http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/ucla_etd/rss Recent eScholarship items from UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:41:15 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/95m98627 In this thesis, I examine how diasporic Salvadoran artist Beatriz Cortez engages with archival records and pre-Columbian history to situate the trauma of war and migration in conversation with centuries of Indigenous neglect and erasure in Central America. Through the use of archival materials, contemporary artists can access buried histories, propose alternative interpretations, and recover what has been suppressed. Throughout her artistic career and her collaborations with the Kaqchikel art collective Kaqjay Moloj, Beatriz Cortez has developed a different relationship with archives and objects that moves away from notions of the past as dead and inaccessible towards the active transmission of knowledge, according to Indigenous epistemologies. I examine the works Armor for Rufina Amaya (2014) and El Altar de Kaqjay (2021) and identify how they function to disrupt and counter official histories that perpetuate singular, disconnected narratives and communicate the shared experiences... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/95m98627 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Arriola, Adela Elizabeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zb6w8n4 The Semiconductor industry is a multi-billion dollar industry and Semiconductor Yield is a fundamental factor driving device cost. Development cost, time-to-market & yield are the most important factors of interest to the industry. Two major components are associated with Semiconductor Yield: 1. Defect Limited Yield 2. Parametric-Shift limited Yield. Parametric Yield is influenced by process variations for a given design and process node.Several models from literature which predict Defect-Limited yield based on primarily two parameters: Defect Density and Area of the Die. A “yield calculator” is developed that incorporates all Defect-limited models and allows the user to compare yield estimates among multiple models, or inversely estimate Defect Density, and calculate model parameters based on Foundry-provided Defect Density values and Wafer Sort (WS) test yield data. The methodology also includes a Bayesian formulation for aggregating yield estimates from various models in... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zb6w8n4 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Karthik Sankaran, FNU https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66c7k825 Actions and decisions in physical environments often depend on detecting patterns of interest, known as complex events. In distributed sensing systems, complex event detection may require combining unstructured sensor data with structured measurements and inferences produced by sensing and recognition models. Complex events may unfold from seconds to weeks and across spatial scales ranging from a single room to an entire city.Existing systems commonly assume that relevant operations, output representations, and execution plans have been selected in advance. However, observations may support competing explanations, sensor streams may expose more information than an application requires, and needed evidence and computation may change as an event progresses. This dissertation argues that distributed sensing systems should use the event and its application context to revise which events remain plausible, determine what information may be disclosed, and adapt sensing and computation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66c7k825 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Brian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jr3x2jb BackgroundImmigrant women in the United States experience persistent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) disparities due to barriers, including immigration-related policies, insurance exclusions, and limited access to language and cultural concordant healthcare. Women navigate these barriers through transnational healthcare, obtaining care in their countries of origin while residing in the United States. Existing research has focused on general healthcare among Latino populations. Little is known about transnational SRH care among Asian immigrant women, including healthcare decisions across borders, patterns of transnational SRH utilization, services obtained, and reasons for transnational care-seeking.AimsThis dissertation examined transnational SRH care among Asian immigrant women in the United States by exploring: (1) decision-making processes surrounding transnational SRH care, (2) patterns and correlates of transnational SRH utilization, and (3) the types of services obtained,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jr3x2jb Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Khando, Tenzin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5hf589tr Clinically defined neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders such as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are behaviorally and etiologically heterogeneous, limiting the ability of diagnosis-first approaches to identify their underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Copy number variants (CNVs) at the 22q11.2 locus offer a genetics-first model for identifying convergent and divergent neurobiological pathways contributing to risk. Reciprocal deletions (22qDel) and duplications (22qDup) of the same 22q11.2 genomic segment provide a genetics-first model of gene-dosage effects, with 22qDel conferring markedly elevated schizophrenia risk, while 22qDup is associated with substantially lower risk, potentially protective relative to the general population. Both CNVs, however, converge in conferring elevated risk for ASD and intellectual disability. Although cortical and subcortical systems have been relatively well studied in 22q11.2 CNVs, the cerebellum, long regarded... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5hf589tr Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fung, Hoki https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58j8j04k Predicting energy for graphics processing units before a large language model workload is deployed requires both its active duration and the activity generated while it runs. This work develops an interpretable energy model for inference on NVIDIA A100 graphics processing units. It separates static energy, which is proportional to active time, from dynamic energy, whose compute term scales with issued floating-point operations and whose memory terms scale with bytes transferred at shared memory, the level-two cache, and high-bandwidth memory. A memory-level count denotes bytes crossing that level's interface with the level beneath it; loads and stores therefore use the same per-byte coefficient. Published microbenchmarks of graphics processors supply compute, memory, latency, bandwidth, and event-energy parameters, limiting local profiling to idle static power and one fixed timing overhead rather than fitting workload-specific energy curves. For inference distributed across... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58j8j04k Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yao, Emily https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jn042wv This dissertation examines how colonial Korean literature imagined transregional affiliations through China during the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than approaching China as a unified national entity or simply as the counterpart of colonial Korea, it argues that Korean writers mobilized Shanghai and Northeast China as literary spaces through which they rethought the nation, empire, and the regional future of East Asia. By shifting attention from nation-based comparison to transregional encounters, the dissertation demonstrates how colonial Korean literature challenged the assumption of discrete, homogeneous national cultures and imagined alternative forms of political and social community.Opposing the scholarly assumption that colonial Korean literature emerged solely from the relationship with Japan—its colonizer and a significant mediator of Western modernity—this dissertation foregrounds how colonial Korean writers engaged with China as their literary background and as a site for... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jn042wv Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kim, Minseung https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1jz8r94z This thesis studies the relationship between return prediction and portfolio optimization for illiquid assets. Traditional predict-then-optimize models first predict asset returns and then use those predictions as inputs to a portfolio optimizer. However, a model with lower prediction error does not always lead to better portfolio decisions. Due to the noisy signals, limited data, and liquidity-related frictions, this issue is especially serious for illiquid assets, where small prediction errors may lead to different allocation decisions.To address this problem, this thesis develops a Decision-Focused Fine-Tuning (DFF) framework based on a pretrained return prediction model. In this framework, a correction layer is inserted between the prediction model and the portfolio optimizer. This layer makes controlled adjustments to the original return predictions, and the adjustment size is controlled by the parameter ε, which bounds the maximum relative adjustment applied to the original... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1jz8r94z Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 WU, YUE https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gw131g3 During development, the brain becomes electrically active even before it is ready to receive sensory stimuli. Such intrinsic developmental activity has been studied for 3 decades in vertebrate model systems and is known to be critical for the proper wiring of neural circuits. However, the complexity of the vertebrate brain and the technical limitations of studying its development have challenged progress towards identifying the precise mechanisms that initiate activity, whether and how it occurs throughout the brain, and its relevance to adult behavior and health. The recent discovery of patterned, stimulus-independent, neural activity (PSINA “see-nah”) in Drosophila has made it feasible to begin addressing these open questions. PSINA begins at the onset of synapse formation and engages the entire brain in highly coordinated and structured cycles of activity throughout the last half of metamorphosis. The global activity patterns are further textured with cell-type specific dynamics... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gw131g3 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Reichl, Jun https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0f21z1r3 Quantitative imaging in CT promises objective descriptors of disease from medical images, but clinical translation is limited by sensitivity to CT acquisition and reconstruction protocol. The same object imaged under different scanner models, reconstruction kernels, or dose levels can yield substantially different measurements, and for the texture features that carry much of radiomics' discriminative value, this protocol-induced variation can rival or exceed the biological differences of interest. The same dependence undermines deep learning models, whose performance often falls on data acquired outside the training distribution. Existing responses largely seek to reduce a biomarker's sensitivity to protocol, through harmonization, standardization, or stability-based feature selection. This dissertation takes a complementary approach: rather than reduce protocol sensitivity, it characterizes and predicts it in terms of physical, quantitative image quality metrics. To enable... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0f21z1r3 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Daly, Morgan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rr1w7t7 Global sea levels may rise up to five meters by 2150, elevating coastal groundwater and intensifying cascading hazards. Little attention has been given to how changing groundwater interacts with earthquake-induced soil liquefaction. Coastal California's 25 million residents and critical infrastructure sit on loose, liquefiable soils. Because liquefaction occurs primarily in saturated, sand-like soils, groundwater elevation strongly governs the hazard. Yet the standard of practice assumes a fixed groundwater depth observed during a site investigation, an assumption that may not hold where sea level rise (SLR) and tides dynamically control the water table. The term liquefaction was first used by Hazen in 1919, and earthquake-induced liquefaction became a major focus of geotechnical research after the 1964 Niigata and Alaska earthquakes. Although probabilistic seismic hazard analysis is standard in earthquake engineering, an equivalent treatment has not been widely adopted... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rr1w7t7 Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kota, Meera Lakshmi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kg7x7h7 The long-term carbon cycle on million-year timescales is shaped by planetary interior evolution, which governs CO2 outgassing, volatile recycling, topography, and ocean-floor bathymetry. Because marine sediments and lithified carbonates represent the largest hydrosphere-accessible carbon sink through much of Earth history, changes in bathymetry, continental flooding, and ocean basin geometry may strongly influence ocean-atmosphere chemistry. This dissertation investigates how solid-Earth evolution controls bathymetry, ocean basins, and the long-term carbon cycle across Earth history and rocky ocean-world analogs.First, I reconstruct bathymetry over the last 80 Myr and evaluate its carbon-cycle consequences using an Earth system model of intermediate-complexity (EMIC). These results show that evolving seafloor geometry significantly affects ocean chemistry and carbon partitioning. Faster tectonics produces shallower pelagic oceans and greater continental flooding, reducing deep-ocean... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kg7x7h7 Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bogumil, Matthew Walter https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62d996sp Statistical literacy is increasingly essential for informed citizenship, yet little is known about how its problem solving skills, Formulate Questions (FQ), Collect Data (CD), Analyze Data (AD), and Interpret Results (IR), develop over time or vary geographically among secondary students. This thesis uses ten years of data (2015-2025) from the LOCUS assessment to examine performance across these four categories among 5,819 AP Statistics students in 11 states and 19 counties, applying fixed-effects regression, hierarchical linear models, random forests, and MANOVA. Results show a robust within-year improvement from first to second semester (10 to 16 percentage points, largest for IR), no consistent linear trend across years after accounting for semester and county, and a COVID-19 disruption reflected mainly in missing second-semester test administrations rather than uniform score declines. County-level clustering explained between 3.2% (FQ) and 14.6% (overall) of variance, with... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62d996sp Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Aguirre, Hannah Grace https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0j5957pf Actin networks are dynamic components of the cytoskeleton, present in all eukaryotic cells and responsible for many important cellular processes, including cell motility and cell division. Improper regulation of actin can lead to detrimental effects in embryology and development. In Drosophila egg development, an actin mesh is assembled by the collaboration of two actin nucleators, Spire (Spir) and Cappuccino (Capu). The persistence of this mesh during mid-oogenesis contributes to slow cytoplasmic streaming, and its subsequent disappearance during late-oogenesis leads to fast streaming. This transition from slow to fast streaming is critical for establishing polarity and future embryo patterning. Besides Spir and Capu, the molecular machinery and mechanisms governing the regulation of the actin mesh remain unknown. To gain deeper insight into the regulation of the mesh as well as Spir and Capu, we used TurboID-based proximity labeling and co-immunoprecipitation combined with quantitative... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0j5957pf Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Carolyn https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02t8m7vv Motion is a fundamental component of active vision, and visual motion is continuously generated during natural behaviors of an observer traversing through the visual environment. Motion arose from the independently moving objects, the observer’s self-locomotion, and eye- and body-movements can all generate retinal motion signals. Although primate extrastriate area MT is well known for its sensitivity to motion directions and speeds, less is understood about how MT represents dynamic motion signals, incorporates information related to self-movement, and contributes to motion-dependent spatial perception. This dissertation examines ecologically relevant visual motion processing through four complementary studies involving macaque, marmoset and human subjects. First, large-scale neurophysiological recordings from macaque MT showed that MT carries information of motion acceleration in a representation that can be decoded quickly and directly from population activity. These findings... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02t8m7vv Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 CHEN, SHUYI https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0039f7rp This dissertation investigates the dynamics of a charged, spinning probe governed by the Mathisson-Papapetrou-Dixon equations in the Root Kerr background: The electromagnetic spinning-disk solution obtained from the ? → 0 limit of Kerr-Newman. Root Kerr is related by the classical double copy to the Kerr spacetime, providing an electromagnetic analogue of this gravitational solution. I find generalizations of the “hidden” Carter and Rudiger constants, showing the probe motion to be Liouville integrable through quadratic order in the probe spin. Their existence uniquely constrains the probe’s multipole moments to those of the stationary Root Kerr field and requires its leading-order dynamical moments to vanish. These results further determine the corresponding classical Compton amplitude through spin squared, exhibiting spin exponentiation and agreeing with the classical limit of a minimally coupled Compton, derived through little group scaling and amplitude factorization. The... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0039f7rp Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 de Firmian, Christopher https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9b79s5wv The theory of semantic change remains comparatively underdeveloped within historical linguistics, partly because change is often driven by extra-linguistic forces that resist prediction, and partly because close reading, the traditional method for tracing it, cannot realistically cover the vocabulary of a whole language. This dissertation investigates what and under which conditions static and contextual word embeddings can contribute to the study of semantic change in historical, low-resource languages. Latin, and the effect of the spread of Christianity on its vocabulary, serves as the case study through which this question is pursued. The dissertation builds and validates the resources this requires: a corrected and extended version of the LatinISE corpus, and a continuous, text-level measure of Christian lexical signal, developed collaboratively and validated against independently assessed texts. It also tests whether continued pretraining the contextual model on the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9b79s5wv Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lunardi, Valentina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99c7q088 As devices are scaled to ever smaller dimensions, their performance becomes increasingly governed by nanoscale heterogeneity in the materials they made of. Rather than the bulk average, local variations in composition, structure, and electrostatic environment start to dominate the materials’ properties. Understanding the behavior, locating the failure point, and predicting the scaling limits of next-generation microelectronic components therefore require quantitative, spatially resolved characterization techniques capable of measuring chemical bonding, temperature, and electrical properties at the relevant length scales. This work advances three such techniques, each leveraging the unique capabilities of scanning (transmission) electron microscopy—STEM and SEM—to push measurement precision and characterization capability beyond what is conventionally considered possible.First, we demonstrate that energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS), despite its ∼140 eV energy resolution,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99c7q088 Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Yueyun https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96t7z958 In 2021, with the passage of Assembly Bill 101 (AB 101), California became the first state in the nation to make Ethnic Studies (ES) a high school graduation requirement. In conjunction with AB 101, the California State Board of Education (SBE) initiated the development of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC, 2022) to help “students see themselves as active agents in the interethnic bridge-building process we call American life” (p. 8). The graduating class of 2030 (incoming ninth-graders, fall 2026) is slated to be the first generation of students accountable to the ES mandate. The opportunity and potential to harness the energies and aspirations of millions of young people in service to the re/construction and expansion of our multiracial democracy is immense.Given the relatively little research on how to develop, implement, and institutionalize ES teaching and learning at the K-12 district level, and even less so at the state level, this study contributes to this area.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96t7z958 Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Concordia, Artnelson https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zn0b59k Artificial biomolecular condensates have emerged as powerful tools for controlling cellular behavior. Here we introduce methods to build artificial condensates via annealing, co-transcription, and within living mammalian cells by designing modular RNA motifs composed of a single short RNA strand. These condensates emerge spontaneously, creating RNA-rich compartments that remain separated from their surrounding environment. The RNA sequences include stem–loop domains that fold as the RNA is transcribed and then condense in the nucleus and cytoplasm through loop–loop interactions. These sequences can be optimized and diversified, enabling the generation of distinct, non-mixing condensate populations and the programmable control of their subcellular localization. The RNA motifs can also be modified to recruit small molecules, proteins and RNA molecules in a sequence-specific manner to the RNA-rich phase. By introducing RNA linkers, we can build condensates with multiple sub-compartments,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zn0b59k Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Shiyi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/84k2g515 Domain-specific accelerators deliver orders-of-magnitude gains in performance and energy efficiency, but each remains a bespoke, multi-year hardware and software effort, confining custom acceleration to a few organizations and stable domains. This dissertation shows that complete programmable accelerator systems — computational fabrics, memory systems, on-chip networks, and their compilers — can instead be produced by automated, evidence-driven, full-stack design space exploration.Four systems form a connected lineage, each widening the automatically explored scope. DSAGEN synthesizes single programmable spatial accelerator cores: hardware is a mutable graph of decoupled-spatial primitives, compiled by modular transformations that adapt to the graph’s features, and explored with a schedule-repairing spatial scheduler; its compiler reaches 89% of manually tuned performance across five reproduced spatial architectures, and its explorer’s designs average a 1.3× performance2/mm2 advantage... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/84k2g515 Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Liu, Sihao https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p88n9vs This dissertation investigates the application of deep learning to clinical ultrasound imaging, progressing from task-specific models for thyroid nodule diagnostics to large-scale self-supervised foundation models for ultrasound. The first part begins with a systematic review of AI methods in the thyroid nodule diagnostic pipeline, identifying problematic gaps in benchmarking rigor and external validation that serve as a driver for following work. Building on those findings, we develop a joint detection and segmentation framework that addresses nodule localization in a multitask model, and ThyGraph, a graph-based architecture for multi-view feature aggregation across an ultrasound image study to improve study-level malignancy classification. These task-specific approaches demonstrate strong performance, but external validation reveals a generalization gap and supervised, single-task training demonstrates representational limits. These observations motivate the second part of the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p88n9vs Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Radhachandran, Ashwath https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jv692z9 Molecular motion and chemical reactivity are two fundamental manifestations of molecular behavior, both of which are strongly influenced by their environments. In crystalline solids, carefully designed architectures can combine long-range structural order with substantial molecular freedom, giving rise to unusual dynamics and reactivity. In solution, interactions among substrates, catalysts, and solvents shape reaction pathways and selectivity. Computational chemistry provides a molecular-level framework for investigating these phenomena across distinct chemical environments. This dissertation presents a series of computational studies of molecular motion and chemical reactivity in crystalline and solution-phase systems.The first part of this dissertation, Chapters 1–4, examines the distinctive molecular dynamics and chemical reactivity that emerge in crystalline environments. Chapter 1 combines quantum mechanical calculations, molecular dynamics simulations, and NMR measurements... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jv692z9 Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shan, Jing-Ran https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65x8k72w Slope failures cause severe human and economic losses worldwide, yet conventional stability methods describe them only up to the onset of failure. Limit equilibrium methods treat the failing mass as rigid and perfectly plastic, and the finite element method is restricted to small deformations, so neither follows the slide once it forms. The Material Point Method (MPM) avoids this limitation by discretizing soil into Lagrangian material points that move through a fixed background mesh, so no mesh distortion develops under large deformation. This dissertation applies MPM to the analysis of slope failures in two parts, the assessment of slope stability and the influence of vegetation on rainfall-induced failures. The one-phase and coupled two-phase formulations are first derived and verified against classical benchmark problems in poromechanics. Next, MPM is applied to evaluate the stability of slopes using the strength reduction technique. For dry and unsaturated slopes, slip... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65x8k72w Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Aldakhil, Sultan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zm9d7m3 The doctoral dissertation study explored the healing experiences of U.S Centroamericana student survivors impacted by sexual and relationship violence in higher education. Emerging literature has focused on reimagining healing through identity and race-conscious lenses that position individual, wholistic, and communal healing at the center of possible institutional interventions and implications for higher education (Harris et al., 2021; Karunaratne, 2026). Exploration of the healing of U.S. Centroamericana student survivors was guided through a theoretical framework that heavily centered Centroamericana Feminist epistemological perspectives and Grounded Theory. The research questions included (1) How does a U.S. Centroamericana identity shape experiences with campus sexual and relationship violence? And (2) How do U.S. Centroamericana college students engage healing from their experiences of campus sexual and relationship violence? Centroamericana Feminist Theory is rooted,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zm9d7m3 Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Aguilar Marquez, Karla Lilibeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1cq82472 Image-guided thermal therapies, including radiofrequency ablation (RFA), microwave ablation (MWA), and high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), offer a curative option for patients with early-stage liver cancer who are not candidates for surgical resection or transplantation. These therapies deposit thermal energy through an interstitial applicator or an external transducer under image guidance to induce coagulative necrosis within the tumor. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is uniquely suited to guide these procedures, providing superior soft-tissue contrast for treatment planning and targeting, continuous device guidance without ionizing radiation, non-invasive temperature mapping by proton resonance frequency (PRF) shift thermometry, and immediate post-procedural assessment of the ablation zone. An MRI-based workflow of planning, monitoring, and evaluation has been established and has demonstrated early feasibility. However, wider adoption is limited by critical challenges... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1cq82472 Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dai, Qing https://escholarship.org/uc/item/17m1f6fb Cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia can be substantially improved with cognitive training (CT) interventions, such that durable cognitive gains emerge along with strengthening of relevant neural circuits. However, treatment response is often variable, and optimizing CT efficacy likely requires a deeper understanding of the pathophysiological processes associated with cognitive impairment in schizophrenia. Early auditory processing impairments, involving stimulus registration and sensory gating, are well established in schizophrenia. Further, these auditory impairments have demonstrated relationships with cognitive symptoms and may be indirectly strengthened through CT, though a range of internal and external factors may also influence these effects. Across three studies, the present dissertation examined auditory processing impairments and their potential predictors and consequences in adults experiencing a first episode of schizophrenia. Participants with schizophrenia and healthy... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/17m1f6fb Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nesi, Emily Louise Martinez https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16t0w1nv Learning representations from human neural activity is constrained by limited supervision, participant-specific sampling, heterogeneous recordings, and distribution shifts across institutions, tasks, and brain states. This dissertation develops representation-learning strategies under these constraints as targets progress from clinical events to episodic content during recall and sleep. Meaningfulness is operational: a representation must relate to its target, remain informative under variation, and be evaluated with evidence distinct from training. The first setting begins with high-frequency oscillation candidates proposed by legacy detectors but lacks exhaustive and consistently defined pathological labels. A self-supervised variational model learns event morphology, clustering discovers weak labels, and a classifier refines the decision boundary using real and generated latent examples. This approach improves patient-level evaluation across multi-institutional datasets while... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16t0w1nv Thu, 3 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ding, Yuanyi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ft1m6wx Wings encountering rapid changes in flow conditions, such as gusts, or those operating on small unmanned and rotary-wing aircraft, routinely experience unsteady separated flow in which the loads bear little resemblance to steady predictions. Much of the lift produced under these conditions comes from the leading-edge vortex, whose growth and eventual departure govern the transient force history. Leading-edge sweep is known to introduce spanwise flow along the vortex axis, but its influence on the transient loads and leading-edge vortex structure of a translating wing remains unsettled. This work presents force measurements and dye flow visualization for a finite wing surging from rest, with sweep as the only geometric variable. A rectangular, untapered NACA 0012 planform of aspect ratio 4 was accelerated over one chord of travel and towed at constant velocity at a fixed angle of attack of 20 degrees, for leading-edge sweep angles of 0, 30and 45 degrees. Lift, drag and pitching... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ft1m6wx Wed, 2 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jones, Henry https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zv6k0q9 As green space becomes more central to both urban growth and sustainability agendas, new parks are emerging from disused infrastructure, funded, designed, and managed by philanthropic donors. These collaborative park governance strategies promise to deliver ecologically responsive and culturally vital green spaces, but raise critical questions about the spatial justice implications of private power in the production of public space.This dissertation explores the drivers, modes, and implications of philanthropic participation in the material and discursive production of urban parks and green spaces. Centering on three embedded cases of donor-led parks in Toronto, Canada – The Bentway, The Meadoway, and The Art Trail – I investigate, first, how philanthropy reshapes the production, design, and governance of urban green spaces, and second, how these politics, processes, and outcomes implicate park justice. I use interviews, policy and media discourse analysis, and urban design analysis... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zv6k0q9 Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nelischer, Claire Sophia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8s33f6tr Belitic calcium sulfoaluminate cement (BCSA) can mitigate the environmental impact of cement manufacture. It has less embodied CO2 than Portland cement, significant strength within four hours of mixing, and better durability versus calcium sulfoaluminate cement (CSA), functioning as a standalone binder. This study examined class C fly ash, unclassified lignite fly ash, flue gas desulfurization (FGD) waste ash, and paper recycling waste as alternative supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) in BCSA to reduce embodied CO2 while maintaining mechanical performance by utilizing the unique chemistry of BCSA. Set time, flow, shrinkage, and compressive strength characterized SCMs in mortars, while pastes’ hydration and microstructure were evaluated via Rietveld refinement, thermogravimetry, isothermal calorimetry, and electron microscopy. The compressive strength of concrete containing FGD waste ash, the best-performing SCM, was measured. Carbon intensity quantifies embodied CO2 per... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8s33f6tr Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Carver Miller, Renee Elizabeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72k385w5 The discovery and characterization of asteroids is necessary for understanding their demographics and their evolution within the Solar System. Diameter is an important asteroid property for assessing impact probabilities and uncovering clues about solar system origins. I assess how the accuracy of diameter estimates of asteroids based on infrared thermal modeling of imaging from the four-band Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is dependent on the number of infrared bands used, as the NEO Surveyor mission will have only two infrared bands corresponding roughly to WISE bands W2 and W3. With a reparameterization of the near-Earth asteroid thermal model (NEATM), we found diameters modeled using observations from W2 and W3 bands to be systematically 10% smaller than their more accurate counterparts obtained with all four WISE bands. Obtaining high-quality orbits for faint main belt asteroids is foundational for many studies, particularly for projects related to solar system... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72k385w5 Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Whittaker, Emerson https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3s4465rj This dissertation investigates two forms of bad dispositions (hexeis), namely incontinence and vice, and two forms of the highest dispositions, namely magnanimity and contemplative excellence.The first chapter argues the ‘unqualifiedly’ incontinent agent is one whose acquired rational dispositions for psychic pleasures match those of the virtuous, but who nevertheless acts badly due to the presence of non-rational innate dispositions for inappropriate bodily pleasures. Such an agent is supposed to threaten the Socratic thesis that a possessor of ethical knowledge ii ought not to be able to behave badly. To defend his thesis, Socrates denied the existence of incontinence altogether. But Aristotle thinks this flies in the face of common sense. So, his proposal is that an incontinent agent lacks the ability to resist inappropriate non-rational bodily pleasures whereas the virtuous agent is disposed to resist such pleasures and so cannot act incontinently.The second chapter proposes... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3s4465rj Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shirvanian, Vaheh https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4kv888xg This qualitative case study investigates the effects of governance configuration and organizational design on financial decision-making at a leading public research university on the west coast of the United States. Rather than conceptualizing financial management as a neutral administrative function, the study frames financial authority as constructed through sequence, thresholds, and exposure. Interviewing academic and financial leaders and analyzing institutional documents, the research investigates how reporting hierarchies, revenue structures, and escalation pathways shape the timing, allocation, and compression of decision authority under fiscal constraints. Results reveal that financial expertise enters strategy at structurally determined points, that autonomy expands and contracts within institutional risk thresholds, and that decentralization creates uneven fiscal capacities across units.Governance configuration emerges as the moderating structure of institutional resilience:... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4kv888xg Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Breen, Karla Leticia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87v9014w At lower RHIC energies, hadronization in the quark–gluon-plasma (QGP) fireball is significantly influenced by transported quarks carried in from the colliding nuclei. Within the quark coalescence picture, these transported quarks, which experience the full evolution of the system’s pressure gradients, imprint distinct flavor and dynamical signatures on final-state hadrons. This thesis presents three complementary measurements from the STAR Beam Energy Scan Phase II (BES-II) program in Au+Au collisions.The influence of transported quarks is directly reflected in the elliptic flow (v2) of charged pions. In Au+Au collisions at √ sNN = 7.7–27 GeV, π − carries systematically larger v2 than π + across centralities and energies, consistent with the higher availability of transported d quarks relative to u quarks in the neutron-rich Au nucleus. Using a coalescence sum rule with the antiproton as a proxy for the produced-quark flow, the transported quark ratio Ntr d /Ntr u is extracted... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87v9014w Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Xiatong https://escholarship.org/uc/item/74x4m934 In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions (SFF A) v. Harvard, the college admissions essay has been transformed from a standard application component into a primary legal and sociopolitical battlefield for racial identity. This qualitative study investigates how eight Black and Latinx high school seniors navigate this heightened systemic pressure while completing the University of California’s Personal Insight Questions (PIQs). Grounded in Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework, this research challenges dominant deficit-centered educational narratives by examining how marginalized youth treat their lived experiences not as structural burdens, but as legitimate sites of institutional expertise and asset cultivation.Data collection involved utilizing textual analysis of 16 personal admissions essays alongside semi-structured interviews. The cross-case synthesis revealed that participants actively reject the institutional expectation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/74x4m934 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Foster, Shani https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rp5g03c Extensive research has documented how culturally responsive or sustaining pedagogies benefit minoritized youth. Yet, critical scholars assert that prevalent professional development models for in-service teachers overemphasize generic best practices or data-driven school improvement and subsequently proliferate problematic deficit paradigms, rather than asset-oriented pedagogies. While understudied, existing research on equity-driven and asset-oriented professional learning suggests critical reflection, collaborative inquiry, and relational trust are key components. Building on such literature, this qualitative case study explored how a public secondary school’s Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) piloted teacher-led and asset-oriented Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). As the study’s lead researcher and the school site’s instructional coach, I utilized Reciprocal Learning Partnerships (RLP) as an equity-focused framework for designing the study’s activities, developing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rp5g03c Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bryant, Lily Rachel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/73s5z26m Multimodality has elevated the utility of modern machine learning models. Through data-driven deep learning, multimodal neural networks learn generalizable and robust features, providing increased performance and capabilities while promising greater resilience to changing environments. Despite such capabilities, the increased complexity of these networks renders them susceptible to other variations that can manifest at inference time - ranging from dynamics during a system's deployment to its active runtime. These weaknesses of multimodal networks have not been adequately addressed in existing work, resulting in severe inefficiencies or subpar performance when subject to inference-time variations in real-world environments. This dissertation examines the weaknesses of multimodal networks across a variety of inference-time variations and diverse datasets, demonstrating that the efficient adaptation of internal weights constitutes a powerful and highly generalizable solution. ... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/73s5z26m Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Jason https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m92j3s7 Dust storms and chronic dust loadings are a growing but heterogeneously characterized publichealth concern in California, where a warming climate, more frequent heat and drought, and expanding disturbed land surfaces are increasing dust activity. This dissertation builds, in sequence, the evidence a dust warning system requires, organized around the four components of a people-centered early warning system: risk knowledge, monitoring and forecasting, communication, and response. Aim 1 systematically reviews global dust storm early warning systems. Of 22 included studies, 19 addressed monitoring and forecasting while only three addressed risk knowledge, communication, or response, a gap that has persisted for more than two decades and that frames the dissertation. Aim 2 develops and externally validates a daily, statewide surface of the dust-attributable fraction of PM (DAF-PM ) at population-weighted ZIP-code centroids for 2006 through ₁₀ ₁₀ 2019, combining a machine-learning... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m92j3s7 Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Alomair, Saud Abdulaziz https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d552374 Fluid flows are high-dimensional, nonlinear dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations, making their direct simulation computationally expensive for many practical applications. Nevertheless, many flows evolve on low-dimensional manifolds, motivating reduced-order models that capture the essential dynamics while significantly reducing computational complexity. Recent advances in machine learning provide powerful nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques capable of learning such representations directly from data. This thesis investigates data-driven latent representations for reduced-order modeling in fluid mechanics, with an emphasis on aerodynamic applications. Rather than treating latent spaces solely as compact embeddings optimized for reconstruction, this work explores representations that incorporate physical and mathematical structure to improve interpretability, robustness, and predictive capability. First, an autoencoder-based framework... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d552374 Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tran, Jonathan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1g82v8qm Intrapersonal communication examines how individuals interact with themselves from a communication perspective. We engage in self-talk, imagine interactions, generate internalized media such as visualizations, and so on, yet a unified study of these phenomena is missing. This dissertation aims to revive the study of intrapersonal communication by describing what it is through a literature review of related subjects and presenting frameworks for how it can be studied. Empirical work is then presented demonstrating a multidimensional approach to studying one example of intrapersonal communication – overt linguistic streams-of-consciousness. In a series of three studies, participants provide their typed or spoken streams-of-consciousness, aiming to report their thoughts continuously and spontaneously. The first study prompts participants to think about life before or during the COVID-19 pandemic to see how their thoughts about the future may shift through psychological momentum.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1g82v8qm Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bainbridge, Constance https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x48z4c0 The City of Los Angeles’s Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ) program adds discretionary review, additional design requirements, and up to 79 days to the entitlement process of new residential projects. Discretion and process-based regulation generally discourages housing construction. Does HPOZ designation meaningfully affect where and how much new housing construction occurs? Permit data from the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety from 1996 to 2025, suggests little construction occurred in HPOZs neighborhoods before designation. This trend continued following designation. HPOZ designation does not affect residential construction within or in surrounding zones in a statistically meaningful way. Policies such as Community Planning, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and corridor-based zoning likely disincentivized housing construction in historic neighborhoods more than HPOZ designation. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x48z4c0 Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Avery, Larson S. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7d62d0nd Metal-halide perovskite solar cells have emerged as promising photovoltaic technologies because of their high absorption coefficients, long carrier diffusion lengths, defect tolerance, and compatibility with low-temperature processing. Despite rapid improvements in power conversion efficiency, their commercialization remains limited by insufficient operational stability. Many degradation pathways originate from the nonequilibrium crystallization of solution-processed perovskite films, which can introduce unfavorable crystal orientations, residual phases, compositional heterogeneity, lattice disorder, and defects that promote nonradiative recombination and ion migration. This dissertation investigates how molecular interactions can be used to control perovskite crystallization across different stages of film formation, from facet-selective crystal growth to post-nucleation lattice reconstruction, thereby improving both photovoltaic performance and operational stability. Chapter... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7d62d0nd Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Duan, Haoxiang https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4m19k20z The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) has opened a new window beyond traditional electromagnetic (EM) observations, vastly expanding the observable compact-object population and revealing some of the Universe's most energetic and exotic processes. In this thesis, I focus on one defining property of GW sources: eccentricity. Specifically, I investigate the population and GW signatures of eccentric compact object binaries across a variety of astrophysical environments. Combining dynamical simulations and waveform analysis, I demonstrate that highly eccentric binaries can dominate the mHz GW source population in the local Universe and produce distinctive "repeated-burst" GW signals. These signatures can significantly improve binary parameter measurements and provide direct probes of their host environments. Furthermore, I show that eccentric systems can generate a substantial stochastic GW background and produce multimessenger counterparts such as ultracompact X-ray binaries... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4m19k20z Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Xuan, Zeyuan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wv9z0d3 Segmentation in medical imaging is an important step to identify and describe organs and diseases such as tumors. Segmentation allows for the quantitative analysis of these anatomical structures to develop biomarkers that can be utilized in the diagnosis, progression, and prognosis of diseases and conditions. In volumetric imaging data, such as those acquired through the use of Computed Tomography (CT) scanners, the process of segmentation involves the manual delineation of voxels composing the structures of interest through the series of images that form the volume. This manual process is time-consuming, limiting high-throughput production of segmentations for clinical usage. To solve this issue, Deep Learning (DL) segmentation algorithms have been developed, leveraging Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to learn voxel-level features for the automated segmentation of medical images. While DL tools have seen advancements and success in recent years, clinical usage of these tools... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wv9z0d3 Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Melendez-Corres, Gabriel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/35q9142r Multimodal generative models are increasingly used in interactive and scientific settings where success requires more than perceptual sample quality. A deployable system must evaluate structured behavior, align model optimization with graded objectives, and generate reliable outputs when training data or measurements are imperfect. This dissertation develops these three capabilities as a closed loop of evaluation, alignment, and generation.The first part studies evaluation for instruction-based image editing. EdiVal-Agent decomposes scenes into objects and evaluates instruction following, content consistency, and visual quality across multiple editing turns. MT-EditFlow then uses these multi-axis signals to optimize sequential editing trajectories and reduce exposure bias and error propagation.The second part studies alignment. REAL formulates regression-aware reinforcement learning for language models used as numeric judges, preserving the ordinal information discarded by binary... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/35q9142r Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Yasi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k20t57c Despite the existence of a large evidence base for youth psychotherapy (Becker & Chorpita, 2023), evidence is inconsistently applied in practice, leading to suboptimal treatment outcomes (Weisz et al., 2013). One approach to bridging the science-to-practice gap is evidence-based practice (EBP), which refers to the integration of psychotherapy evidence, client-specific evidence, and clinical expertise to inform practice (Spring, 2007). EBP is achieved through a process of intentionally using evidence to make decisions about care; decision-making is considered the “lynchpin” of EBP (Spring, 2008). Clinical supervision, or ongoing consultation between a therapist and supervisor to ensure safe and effective practice, has been found to play a key role in determining how care is delivered (e.g., Schoenwald et al., 2009; Bearman et al., 2013); thus, supervision offers a promising avenue for facilitating decision-making that can support EBP—or in other words, EBP-aligned decision-making.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k20t57c Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Reeder, Kendal https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dd1n53s Asian Americans (AAs) face growing mental health risks, including rising rates of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and suicide (Lee et al., 2022; Karaye, 2022; Hahm et al., 2021; Twenge et al., 2021). Longitudinal data show that while mental health problems improved for White, Black, and Latine groups following the COVID-19 pandemic, it worsened among AAs, likely reflecting persistent discrimination experiences that were exacerbated by scapegoating of AAs during the pandemic (Cheslack-Postava et al., 2024; Dougan et al., 2024; Wu et al., 2021). Despite these growing mental health disparities, AAs remain persistently underserved due to stigma and a lack of culturally appropriate interventions. Thus, AAs face an increasing mental health care gap (Chu & Sue, 2011; Zhou et al., 2021). Self-criticism, a transdiagnostic trait associated with depression, anxiety, psychosis, and personality disorders (Werner et al., 2019a), has been identified as more prevalent among AAs... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dd1n53s Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Belinda C https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ms0x3br This thesis investigates flux tubes as probes of emergent phenomena in strongly coupled quantum field theories. Combining analytical techniques and numerical modeling, we study the structure and dynamics of vortex strings in several variants of the Abelian Higgs model (AHM) in~$3+1$ dimensions. These systems arise in settings ranging from magnetic vortices in Ginzburg-Landau superconductors to confining strings in deformed Seiberg-Witten (SW) theory. A central focus is the large-flux limit in which the rich internal structure of vortex strings becomes analytically tractable. In the AHM that arises in the context of deformed SW theory, we find that giant vortex strings exhibit a nontrivial pattern of phases and transitions. This structure becomes especially transparent in the large vorticity limit and bears a striking resemblance to wall-crossing phenomena for kink solutions in two-dimensional supersymmetric theories. We also investigate the low-energy worldsheet spectra of superconducting... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ms0x3br Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gaikwad, Amey https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dd1f5p5 Despite the availability of effective psychotherapeutic interventions for mental health concerns, many individuals who seek mental health services experience substantial barriers to accessing and remaining engaged in care (Andrade et al., 2014; SAMHSA, 2023). Although psychotherapy engagement has often been examined through discrete indicators such as attendance, missed appointments, or premature termination, engagement can be conceptualized as a dynamic, multi-phase process unfolding across the transition from help-seeking to treatment access, initiation, ongoing participation, and termination (Dixon et al., 2016; Holdsworth et al., 2014). This dissertation examined psychotherapy engagement processes within a university-based training clinic providing evidence-based psychotherapy services to the general community. Study 1 used archival electronic health record data from adult psychotherapy clients to examine associations among client demographic factors, wait times, psychotherapy... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dd1f5p5 Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Moodliar, Rddhi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cc2m9rk Wireless technologies have been evolving significantly over the past few decades, forming the backbone of many modern applications. Two key paradigms have emerged for different purposes: communication and sensing. Wireless communication systems, such as WiFi and 5G, are optimized to encode as much information as possible into the limited time-frequency resources for high-throughput, low-latency data transmission. Wireless sensing systems, such as radar, focus on extracting information about the environment, such as the location and movement of objects, by analyzing the wireless signals reflected off them. These two paradigms have been evolving separately, developing different hardware and software stacks. Next-generation wireless systems seek to integrate sensing and communication into a unified system to enhance performance and enable new applications. Many challenges exist in achieving this integration. One key challenge is designing unified radio software and hardware... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cc2m9rk Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lu, Haofan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66f9m2bd Extant research has provided support for the immigrant health paradox within the Black community. Specifically, Black immigrants in the United States largely demonstrate better physical and mental health outcomes than U.S-born Black individuals. Investigations of current explanatory hypotheses of the immigrant health paradox have yielded mixed findings and notable limitations. Accordingly, the present research aimed to test a new framework for understanding potential key contributors to the Black immigrant health paradox. This framework employed a social-cognitive approach by integrating a race-conscious lens with system justification beliefs (via the meritocratic worldview or MW), in charting how ideologies may shape perceptions of discrimination, and subsequently, how differences in perceived discrimination might mediate the differential health outcomes between Black immigrants and their American-born counterparts. Two interrelated studies examined and tested the constructs... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66f9m2bd Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Owoyemi, Praise https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62h4r6fj This dissertation develops remote sensing methods to monitor urban forest canopy cover changes, phenology, removal, and post-fire recovery across California. I combine high-resolution National Agriculture Imagery Program aerial imagery, repeated PlanetScope satellite observations, tree inventory data, parcel information, and field and image-based validation to examine urban forest change across multiple spatial and temporal scales.First, I developed a four-year canopy cover time series for all California census-designated places from 2016 to 2022 using 60-cm aerial imagery and a deep learning classification model. I estimated canopy cover and change using an error-adjusted area estimation, which showed apparent statewide canopy decline was not statistically distinguishable from no change once mapping uncertainty was considered. Residential parcels consistently contained more than half of the canopy within incorporated urban areas, showing that statewide canopy goals will depend... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62h4r6fj Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pawlak, Camille Christine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19s7j29v Suicide is a leading cause of death among youth and young adults; however, effective intervention and prevention strategies are limited in their generalizability and applicability to acutely at-risk populations. To successfully develop strategies to decrease suicide prevalence across childhood, suicidality must be contextualized using frameworks such as ecodevelopmental theory and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model which situate suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) within individual, family, community, and cultural systems. One salient system associated with STBs is the Juvenile Legal System (JLS), where individuals experience markedly higher rates of STBs and related risk factors. However, temporal associations between engagement in STBs and JLS involvement are unclear, including their shared risk factors. This dissertation consists of two studies designed to address these shortcomings and examine the relationship between STBs and JLS involvement, with the goal of illuminating... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19s7j29v Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Schiff, Sara https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0qp642cc Multi-agent systems have attracted attention in applications such as satellite networks and autonomous traffic. However, as the number of agents grows, the joint state, observation, and action spaces expand. This growth can lead to higher computational complexity, communication overhead, and unstable optimization. Scalability therefore asks whether agents can operate without their online burden growing with the total system size. We study scalability in estimation and decision-making, focusing on these two problems under uncertainty. In estimation, uncertainty appears through unknown inputs, unmeasured signals that nonetheless enter the dynamics. In decision-making, uncertainty arises from changing population distributions and common noise. Based on how agents are modeled and interact, we consider two regimes: the networked regime and the population regime. We primarily study estimation in the networked regime and decision-making in the population regime. In the networked regime,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0qp642cc Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Zida https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0g04x2fb This dissertation investigates the historical development of Greek syllabification from Mycenaean through the Archaic first-millennium dialects, with particular attention to its implications for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) syllable structure. It develops a unified account of Greek syllabification by integrating linguistic, orthographic, metrical, and philological evidence within an Optimality-Theoretic (OT) framework.The study draws primarily on Mycenaean and Homeric Greek, the earliest attested stages of the language, while also incorporating comparative Indo-European evidence where relevant. Four complementary sources of evidence are examined: sound changes and synchronic phonological processes sensitive to syllable structure; Linear B orthography and inscriptional practices; metrical evidence from Homeric poetry; and observations preserved in the ancient grammatical tradition. Philological analysis and phonological modeling are employed jointly to reassess... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0g04x2fb Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sabattini, Paolo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jj175kx Proton-exchange-membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) directly convert chemical energy into electricity with water as the only byproduct, providing a promising pathway toward a zero-emission future. Their commercial success has been demonstrated in light-duty vehicles (LDVs) exemplified by the Toyota Mirai. Compared with battery electric vehicles (BEVs), fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) offer distinct advantages for heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs), including shorter refueling time, higher payload capacity, and reduced weight penalty. However, the harsh operating conditions and prolonged service life of HDVs impose stringent requirements on PEMFC durability, while the increasing demand for Pt catalyst calls for reduced Pt utilization and scalable manufacturing. Therefore, developing highly durable, cost-effective, and industrially scalable Pt-based electrocatalysts is critical for the widespread commercialization of PEMFCs in heavy-duty transportation. Chapter 2 presents a graphene-nanopocket... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jj175kx Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tsai, Yu-Han https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36q672b3 About 2.7% of the 187 years spent researching ozone are encapsulated in this dissertation. The main goal of the research conducted was to improve dealkenylation, an emerging organic chemistry method for synthesis through C(sp3)–C(sp2) bond scission. The first generation of dealkenylation required the use of ozone to generate a high-energy peroxide intermediate which enabled radical cascades to break bonds and create new, valuable products. A second generation was developed through this work to bypass the ozone requirement and thereby diversify the chemical space available to dealkenylation. Not only did this second generation solve issues regarding incompatibilities of alkenes with ozone, but also it broadened the products available after radical functionalization. Further research into the ozonolysis reaction led to the development of a predictive tool to quantify the dealkenylation peroxide intermediate and provide a more complete understanding of the overall transformation. ... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36q672b3 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dworkin, Jeremy 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