation training modeled after Prevention and Management of Disruptive Behavior (PMDB) Level IV content could improve nurse confidence in managing aggressive patient behavior and reduce Code Green activations on a high-risk medical-surgical unit.Methods: This Doctor of Nursing Practice quality improvement project used a pre-test/post-test design at a Southern California VA Medical Center. Seventeen staff... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6883q6s7 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Agiba, Abraham https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66c5583p This qualitative study examines how ten non-Western international students at Handong Global University (HGU), South Korea, construct and enact global citizenship within a Western-oriented Global Citizenship Education (GCED) framework. Using a phenomenological orientation, data were collected through in-depth interviews with participants from ten non-Western countries across Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Five findings emerged. First, participants grounded global citizenship in relational, moral, and identity-based orientations, particularly empathy, hospitality, care, and accountability, aligning more closely with critical than soft GCED. Second, participants' issue priorities and civic aspirations were inseparable from their biographical and national contexts, with lived experiences of injustice, structural inequality, and political constraint shaping their engagement with global issues. Third, they drew... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66c5583p Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yoon, Chung Min https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q32n5zd While the role of the mu opioid receptor (MOR) in mesolimbic circuits has been widely studied for its role in opioid reward and addiction, its role on indirect pathway medium spiny neurons (MSNs) in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is not fully understood. This study sought to understand the role of these neurons, using adenosine 2a receptors (A2aR) as a protein marker, in opioid reward under a chronic neuropathic pain mouse model. Whole-brain MOR ablation was carried out using the genetic paradigm A2a-Cre crossed with MORloxP/loxP mice. Following oxycodone conditioning, animals with MORs knocked out exhibited significantly greater oxycodone preference regardless of pain state compared to wildtype littermates Subsequently, a conditional MOR ablation from MSNs in the medial shell of the NAc was carried out using a novel CRISPR-Cas9 viral construct. Animals with bilateral MOR knock-out exhibited significantly greater oxycodone preference when compared to control unilateral or... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q32n5zd Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ohanian, Lilit Azatui https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5p46d889 Background: Hypertension (HTN) is a leading cause of cardiovascular disease, morbidity, and mortality in patients with uncontrolled blood pressure (BP). Lack of knowledge, inadequate self-care behaviors, and poor medication adherence contribute to suboptimal BP control despite available treatments. Nurse practitioners (NPs) can lead telehealth-supported interventions that promote self-management and improve BP outcomes. In primary care settings, a substantial number of adult patients present with uncontrolled BP with routine clinic visits. Literature reviews of randomized control trials (RCT) indicate that telehealth and patient-centered interventions address challenges such as health literacy, access, time, transportation, and financial constraints, especially in underserved populations. Objectives: The quality improvement project aimed to evaluate the effects of NP-led home BP telemonitoring (HBPT), education and lifestyle modification on BP control, adherence and self-management... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5p46d889 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Amjadi, Roya https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nc3w64p Artificial-intelligence workloads are increasingly limited by the energy and latency cost of moving data between memory and compute units. Compute-in-memory (CiM) accelerators reduce this data movement by performing matrix-vector multiplications directly inside memory arrays. However, practical multi-bit CiM designs face a tradeoff among accuracy, energy efficiency, density, and re-write ability. This thesis presents an accurate, energy-efficient, and flexible architecture for multi-bit analog CiM using per-cell digital-to-analog converters (DACs). Rather than storing weights in charge-trap transistors (CTTs), CTTs calibrate compact per-cell DACs, enabling low-power multi-bit activation generation. Weights are stored in embedded dynamic random-access memory, allowing straightforward rewriting and flexible updates. An in-situ write-verify-write loop compensates for device mismatch and read-out-path non-idealities, enabling accurate current-mode computation. Circuit simulations... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nc3w64p Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chakrabarty, Samyak https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n3025gr Huntington’s disease (HD) is a rare neurodegenerative disorder caused by a mutation in the gene that encodes for huntingtin (HTT), resulting in misfolding and aggregation of the protein product. Mutant huntingtin misfolding and aggregation are key histopathological features of HD and are associated with progressive cortico-striatal dysfunction. Circadian-based interventions may offer a novel strategy to modify disease progression. Previous studies have shown improved sleep quality and activity rhythms by the circadian-based intervention time-restricted feeding (TRF) in a mouse model of HD, the bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC)-mediated transgenic mouse HD (BACHD), as well as behavioral ameliorations and a reduction in the deposits of beta-amyloid protein in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s Disease. Together, these findings suggest that TRF may influence pathological protein accumulation, including mutant huntingtin (mHtt). Therefore, we sought to investigate the effects of TRF... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n3025gr Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Balu, Vedant https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bv252s7 Large language models trained on sequential data have demonstrated surprising emergent capabilities, yet their internal computations remain poorly understood. This thesis investigates the mechanistic interpretability of OthelloGPT, a decoder-only transformer trained solely to predict legal moves in the board game Othello on a reduced 6 × 6 board.We apply two complementary interpretability techniques. First, we train linear and nonlinear probing classifiers on the model’s residual stream activations to test whether board state is encoded in a linearly accessible form. We used the probing classifiers to test whether board cell ownership (empty, mine, opponent) can be decoded from intermediate activations. We made a comparison with an 8-head Transformer variant of OthelloGPT. We find that board state is moderately readable but significantly less so than in a wider 8-head architecture, despite the 2-head model achieving higher task performance—a finding that challenges the assumption... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bv252s7 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cai, Xintong Jessica https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jw6z71k The integrity of human cognition relies on a delicate neural economy: the ability to efficiently gate sensory input and reserve attentional resources for the most salient environmental cues. In Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), this economy is calibrated distinctly, in most cases leading to Sensory Over-Responsivity (SOR) and atypical social engagement. This dissertation investigates the neural mechanisms underlying salience allocation in autism across three levels of analysis: task-based social-sensory integration, intrinsic network dynamics, and causal neuromodulation. Study 1 utilized functional MRI to examine how social relevance influences the processing of aversive sensory input. Results demonstrated that while typically developing youth show robust neural differentiation between social and nonsocial aversive stimuli, autistic youth exhibit reduced discrimination, responding primarily to the sensory intensity of the stimuli regardless of social context. Study 2 probed whether... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jw6z71k Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Than, Amy Hong Thy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0000r9nq This dissertation argues that the current wildfire reality in Southern California is best understood through the concept of deferred risk—an accumulation of vulnerabilities that is obscured beneath socially produced assumptions of stability, control, and growth and which culminate in catastrophic wildfire. The author uses a mixed-method approach to (1) trace the ways that settlement campaigns and historical fire management choices in Southern California have led to such accumulation of risk, (2) explore the lived experience of deferred risk becoming realized through catastrophic wildfires such as the 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, and (3) examine how experiences with wildfire are publicly narrated through analysis of newspaper coverage of the 2017 Thomas fire. Together, the chapters illustrate the ways in which historical management and settlement choices have led to an expectation of stability in the wildland-urban fringes in Southern California. In turn, this expectation of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0000r9nq Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Barnosky, Emma Jane https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g86f2sz This dissertation examines the community politics of urban redevelopment in Los Angeles’ Chinatown from 1975-2012, using archival documents, interviews with community leaders, government staff, Chinatown residents, and small business owners, newspaper articles in English and Chinese, and Census Data. It asks: How do community groups—particularly those rooted in ethnic communities—acquire and exercise power in shaping urban redevelopment projects? What strategies do community groups use to gain legitimacy for representing community needs in addressing neighborhood redevelopment, public safety, and economic well-being? How do different community stakeholders define who counts as the community and what community needs are? How do groups deploy narratives tied to race, ethnicity, migration and class to create boundaries around who belongs to the community? In the 1970s, LA’s Chinatown began to rapidly grow as immigrants and refugees moved in from Southeast Asia, China, and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g86f2sz Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tran, Victoria https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9850z2tn This work develops a framework to identify low-energy trajectories in the Circular Restricted Three Body Problem (CR3BP) based on the identification of minimal geodesics. We propose that minimal geodesics on a manifold described by a Randers metric that encodes the dynamics of the CR3BP correspond to natural, low-energy pathways through the state space of the physical three body system. We demonstrate the efficacy of this framework by comparing its results to both periodic low-energy orbits in the CR3BP and as-flown spacecraft ephemerides. This framework transforms the trajectory planning problem from an iterative boundary value problem in terms of time-dependent variables to a direct minimization problem solely parametrized by the curve length of the trajectory. Since the dynamics of a spacecraft traveling between celestial bodies in our Solar System can be modeled with the CR3BP, the proposed geometric framework is suitable for preliminary trajectory planning for missions within... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9850z2tn Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zafran, Eden Mae https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90m208kb Aging and germline variants are two of the biggest biological risk factors for prostate cancer initiation. Common aging prostate diseases include benign prostate hyperplasia, prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia, and prostate adenocarcinoma, all of which involve dysregulated prostate cell growth and are associated with an expansion of progenitor-like luminal cells. Normal prostate tissue development depends on the transcription factor HOXB13. Carriers of specific germline HOXB13 variants experience higher risk of developing prostate cancer as well as earlier age of disease onset, which potentially signifies accelerated aging in prostate epithelium. More interestingly, distinct germline HOXB13 variants are found exclusively in individuals of distinct ancestries. It remains unclear to what extent these ancestry-associated germline HOXB13 variants alter the prostate aging signature, and how that may contribute to prostate cancer initiation. To address this question, this dissertation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90m208kb Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Shile https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nh4c10k Background: Long-acting injectable (LAI) antipsychotics improve adherence and reduce relapse risk, yet they remain underused. Early-career psychiatric–mental health nurse practitioners (PMHNPs) often report limited training and lower confidence with LAI selection, initiation, monitoring, and missed-dose management. Objectives: To evaluate whether a structured LAI education program improves early-career PMHNPs’ knowledge, confidence, and attitudes related to LAI implementation in routine practice. Design: This single-site quality improvement project used a single-group pretest and posttest design. Before participating in a 90-minute interactive education session, PMHNPs first completed a baseline survey, followed by an immediate post-session survey, and a follow-up survey 4 weeks later. Results: Of the 22 PMHNPs initially enrolled, 18 completed pre- and posttest surveys, for a retention rate of 81.8%. Mean knowledge scores increased from 7.50 (SD = 3.07) at pretest to 9.78 (SD... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nh4c10k Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Byeon, Keumhee hee https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j13s3tb We initiate the study of streaming functional encryption (sFE) which is designed for scenarios in which data arrives in a streaming manner and is computed on in an iterative manner as the stream arrives. Unlike in a standard functional encryption (FE) scheme, in an sFE scheme, we (1) do not require the entire data set to be known at encryption time and (2) allow for partial decryption given only a prefix of the input. More specifically, in an sFE scheme, we can sequentially encrypt each data point x, in a stream of data x = X1... Xn as it arrives, without needing to wait for all n values. We can then generate function keys for streaming functions which are stateful functions that take as input a message x₁ and a state st, and output a value yi and the next state sti+1. For any k ≤ n, a user with a function key for a streaming function f can learn the first k output values y1... yk where (Yi, sti+1) = f(xi, sti) and st₁ = 1 given only ciphertexts for the first k elements x1...... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j13s3tb Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Korb, Alexis Lei Wan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8db427zd Transgender individuals represent a growing share of the American population yet face disproportionate rates of violence, discrimination, and psychological adversity. Despite extensive documentation of these consequences, the cognitive and perceptual processes through which anti-transgender bias originates remain poorly understood. This dissertation blends social vision and social cognition frameworks to investigate how transgender individuals are mentally represented, visually categorized, and evaluatively penalized in social encounters.The first empirical chapter introduces a novel indirect measure of mental representations, the Group Q-Sort (GQ-Sort), applying it across four studies to examine how sexual and gender minority identities are mentally organized relative to one another and to broader gender categories. The second chapter turns to the face, examining across two studies whether transgender identity can be visually categorized from facial photographs and how that categorization... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8db427zd Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Strickland, Lucas M. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/89k3k921 Wildland urban interface (WUI) fires produce complex inhalation exposures in their smoke, one of those hazardous exposures are particulate bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). This study characterized the composition and size distribution of particulate bound PAHs measured in WUI simulated smoke generated in a chamber system. A filtration model was utilized to examine the filtration efficiency of a high performance respirator filter against particle bound PAHs in the generated smoke. Four combustion trials were performed containing biogenic and synthetic fuels to represent WUI combustion conditions. Samples were collected by a cascade impactor and analyzed via GC-MS, which allowed for speciation and calculation of toxic equivalency to determine the lifetime average daily dose and incremental lifetime cancer rick (ILCR). The study found that the particulate bound PAHs were predominately in the thoracic and respirable size ranges which indicated potential deposition in... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/89k3k921 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ramirez, Nicholas Maximus https://escholarship.org/uc/item/89j1d816 Atmospheric and wildfire science can be difficult for non-expert audiences to interpret when communicated primarily through technical language, static figures, or traditional lecture-based instruction. This thesis develops, documents, and evaluates jibber JABR, a multimedia science communication framework for atmospheric and wildfire education grounded in scientific accuracy, narrative structure, visual explanation, conversational accessibility, and classroom integration. Season One episodes translated topics including Southern California fire weather, Santa Ana winds, prescribed fire, biome-level fire danger, and wildfire vulnerability through interviews, narration, motion graphics, animations, and real-world examples. Episodes were integrated into UCLA general education Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences courses through homework, laboratory, discussion, and reflection assignments. Student feedback, episode-linked performance, and platform analytics suggest students valued the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/89j1d816 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Petrusevski, Cameron Cole https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8321v9dh Background: Interstitial lung diseases, particularly those with progressive fibrosis, are characterized by increasing fibrosis, declining lung function, and worsening symptoms. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) provide important information regarding symptom burden, yet interpreting meaningful change in scores remains challenging. We aim to compare methods for estimating thresholds for meaningful and statistically significant between- and within-patient change in dyspnea among those with interstitial lung disease (ILD).Methods: Data were obtained from the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation Patient Registry. Adults with baseline and follow-up University of California, San Diego Shortness of Breath Questionnaire (SOBQ) scores were included. Anchor-based minimally important change (MIC) thresholds, using the Short Form 6 Dimensions (SF-6D) health survey, were estimated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and predictive and adjusted predictive modeling. Individual-level... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8321v9dh Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Channick, Jessica Erin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wj0z181 This thesis presents a numerical investigation of acoustically coupled, non-premixed combustion dynamics in a coaxial methane-air laminar jet diffusion flame, replicating the experimental configurations of Vargas et al. (2025) and Hayrapetyan et al. (2025) at UCLA. Simulations are performed using the CELESTE compressible reacting-flow solver with two-step Westbrook-Dryer chemistry on a 1.32-million-cell grid. Buoyancy is implemented as a body-force source through the user-defined source interface, and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) is the principal modal-analysis tool. The LAR-Thin coaxial burner is simulated at jet Reynolds number Re1 = 40 across three velocity ratios (R = 0, 0.11, 0.32) under unforced, pressure node (PN), and pressure antinode (PAN) excitation.The unforced flame produces a natural buoyancy-driven oscillation at an estimated frequency of fpk-tr ≈ 17.1 Hz, within the sinuous-mode band of Cetegen et al. (2000) and consistent with the lifted-laminar correlation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wj0z181 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Boranian, John Eric https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vj8t4kc We live in a changing and uncertain world. A strategy that once proved adequate to solve a problem in the past may no longer be useful under new circumstances and with new information. To adapt, it is therefore vital that we recognize meaningful changes in our environment, and learn and adopt new strategies as needed. The research presented here resulted from a study of such flexible learning with the goal of understanding contributions of the ventrolateral Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC). First, I review decades of research that points to neurons in OFC as highly influential in integrating time and reward information in constructing value. I then describe how I used single-cell calcium imaging to compare neuronal activity in OFC with secondary motor cortex (M2) in tracking important task variables such as choice and outcomes under reinforcement uncertainty. We found that although neurons in M2 signaled choice more strongly than OFC neurons,only neurons in OFC increase their signaling... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vj8t4kc Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Romero Sosa, Juan Luis https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7v0905p5 This dissertation investigates how social information shapes decisions, political attitudes, and the language people use to justify their beliefs. Across three chapters containing multiple experiments, the present research examines the cognitive and social processes through which individuals sample information from their social environments, shift their attitudes in response to the views of others, and converge in the linguistic structure of political reasoning. Drawing on theories of social influence, social sampling, and motivated reasoning, the dissertation proposes that political attitudes are dynamically shaped by socially available information rather than solely by stable internal beliefs. Chapter 1 examines how individuals mentally represent their social environments and rely on social sampling processes when making judgments about online and offline activities. These studies explore the structure of perceived social circles and the role of socially retrieved information... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7v0905p5 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Linford, Bryce https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tx0p1hn The transition away from fossil fuels is among the most consequential infrastructure transformations of our time, carrying broad implications for who bears its costs and who captures its benefits. While decarbonization holds the potential to reduce pollution burdens that have long fallen disproportionately on Black, brown, indigenous, and poor communities, the way that transition is designed and financed matters enormously. Drawing on energy justice frameworks and the concept of fossil fuel racism, this dissertation asks: how can local energy planning and implementation incorporate environmental justice goals to improve energy transition outcomes for low-income households and communities of color? I examine this question through three interdisciplinary studies set around Los Angeles—home to the country's largest municipal utility, the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP)—each addressing a different scale of decarbonization. The first examines the Los Angeles 100% Renewable... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tx0p1hn Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sheinberg, Rachel L https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7s88z3r8 Natural products represent foundational blueprints for therapeutic discovery, yet their clinical advancement is frequently constrained by synthetic challenges or poor pharmacokinetic properties. This dissertation addresses these structural and delivery bottlenecks through a series of interconnected programs spanning fundamental heterocyclic methodology, complex natural product total synthesis, and targeted chemical biology.Chapter 1 establishes the essential synthetic groundwork for a class of highly reactive, metastable heterocycles: the 3-methylene-1-pyrrolines (methylidene pyrrolines). A highly scalable, one-pot isonitrile insertion-Heck cyclization cascade was developed to provide streamlined access to 2-acetyl-3-methylene-1-pyrrolines. Additionally, a convergent Stille-Staudinger cascade sequence was optimized to synthesize diverse, previously inaccessible 2-formyl congeners. Systematic reactivity studies revealed that these cyclic imines possess unique dual profiles, acting... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7s88z3r8 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lotuzas, Aleksandras https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m03837d Embryonic development relies on the coordinated action of multiple signaling pathways that guide pluripotent cells toward specific fates. Among these, Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMPs), are essential in the development of various tissues and organ systems. This versatility raises a fundamental question: how does a single signaling pathway generate such diverse responses? In this thesis, I investigate how downstream BMP signals are interpreted during dorsal spinal cord development, with a focus on the distinct contributions of Smad1 and Smad5. I summarize work that leverages in vitro differentiation systems to dissect BMP pathway mechanisms and demonstrate how these platforms can be further utilized to study dorsal interneuron (dI) specification.First, we establish a directed differentiation protocol that allows us to generate the full complement of dorsal interneurons from mouse embryonic stem cells. This highly synchronized in vitro model system serves as a platform for probing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m03837d Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gallardo Dominguez, Salena https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7h6477wz A feedback controller that can achieve a desired oscillation as a stable limit cycle of the closed-loop provides autonomy in returning to the oscillation after perturbations, without mandating strict phase timing. In addition, as compared to centralized control, a distributed control architecture with independent control stations that communicate with pre-selected neighbors can provide robustness to localized failures in the system. Developing theoretical foundations towards such autonomy and robustness can enable control design advancements for applications like robotic locomotion in uncertain environments.This work bridges the gap between linear pattern formation control (via linear eigenstructure assignment theory) and distributed nonlinear control to achieve a stable limit cycle. The high-level approach is the extension of the linear theory in two directions. First, a linear distributed controller was constructed by taking a strongly connected distributed synthesis of the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7h6477wz Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Taneja, Laqshya https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7gw3d2k6 As climate change intensifies pressures on urban environments and coastal ecosystems, green and blue infrastructure–networks of natural and semi-natural features designed to deliver ecosystem services alongside social and economic benefits–have emerged as critical tools for building socio-ecological resilience. Yet, the success of such initiatives depends not only on their technical soundness, but also on the social and institutional context in which they are embedded. This dissertation investigates the role of community engagement and public attitudes across three interconnected forms of infrastructure: green stormwater management systems (with a global focus), kelp forest restoration as blue infrastructure (informed by subject-matter experts internationally and a California-wide survey), and multi-benefit green infrastructure (in Los Angeles County). Comprising three chapters, this dissertation draws on a narrative literature review guided by the Preferred Reporting Items... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7gw3d2k6 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Siegel, Madeleine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/73k867m7 This thesis reexamines Nüwa Stone, an unfinished late Qing science fiction novel, through Karen Barad's posthumanist framework of intra-action. Against readings that reduce the novel's female figures to nationalist symbols or failed feminist archetypes, this thesis proposes medical technology as an analytical entry point, attending to the material-discursive conditions through which new forms of women's agency were made imaginable rather than simply prescribed. Chapter One focuses on the epistemic landscape of Western anatomical and physiological knowledge as it entered late Qing China—selectively appropriated by medical missionaries, reform politicians, feminist thinkers, and commercial publishers alike—producing a contested terrain on which the female body became newly available as a site of redefinition. Chapter Two turns to Nüwa Stone itself, reading the artificial insemination fantasy and the brainwashing surgery not as instruments of a fixed ideological program, but... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/73k867m7 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Jingwen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zg557sb Galaxy mergers are common across time, and since most massive galaxies host a central supermassive black hole (SMBH), mergers inevitably produce SMBH pairs. These binaries are expected to be long-lived and dynamically influential, yet they remain observationally elusive across a wide range of separations. Tidal disruption events (TDEs), which take place when a star ventures too close an SMBH and is torn apart by its tidal forces, offer a promising indirect probe of these hidden binaries. The rate and character of TDEs are sensitive to the dynamical environment of the disrupting black hole, making them a powerful too for identifying SMBH binaries in otherwise quiescent galactic nuclei.This thesis, models TDE production in SMBH binaries under the combined influence of the eccentric Kozai Lidov (EKL) mechanism and two-body relaxation. These two processes are complementary; together they widen the parameter space over which disruptions occur and sustain TDE rates over timescales long... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zg557sb Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Melchor, Denyz https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jr927k6 This thesis develops and evaluates a computational pipeline for pediatric ureteral stent flow simulation. The project addresses a specific problem in simulation based design. A candidate stent cannot be used as training data for future optimization unless the requested geometry, the generated computer aided design geometry, the COMSOL Multiphysics simulation, the extracted measurements, and the output table can be linked at the level of a single design row. The primary validation study was a 140 mm stent length campaign. In this thesis, this campaign is called the 140 mm validation campaign. The name refers to the fixed stent body length used for the first controlled batch of simulations. It does not refer to a clinical standard length or to a final pediatric device. The campaign was used to test whether the pipeline could convert candidate designs into traceable simulation rows. The campaign narrowed 60 intended designs to 54 attempted designs, 47 completed simulations, 46 pilot... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jr927k6 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chauhan, Akash https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62b217n3 Shoah Shadows: Israeli Migrants’ Aesthetic Interventions in Germany explores the memory dynamics that emerge when Israelis migrate to the charged space of Germany. I examine how Germany’s guilt-driven Holocaust memorial culture provokes, enables, and sometimes curtails aesthetic engagements with the Shoah. The German state’s perspective on Jews is largely colored by its guilt about the Holocaust resulting in reductive views of them as indelibly victims and tools for Wiedergutmachung. Yet, Israeli migrant artists and authors in Germany find creative ways to subversively counter these narratives of eternal Jewish victimhood. Through poetry, prose, performance, films, photography, and mixed media art, Israeli migrant artists and authors resist the victim label frequently fixed on them by the German state while also urging Germany to see Israel in more complex and critical ways. My analyses of Israeli migrants’ aesthetic interventions demonstrate the multifaceted ways they create... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62b217n3 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 zelnick, sharon tova https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6199f2pj Millimeter-wave integrated access and backhaul (IAB) enables dense wireless deployments by allowing access and backhaul links to share spectrum. Full-duplex operation can further improve spectral efficiency and reduce delay, but self-interference makes its practical scheduling problem challenging. In full-duplex IAB networks, each node must coordinate multiple antenna panels whose simultaneous transmissions affect receivers, making link rates schedule dependent. This thesis studies scheduling for full-duplex mmWave IAB networks under self-interference. We formulate the scheduling problem as a maximum-weight optimization over a multi-hop IAB tree and develop a forward–backward dynamic programming algorithm that computes the throughput-optimal schedule with nearly linear complexity. We also propose FD-LocalMWBP, a local max-weight scheduler only based on local information. FD-LocalMW-BP learns effective backhaul-downlink weights during an estimation phase and reuses them during... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6199f2pj Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 CHO, SUNGHO https://escholarship.org/uc/item/614868rb Recent advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the development of machine systems with emergent reasoning capabilities. Modern large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) are capable of incredible feats, but their abilities are unpredictable in a distinctly unhuman way. Current AI evaluation methods thereby face challenges in distinguishing genuine intelligence from shallow statistical pattern-matching. Existing benchmark-driven evaluations offer only aggregate scores and general trends, masking brittle generalization and obscuring underlying functional behavioral mechanisms. Recent psychologically grounded evaluations have shown promise as a more theoretically grounded alternative, yet frameworks designed for human cognition do not transfer cleanly to AI systems and risk importing assumptions that can distort interpretation (such as anthropomorphism). To address this gap, this dissertation develops a comparative cognition-inspired... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/614868rb Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kirkman, Cyrus Fletcher https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xc2r41w Background: Measurement-based care (MBC) is the routine collection and use of standardized symptom measures to monitor patient progress and inform treatment decisions. Although MBC is recommended in psychiatric clinical practice, routine use of standardized symptom-monitoring tools remains inconsistent in many outpatient behavioral health settings. At the project site, Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) use was not routinely integrated into medication management appointments and lacked a standardized clinic process. Objectives: To implement and evaluate a standardized clinic workflow for administering the PHQ-9 to every patient (>12 years of age) upon arrival for a medication management visit at an outpatient behavioral health clinic. Methods: This project used a quality improvement (QI) design with a pre-/post-implementation approach and three sequential Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles over a 12-week implementation period. Lewin’s Change Theory guided implementation. The intervention... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xc2r41w Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 neiswender, loren https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r929374 It has been just over a decade since the demonstration of the first terahertz quantum-cascade vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser (QC-VECSEL). These devices consist of an amplifying, QC-loaded metasurface and a highly reflective output coupler; when properly aligned, these two elements and the space in-between them form the external cavity. Perhaps the most distinctive qualities of the QC-VECSEL are its excellent beam pattern and its broad, single-mode, continuous tunability. Devices have been demonstrated with nearly 20% continuous fractional tuning in continuous-wave, single-mode operation, which amounts to two orders of magnitude more tuning than a conventional monolithic QC laser. These qualities make them enticing candidates for terahertz spectroscopy, either as local oscillators pumping heterodyne receivers or as tunable sources for laser absorption spectroscopy. This dissertation explores the limits of their single-mode operation and leverages their broad single-mode... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r929374 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Morag, Eilam https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59d9g2dv Students with emotional disturbance (ED) make up about five percent of all students with disabilities (Pew Research Center, 2023), and they spend 80% of their time in general education classrooms (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2024). Teachers are an incredibly important part of a student’s life – specifically for those students who experience marginalized identities, such as students with ED. However, teachers’ perceptions and expectations can impact student success and behavior (Ansari et al., 2020). The aim of this dissertation is to examine how pre-service teachers’ perceptions differ based on students’ disability label, and how this impacts their suggested accommodations. Using a vignette-based research design, this quantitative dissertation examines preservice teachers’ perceptions of students with emotional disturbance. Pre-service teachers (n = 291) were recruited from Cal State LA’s EDSP 400 courses: Foundation of Special Education. They received... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59d9g2dv Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sarkissyan, Tatev https://escholarship.org/uc/item/55t2r7jp Neuromodulatory systems do not simply broadcast a uniform signal across the brain. Rather, individual neuron subtypes within a modulatory population may exert distinct, circuit-specific effects on behavior, yet the cellular and synaptic mechanisms underlying this specificity remain poorly understood. Octopamine, the invertebrate analogue of norepinephrine, is well-positioned to address these questions, as it modulates a diverse array of neural circuits and behaviors across a genetically tractable model organism, Drosophila melanogaster. Here, we describe the generation and characterization of a comprehensive library of split-GAL4 driver lines providing selective genetic access to nearly all long-range octopaminergic/tyraminergic (OA/TA) neuron types in the adult brain, establishing the toolkit that makes functional studies possible. Two-photon calcium imaging in quiescent flies is used to characterize the sensory responsiveness of AL2i2 neurons, an OA subtype whose optic lobe... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/55t2r7jp Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Palacios Castillo, Lesly Maria https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4xw603kc This thesis examines the practices of asexuality as performed by women in late imperial Chinese literature; by abstaining from sex, I argue, these women wrested autonomy over their sexual bodies from societal norms constructed by men. By understanding asexuality as practices, rather than an identity, I present these women as deviating from typical tropes of female characters in the likeness of fox-spirit succubi or lecherous nuns. Previous works in asexuality studies have focused on Western or modern-day identity, whereas studies on Chinese fictional tales have mostly been focused on both the reader’s and author’s fascination with sex, rather than its absence. This paper seeks to highlight how the boundaries that women set for their own bodies can be interpreted as a spectrum of asexual practices in late imperial Chinese literature. Based on stories of Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi, Li Yu’s Twelve Towers and Silent Operas, and the novel Haoqiu zhuan, I argue that the women’s choices... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4xw603kc Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Cindy Christina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wx3z9pv This dissertation presents two ways to compare grammar formalisms beyond the string or tree languages they generate, by also examining how these strings are generated. Though formalisms vary vastly in the ways they build strings or structures to produce strings, I propose that comparing their derivations themselves can yield fruitful results of equivalence between seemingly different formalisms. The first notion is count equivalence: two grammars are count equivalent if they generate the same number of derivations per string. The second considers interpretations as homomorphic functions over derivation structures. Two grammars are interpretationally equivalent if they generate the same set of string-interpretation pairs. Interpretations are not limited to semantics, but serve as a proxy for comparing the derivation structure as a whole -- how the derivation was assembled. Although many of the formalisms I discuss are known to be weakly equivalent, I provide many examples... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wx3z9pv Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chang, Kalen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t63c6jk One of the central goals of theoretical computer science is to understand the intrinsic resources required for computation. This dissertation studies communication as such a resource: how several parties, each holding only part of the input, can jointly solve a computational problem with minimal communication, and how this cost changes in the presence of randomness, quantum information, or multiple independent instances. Communication complexity provides a clean mathematical framework for these questions and has deep connections to circuit lower bounds, query complexity, streaming algorithms, and data structures.The first part of the dissertation studies the power of quantum communication relative to classical randomized communication. We prove that there exist partial functions for which the gap between quantum and randomized communication complexity essentially matches the largest possible separation. The proof proceeds through the query model, where we first establish an optimal... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t63c6jk Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Storozhenko, Andrei https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n00b9d2 In chapter 1, I show that U.S. public pension plans strategically invest in private equity to exploit the appearance of stability created by smoothed net asset value reporting. Using the 2012 GASB 67 and 68 accounting reform as a quasi-exogenous shock to the visibility of pension underfunding, I find that underfunded pensions increased their allocation to private equity and were 19% more likely to select fund managers with a history of stronger return smoothing within four years of the reform. While smoothing offers short-term accounting benefits, it amplifies portfolio allocation risks during market downturns through the “Denominator Effect.” When public asset values decline, the relative weight of smoothed private equity holdings becomes mechanically inflated, causing overallocation for plans that must maintain portfolio weights within specified bands. This imbalance often forces pensions to liquidate private equity holdings in the secondary market at substantial discounts,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n00b9d2 Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Systla, Venkat Anand