http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/ucr_etd/rss Recent eScholarship items from UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Wed, 12 Aug 2026 02:12:29 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tn3231p This dissertation investigates rigidity in several complex variables through the study of intrinsic metrics on bounded domains in Cn. In particular, it focuses on geometric and analytic characterizations of the unit ball using the Carathéodory, Kobayashi, and Bergman metrics. These metrics are biholomorphically invariant and play a central role in understanding the complex geometry of domains independently of coordinate representations. The work is motivated by classical results of Lempert and Lu, as well as more recent developments concerning strongly pseudoconvex domains and curvature rigidity. The first main contribution concerns the Kähler structure of the Carathéodory metric on bounded strongly pseudoconvex domains. Lempert proved that on bounded convex domains the Carathéodory and Kobayashi metrics coincide, and an important consequence is that the Kobayashi metric is Kähler if and only if the domain is biholomorphic to the unit ball. More recently, Zimmer extended this... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tn3231p Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Ruoyi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19z6h23c Spatial memory and navigation are critical for learning and interacting within complex environments, yet less is known about tools and conditions that support specific processes involved in the encoding and organization of large-scale spatial information. The present study investigated whether fictional story could serve as a cognitive structuring tool to support object-location memory in a large-scale virtual environment. A total of 120 undergraduate students completed the Minecraft Memory and Navigation (MMN) task and were randomly assigned to a fictional story, non-fictional narrative, or silent condition during passive route learning. Outcomes included object accuracy, object sensitivity (d′), spatial location accuracy, and object-location binding accuracy. Results indicated that fictional story did not significantly improve overall spatial memory performance relative to the other conditions. However, a marginal effect emerged for spatial location accuracy, with participants... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19z6h23c Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Colchete, Nicole https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sm6172b The navel orangeworm, Amyelois transitella Walker (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae), is the most significant insect pest of almonds, pistachios, and walnuts. Tolerance for A. transitella feeding damage is < 2% due to yield loss, increased processing costs, and its association with aflatoxins. To maintain this level of control, several integrated pest management (IPM) strategies are used. However, these strategies are not coordinated among growers or applied uniformly. Consequently, gaps remain in management that can be exploited by migrating A. transitella. These gaps can be better managed by understanding A. transitella’s dispersal ability and movement between orchards. The goals of this dissertation were to (i) examine A. transitella dispersal in the field, (ii) discover potential intrinsic biomarkers obtained from larval diet, and (iii) evaluate the influence of larval diet on flight capacity and nutritional profiles of adults.Mark-release-recapture methods evolved over four years... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sm6172b Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Reger, Joshua Eugene https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vc6w943 Bacterial contamination and biofilm formation on material surfaces remain major challenges in USDA-relevant food and agricultural environments, where durable coatings are needed to reduce microbial attachment, persistence, and cross-contamination, including from multidrug-resistant pathogens. Silk fibroin is an attractive coating platform because it is a biocompatible structural protein whose surface chemistry and interfacial behavior can be tailored through chemical modification. In this study, silk fibroin was functionalized with 1-hydroxyethylidene-1,1-diphosphonic acid (HEDP) using EDC/NHS coupling to create a phosphonate-modified surface with enhanced ion-binding capability and altered wettability. The resulting silk-HEDP materials were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, water contact angle measurements, and calcium depletion experiments. FTIR confirmed successful incorporation of phosphonate functionality while preserving the characteristic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vc6w943 Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Samantha https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t7375n3 Bumble bee colony development is shaped by reproductive and behavioral transitions within the nest, as well as broader ecological conditions that influence colony members across landscapes. Broadly, nests are founded by independent queens, who perform all essential tasks during the earliest stages of nest development, including foraging, egg laying, incubation, and feeding. As workers emerge, colonies transition into a eusocial phase, during which workers assume many in-nest and out-of-nest tasks and queens begin to specialize in reproduction. This dissertation examines the early stages of bumble bee colony development and explores how social and environmental variation may shape colony function beyond this initial stage. In Chapter One, I investigate how social context influences queen reproductive plasticity during early colony development by examining whether brood and workers regulate queen egg-laying, as well as the timing of this regulation. In Chapter Two, I extend this... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t7375n3 Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Peto, Blanca https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44t8p5xv DNA methylation plays essential roles in epigenetic regulation, development, and disease. Here, structural, biochemical, and biophysical approaches were used to investigate mechanisms underlying DNA methylation regulation in plant and mammalian systems.Structural and biochemical analyses of the plant methyltransferase DRM2 revealed that DNA conformational dynamics contribute directly to CHH substrate selectivity. Cryo-electron microscopy analyses of mammalian DNA methyltransferase DNMT3A and the leukemia-associated hotspot mutant DNMT3A R882H revealed a multi-domain autoinhibitory oligomeric architecture and a pathogenic filamentous assembly mechanism associated with dominant-negative inhibition of DNA methylation activity. Together, these studies provide mechanistic insights into how DNA conformational dynamics and higher-order methyltransferase assembly regulate epigenetic specificity in development and disease. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44t8p5xv Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Jianbin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44m9365j The endocannabinoid (eCB) system is a lipid-derived signaling pathway that regulates food intake, energy homeostasis, and reward, and is expressed throughout the gastrointestinal tract. In diet-induced obesity (DIO), the eCB system becomes dysregulated and may contribute to impaired gut barrier function; however, it remains unclear whether activation of this system by cannabis is protective or detrimental. Previous studies suggest that intestinal epithelial CB1 receptors (CB1Rs) regulate gut barrier integrity and inflammation, yet conflicting evidence exists regarding the effects of cannabinoid signaling on intestinal permeability.To address this, we examined the impact of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and whole cannabis extracts on gut barrier function in male and female mice with conditional deletion of CB1Rs in the intestinal epithelium (intCB1R-/-) and control mice (intCB1R+/+). Mice were maintained on either a low-fat standard diet or a Western diet (WD) for 60 days. Intestinal... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44m9365j Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Olmos, Martin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34k9b7rf This dissertation studies home renovation in housing market dynamics, combining search-and-matching theory with new empirical evidence from the United States. The three chapters examine how renovation interacts with housing market frictions, credit market frictions, and household collateral constraints. Chapter 1 develops a search-and-matching model with endogenous renovation. Using aggregate U.S. data, I document new stylized facts: renovation comoves positively with prices, vacancies, and sales, and negatively with time-on-market. The calibrated model replicates these elasticities and shows that endogenous renovation is an essential adjustment margin. Chapter 2 adds a frictional credit market for renovation financing. Calibrated to the 2012–2019 U.S. housing recovery, the model implies that the credit channel barely affects average prices but accounts for about 64% and 71% of the declines in time-to-sell and the vacancy rate, through a novel compositional channel... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34k9b7rf Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Son, Yeonjoo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tk61057 DNA methylation is a fundamental epigenetic mechanism that shapes genome function, chromatin organization, and cellular differentiation. Although the regulation of 5-methylcytosine (5mC) in higher eukaryotes has been extensively studied, key questions remain regarding how distinct DNA methyltransferases recognize DNA substrates under different chromatin contexts. This dissertation investigates the structure and regulation of representative eukaryotic DNA methyltransferases that establish either 5mC or N6-methyladenine (6mA). First, biochemical analysis of the Neurospora crassa cytosine methyltransferase Defective-In-Methylation-2 (DIM2) shows that its activation is tightly controlled by heterochromatin factors. The highly activated DIM2 requires the cooperativity between HP1 and H3K9me3. Three cryo-EM structures reveal how these multivalent inputs enable region-specific DNA methylation. Second, structural characterization of the Tetrahymena thermophila N6-adenine methyltransferase... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tk61057 Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shao, Zengyu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2dn95389 This dissertation resolves the apparent conflict between human autonomy and nature's self-organization—a tension rendered urgent by complex systems science. Drawing on Kant's "Ideas" (normative frameworks that bi-constitute subjects and their purposive worlds), I argue that nature's self-organizing character follows from the Idea of autonomy itself. Because the highest good requires a purposively unified cosmos, practical reason compels us to postulate nature as self-organizing. Theoretical reason can never establish this; practical reason affirms it as a necessary condition of moral agency. I then demonstrate that for Kant, judging organisms, ecosystems, or even convection cells as self-organizing agents involves treating them as if guided by an immanent Idea following a four-part schema: coherent identity, reciprocal causality between parts and whole, selective engagement with an environment, and a coherency test whereby success reinforces or failure revises the agent's organizational... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2dn95389 Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Spano, Christopher https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sd9v47g Impatience is commonly experienced in everyday life, yet little is known about how it is expressed or recognized. Emotion researchers have historically focused on basic emotions with universal facial expressions, but emotions like impatience are more context-dependent and lack a clearly defined expressive profile. This research aimed to address this gap by identifying the behavioral markers of impatience and assessing whether they are reliably recognized by others. This work explored how impatience is conveyed through facial, vocal, and bodily cues across three studies. Study 1 used a naturalistic induction to elicit impatience in a waiting context, capturing spontaneous expressions. Study 2 examined how individuals express impatience when prompted, with the goal of further elucidating behavioral patterns associated with impatience. Focal expressions identified in Studies 1 and 2 informed the stimulus development for Study 3, which evaluated recognition accuracy and compared impatience... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sd9v47g Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hawes, Jason https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t02j9ps This dissertation presents three studies on development economics in India. Each uses quasi-experimental methods to estimate a causal effect that standard measurement misses or that policy design failed to anticipate. The first essay evaluates the Kanyashree Prakalpa (KP), a conditional cash transfer program in West Bengal that pays girls Rs 25,000 to remain unmarried until 18. Using difference-in-differences with NFHS-5 (2019-21) data, I find the program increased marriage likelihood by 4-6 percentage points for girls aged 16-17. Early motherhood rose by 4 percentage points. Education gains were limited to Grades 7-9. KP-exposed brides married better-educated husbands with smaller age gaps, indicating families captured the program's value through improved matches rather than delayed timing. The results show that modest transfers conditional on marital age can backfire when marriage norms are strong and verification is weak. The second essay examines five decades of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t02j9ps Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jain, Vaishali https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xd4k522 Various monikers over the years have been ascribed to artworks that consider the circumstance of their making: situationally-derived, site-responsive, in-situ–each differentiated by the nuances of practice but united by a shared will to exist in relation to their environment. These terms are all derived from the Latin root, situs, meaning “situation, position, or site,” inherently signalling a commonality in intent. I propose a retooled term, responsive, to both encompass the minutiae of these categories and to redress their scope. This term is used both to refer back to the rich history of conceptual art and to address contemporary practices that admit and challenge present conditions, such as those that involve the implications of new media. A responsive practice tends to occur across three, interrelated sub-dimensions: site, legibility, and distribution. This research relates how visual artists can use this framework to address the systems or conditions under which they operate. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xd4k522 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jackson, Rachel Marie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zz5f08f In this work, I investigated strategies to improve recombinant protein production in yeast by targeting both transcriptional regulation and protein secretion. First, I characterized how mutations within the promoter region of Saccharomyces cerevisiae influence gene expression. Targeted mutagenesis revealed that increasing GC content within the TATA box and pre-initiation complex consistently reduced expression, identifying these regions as highly sensitive to sequence composition. I then expanded this approach using CRISPR-enabled trackable genome engineering (CREATE) to introduce a broader range of mutation types across an extended promoter region. This analysis confirmed that GC-rich substitutions were strongly associated with decreased expression, while certain AT- or mixed-base substitutions in the scanning region and transcriptional start site contributed to increased promoter activity. Finally, I adapted a mid-western (colony blot) secretion assay for use in Kluyveromyces... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zz5f08f Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Biondo, Dominic Thomas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w19n5c9 This dissertation examines why the COVID-19 pandemic produced post-pandemic strike waves in some liberal market economies but not others. The U.S., U.K., and Canada experienced escalating strike activity; Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand did not. In Canada, a wave concentrated in Quebec but not in Ontario or British Columbia. The dissertation proposes an activation sequencing framework, in which waves arose where premature rollback of pandemic-era income supports met coordination networks already operationally exercised for cross-sector mobilization. Neither condition alone was sufficient. The within-Canada comparison points to network activation as a key variable. Rollback appears necessary but insufficient; the mobilization capacity hypothesis is not supported, as the United States produced a wave from the most adverse structural position; activation sequencing alone is consistent with all cases examined. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w19n5c9 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kinzel, Ian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rb142kw Effective communication of medical and environmental information remains one of the most persistent challenges in modern healthcare (Berkmann et al., 2011). While scientific and clinical knowledge continues to expand at an unprecedented rate, the translation of that knowledge into formats that are accessible, trustworthy, and actionable for the general public has not kept pace. This disconnect is particularly evident in communities disproportionately affected by environmental health risks, where residents must navigate complex, and often conflicting, information about exposures, long-term health consequences, and mitigation efforts. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rb142kw Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hora, William Molina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ph1j7m9 We present the Toggle Tree, a parallel data structure for frontier-based graph algorithms. A Toggle Tree is used to represent a subset of vertices using hierarchical bit vectors, enabling efficient parallel updates, traversal, and set-wise reductions without global packing. It provides an IndexSet interface that unifies a wide range of parallel graph algorithms un- der a common abstraction of frontiers and active sets, and an IndexMap interface that also incorporates priority-queue semantics. Specifically, the Toggle Tree aims to combine the advantages of traditional sparse and dense frontier representations, offering both provable theoretical guarantees and high efficiency in practice.Using Toggle Trees, we implement five fundamental graph algorithms, including breadth-first search (BFS), k-core, degree-based graph coloring, single-source shortest paths using Bellman-Ford, and weighted-BFS (wBFS). Across a diverse set of large real-world graphs and the five graph problems, our... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ph1j7m9 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jiang, Xinjian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93k831xj The intrinsic properties of ultra-wide-bandgap semiconductors are exceptional. Diamond alone combines a bandgap of 5.47 eV, a theoretical breakdown field exceeding 10 MV/cm, and a thermal conductivity unmatched by any other semiconductor material. Whether these properties translate into working devices is determined not only by the bulk crystal but also by the atomic and electronic structure of its surface. This dissertation establishes, through first-principles calculations, how atomic-scale bonding at surfaces and interfaces governs the electronic properties that cannot be understood from the bulk structure alone. The diamond (100) surface reconstructs without an activation barrier, driving a metallic-to-semiconducting transition. In contrast, the diamond (111) surface admits a secondary pathway through a previously unidentified metastable intermediate, with the final reconstructed surface remaining semi-metallic. These reconstructed surfaces serve as the structural and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93k831xj Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gomez, Hector https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90k6j926 When I was 11, I made a large collage in response to the Oklahoma City Bombing that took place on April 19th 1995–orchestrated by Timothy McVeigh, who lived about 20 minutes from my small home in Lockport, NY. I was devastated by the images of people carrying the bloodied bodies of infants through grey smoke. I constructed a memorial or an artwork or a monument. Reaction, response, refuge? When I was finished, one of my male cousins–the house was full of them, I was staying with family while my father was dying, probably from his work in an automotive factory–looked down at what I'd made and said “that looks like a little girl made it” and laughed.Again, I find myself responding to the violence inflicted on this world by men (of course not exclusively but almost entirely), and trying to listen to the spirit that moved me then which moves me now through grief and action. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90k6j926 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 O'Byrne, Ryan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z97r3zh The cotton seed bug (CSB), Oxycarenus hyalinipennis (Costa) (Hemiptera: Oxycarenidae), is seed-feeding insect that may become a significant pest of cotton, valued at $135.2 million in California. CSB feeding can reduce the cotton seed weight by up to 15 percent, germination rates by as much as 88 percent, and cotton lint may be stained if CSB are crushed during the ginning process. While CSB is not yet found on cotton in California, CSB is found on ornamental plants such as cow-itch trees, Lagunaria patersonia (Andrews) G. Don (Malvales: Malvaceae). Lagunaria patersonia is a good host plant because seed pods present year-round provide food and shelter for CSB feeding swarms. However, minimal studies have analyzed the population dynamics of CSB on L. patersonia, documented natural enemies, or described the developmental biology of CSB. Phenological sampling found that L. patersonia blooms once per year around May/June and pods reach maturity in early September. Pod sampling determined... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z97r3zh Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Adams, Theodore https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8w80590k How can we mine the socio-technical activities of an open-source platform like GitHub? Specifically, how can we (a) identify repositories of interest, (b) study a community of interest at scale, and (c) connect users of interest beyond the platform’s boundaries? GitHub is the largest public software-hosting platform, with over 180 million developers and 630 million repositories as of 2025, yet the research community still lacks general-purpose capabilities to navigate its socio-technical surface end-to-end. The public surface of GitHub exposes far more actionable information than its native search and APIs reach, but extracting it requires methods that scale to the platform. This thesis spans three interrelated problems. First, we propose RepoScope, a multi-granularity query-by-example framework for GitHub repository search. RepoScope introduces three pre-crawled levels of granularity (292M repositories with minimal metadata, 1.46M with full metadata, and 50.5K with metadata... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8w80590k Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Masud, Md Rayhanul https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8v16m04f This thesis examines how queer Chicanx artists negotiate belonging under inner-cultural control through lowrider visual culture in The Q-Sides exhibition. The first chapter, “Up in Flames: Iconoclastic Por Vida,” focuses on Manuel Paul’s mural Por Vida in San Francisco’s Mission District. I begin with a formal analysis of the three panels of the mural to show how Paul transforms traditional Chicanx imagery to represent queer intimacy, transgender visibility, and lesbian autonomy within a historically masculine cultural context. The chapter then goes into the mural's presence on Instagram, revealing how comments and reactions demonstrate digital control of visibility, and uses Koritha Mitchell’s “know-your-place aggression” to interpret efforts to regulate queer visibility in the community. It also traces how these issues led to acts of vandalism and arson, framing the mural’s destruction within a broader history of policing the intersectional queer and Latinx bodies in public... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8v16m04f Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lepe, Breana Carolina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n76s8ds Given a finite group G, an equivariant map between spaces with group actions is a map that preserves the G-action. We can keep track of the equivariant maps between the quotient sets of G using the orbit category. An isovariant map is an equivariant map that preserves isotropy groups. Yeakel defines the link orbit category, which records the isovariant maps between the quotient sets of G.The subdivision of the orbit category is a stratified version of the orbit category that explicitly encodes paths through the orbit category. The classifying space functor, B, assigns to each category a topological space and interprets functors as continuous maps, and a functor is a weak equivalence if its image under B is a homotopy equivalence.In this thesis, for finite abelian groups, I construct a weak equivalence from the subdivision of the orbit category to the link orbit category using Quillen's Theorem A. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n76s8ds Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Muckle, Katherine Lara https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mg3285c Mental health disorders, such as Major Depressive Disorder, depression, and dysthymia, represent a significant public health burden in the United States. However, area-level structural conditions that drive these disparities in mental health outcomes remain understudied at the community level. Limited research has examined the association between the CDC Social Vulnerability Index and area-level mental health outcomes at the Zip Code Tabulation Area level, especially in high-vulnerability regions such as the Inland Empire. This study employed an ecological, cross-sectional secondary data analysis to examine the association between CDC AVI scores and three area-level mental health outcomes (poor mental health days, depression, insufficient sleep) across 168 ZCTAs in the Inland Empire, comprising Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Social vulnerability data were obtained from the American Community Survey, and mental health outcomes were obtained from CDC PLACES Better Health... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mg3285c Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pandian, Eliana https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k128144 This dissertation examines self-reflexivity and (inter)subjectivity in autobiographical film and video by women directors and artists through the emerging lens of autotheory. Through close readings of works by French directors Laetitia Masson and Agnès Varda, Argentine director Albertina Carri, Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo, and Latinx/Chicana performance artist Xandra Ibarra, I argue for the potential contributions of autotheoretical approaches in film and media studies by revisiting the question of the “I” in key debates on auteurism, spectatorship, and apparatus theory. I investigate how these artists engage in worldmaking projects by subverting formulaic narrative structures and generic expectations. In doing so, they disorient, obfuscate, and reorganize subjectivity, the “I,” and the gaze outlined by early debates in film and media studies. This dissertation introduces the palimpsext as a conceptual framework for analyzing autobiographical and intertextual... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k128144 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cuellar, Iliana Cristal https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gm8s3tx Trust in science has important implications for health behavior and policy support, yet most research relies on explicit measures that are vulnerable to social desirability. Based on dual-process theory, this dissertation first establishes the predictive validity of implicit and explicit measures of trust in science on science-related behavior. Building on the foundation of understanding of implicit and explicit trust in science, this dissertation also aims to understand how message framing, uncertainty, and scientific knowledge shape implicit and explicit trust in science and behavior. In Experiment 1, I measured implicit trust in science using a single-category IAT, explicit trust using self-report measures, and behavior using scientific news headline choices. In Experiment 2, I manipulated how science is framed – static (science as fixed) versus dynamic (science as evolving) – and tested if scientific knowledge moderates the effect on implicit and explicit trust. In Experiment... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gm8s3tx Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chaplin, Kayla Marie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d20h532 All chapters of this dissertation share two central themes: understanding predator–prey dynamics between kangaroo rats and rattlesnakes and developing standardized computational methods that are generalizable to other biological systems. In Chapter 1, I develop a game-theoretic agent-based model to simulate microhabitat use strategies in the kangaroo rat-rattlesnake system. Microhabitat choice shapes predator-prey interactions through differential selection pressures from aerial predators and sit-and-wait predators, as well as physical structure for refuge and camouflage. The results of our analysis show that when specialist predators occur at higher densities than generalist predators, both generalist predators and prey shift toward habitat specialization due to competition. In Chapter 2, I simulate microhabitat use from the perspective of an ectothermic predator that is thermoregulating to compare computational approaches to standard thermal ecology metrics used for determining... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d20h532 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Remington, Michael James https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cx032xb Vision–Language–Action (VLA) models have become a dominant paradigm for generalist robot manipulation, yet most are effectively memoryless: they map the current observation and a language instruction to an action without an explicit mechanism for retaining and reusing information across long-horizon, partially observable episodes. This thesis makes two contributions toward memory-augmented VLA policies. First, we unify three heterogeneous VLA backbones—pi0.5, Cosmos, and DreamZero— under a single BasePolicy interface, so the same evaluation and rollout infrastructure applies uniformly to all three. Second, we introduce DynaMem, an input-level, single-point dynamic memory injection mechanism that augments any backbone behind this interface without modifying its internal architecture or requiring backbone-specific engineering. We evaluate the resulting system with closed-loop rollouts on the RoboMemArena (RMA) benchmark. Preliminary experiments indicate that input-level memory injection... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cx032xb Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gong, Litian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cr1h5cq Persistence modules serve as the algebraic foundation for topological data analysis, typically studied as representations of posets over a field. This dissertation extends the structural and decomposition theory of persistence modules to the more general setting of unitary left modules over Noetherian rings. We introduce the notion of a module of projective constant type, a generalization of interval modules that facilitates decomposition results. We characterize the existence of projective constant decompositions for pointwise finitely generated persistence modules indexed by An-type quivers, totally ordered sets, and zigzag posets. Our primary results establish that such decompositions exist if and only if specific algebraic criteria are met: the projective colimit conditions (PCC) for quiver and zigzag indexings, and the projectivity of cokernels of internal morphisms for totally ordered indexings. Furthermore, we provide corollaries for the existence of classical interval... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cr1h5cq Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Upegui Keagy, Nadiya https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8b22q53q Biosensing technology represents a core and often underappreciated pillar upon which most of the major discoveries in the life sciences rest. The development of new biosensing materials and methodologies has continually enabled life-saving advancements in medical diagnostics, drug discovery, and environmental monitoring, to name only a few major areas. Surface-based biosensing techniques mark a major subclass of biosensors, ranging from the simple colorimetric lateral flow assays found in COVID-19 tests to powerful techniques used for characterizing the binding behavior of a broad range of biological interactions. Among these is surface plasmon resonance (SPR), a highly sensitive real-time biosensing modality that has been used extensively in the fields of drug discovery, vaccine research, toxicology, and fundamental explorations of other biophysical interactions. The aim of the work presented in this dissertation is the advancement of all major aspects of the SPR sensing workflow,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8b22q53q Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ebel, Cole Pattric https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7xb8401j Rapid, sensitive, and accessible pathogen diagnostics are urgently needed to address the global health burden of infectious diseases and the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. Conventional methods, such as culture-based assays and PCR, remain limited by long turnaround times, sophisticated instrumentation, and restricted multiplexing capabilities, which make them impractical for deployment in resource-limited or point-of-care (POC) settings. This dissertation presents the development of integrated microfluidic platforms coupled with biochemical assays based on recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) and CRISPR/Cas12a detection for rapid, portable, and instrument-free diagnostics. A series of microdevices were engineered to overcome limitations in fluid transport, sample processing, and assay integration. First, a Rotation-Chip was designed as a low-cost, reusable platform that enables high-throughput multiplexing through manual fluid transfer. Leveraging superhydrophobic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7xb8401j Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Peng, Ruonan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m38g2qs Gothic studies often understands the figure of the ghost as seeking resolution to unfinished business while monsters are understood for their “otherness,” but in Latinx and Chicanx literary and cultural texts, ghosts and monsters instead move back and forth across borders or stay contained within homes as permanent embodiments of trauma that teach the next generation how to survive. Through gender studies, literary studies, and cultural studies, my project Domestic Enclosures: Liberation, Monstrosity, and Transformation in Latina Speculative Expression analyzes the (im)mobile bodies of monsters, plants, ghosts, and werewolves within texts including poetry, prose, and zines. Under capitalism and colonization, the state usurps people of color’s relationship to their own bodies, both infantilizing BIPOC folks while robbing youths of color of the innocence that their white peers are afforded. Working within this contradiction, Domestic Enclosures asks readers to consider how childhood,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m38g2qs Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hernandez-Bachman, Carolina D. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dc419n7 In Beside Ourselves: Trauma, Self-Relation, and Autofabulation, I consider the narrative problem of trauma through new terms of engagement inspired by survivors themselves. Despite the hegemonic expectation for documentarian forms, survivors use a diverse array of techniques to tell their own stories. I develop the term “autofabulation” to describe survivors’ use of the fictional, fabricated, and fantastic. My usage of fabulation is derived from historian Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o’s “Afro-fabulation.” Hartman describes critical fabulation as a methodology that combines research with imagined narrative in order to address archival gaps occasioned by violence. Nyong’o builds from Hartman’s premise with Afro-fabulation, which enacts a “tactical fictionalizing of a world that is, from the point of view of black social life, already false” to critique structures of oppression in the present while also projecting a vision of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dc419n7 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wood, Alexandra Rose https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zr3p0xf Despite being one of the recurrent spaces in contemporary Queer Mexican narrative, little scholarly attention has been given to baños. Employing a critical approach to bath space, this dissertation explores the representations of bathrooms and bathhouses and their potential not only in their narrative function but also as opportunities for critical reflections on larger dynamics of power related to space, gender, sexuality and the control of bodies. I begin by making an argument for Critical Baño Studies, an analytical framework for understanding bath space narratives. In chapter one, I argue for a rereading of Ana Clavel’s novel Cuerpo náufrago with an acute focus on the protagonist’s overnight transition into a man, her new obsession with urinals, and an understudied portion of the novel that portrays masculine sociality in the bathhouse. In chapter two, I bring together a score of pre- and post-2000s films under the genre of “Bathhouse Film.” With a new approach to the iconic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zr3p0xf Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hansen, Koby Bryan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zn307z5 Safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as autonomous vehicles and robots, increasingly rely on deep neural networks. While these systems require high prediction accuracy, they must simultaneously satisfy strict end-to-end timing constraints under tight memory and energy budgets. The challenge extends beyond static inference: realistic deployments face non-stationary data and fluctuating power conditions, necessitating online adaptation systems. However, existing machine learning methods largely overlook the timing, memory, and accelerator-contention constraints inherent to embedded CPS, resulting in unpredictable latencies and frequent out-of-memory failures.This dissertation addresses the gap between algorithmic machine learning and real-time systems by developing a predictable and self-adaptive On-Device machine learning stack. We demonstrate that predictable learning is a distinct systems problem requiring cross-layer coordination rather than isolated algorithmic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zn307z5 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Zexin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6td4n6sd Traumatic brain injury (TBI) in males has been extensively studied but less so in females. There is a general understanding that females and males’ recover differently after TBI but this has not been extensively documented. A significant gap is how the vasculature and blood brain barrier (BBB) is altered in females after TBI. Adult C57/BL6 male and female mice underwent a moderate cortical TBI. At selected time points BBB leakage and lesion volumes were assessed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at baseline, 3-, 7-, 14-, 30-, and 60-days post injury (DPI). We also obtained classical vessel characteristics and complexity using our novel vessel painting technique at 60 DPI. We observed that females had a significant increase in vascular complexity at 60 DPI compared to the male mice. In contrast, males exhibited an increased BBB leakage and a more elevated lesion volumes over the 60 DPI time course. Our novel findings confirm that the response to a penetrating TBI in female mice... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6td4n6sd Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Galleguillos, Sophia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6t81h3d8 Given the rapid growth of older adults in the United States, there is a pressing need for research on aging, particularly on preventing trajectories of decline. Although some age-related declines in cognitive abilities are documented as part of normal aging, reduced engagement in novel and cognitively stimulating activities may contribute to these changes. Learning intervention research suggests that learning new skills can improve cognitive and functional abilities as well as other psychosocial outcomes among older adults, supporting healthy aging. These benefits may be especially important for underserved older adults, who face systemic inequities that increase their risk for adverse aging outcomes. However, there is limited research examining the impact of learning engagement among these populations, likely due to participation barriers such as financial, transportation, and language constraints. This dissertation addresses this gap by presenting a tailored, community-based... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6t81h3d8 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rodriguez, Tania Melissa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rn5h3rr All-solid-state batteries replace flammable liquid electrolytes with inorganic solid electrolytes, yet the thermal properties of these ion conductors remain less understood than their ionic conductivity. Because solid electrolytes form continuous heat pathways between electrodes, their thermal conductivity (κ) governs temperature profiles, degradation, and cycling safety. This dissertation examines thermal transport and lattice dynamics in oxide solid electrolytes and explains low, glass-like heat transport in ion conductors.Single-crystal Li6.5La3Zr1.5Ta0.5O12 (LLZTO) was grown by floating zone method. Thermal measurements show an intrinsically low room-temperature κ of 1.59(33) Wm−1 K −1 . Inelastic neutron scattering observes acoustic phonons, while first-principles calculations reproduce the spectra and reveal dense optical modes with acoustic-optical avoided crossings near 7 meV. Quasielastic neutron scattering reveals fast local Li hopping, connecting mobile-ion dynamics... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rn5h3rr Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Yitian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6q90n4mp Social supergenes are genomic regions with locally suppressed recombination that have evolved repeatedly and convergently across multiple ant groups. They control a suite of traits associated with a social polymorphism, which distinguishes monogyne colonies headed by a single queen from polygyne colonies containing multiple queens. Because polygyne colonies contain multiple, often unrelated lineages, they create conditions in which conflicts of interest among nestmates can favor the evolution of selfishness within social supergenes. Theoretical modeling showed that the evolution of selfish haplotypes can pose an evolutionary challenge to the maintenance of social polymorphism. While classically described social supergenes typically harbor two alternative haplotypes, one monogyne-associated and one polygyne-associated, here we reveal four haplotypes on the chromosome 3 social supergene in Formica cinerea: two monogyne-associated (MA and MD) and two polygyne-associated (P1 and P2).... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6q90n4mp Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Palanchon, Marie Elisabeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p14m6fn Transition metal-catalyzed C–H functionalization is a powerful approach for the rapid construction of structurally complex molecules. Oxidative annulation chemistry has enabled efficient synthesis of diverse heterocyclic scaffolds; however, many established methods rely on electron-deficient coupling partners. In comparison, electron-rich alkenes and alkynes remain underexplored. This dissertation focuses on development of Rh(III)- and Co(III)-catalyzed C–H functionalization methodologies employing electron-rich π-systems and their application toward the synthesis of biologically relevant heterocycles, including protoberberine alkaloids.A concise and modular route toward natural and unnatural protoberberine alkaloids was developed by combining oxidative Rh(III)-catalyzed C–H functionalization of electron-rich silyl enol ethers with an anionic aza-6π-electrocyclization. Electron-rich silyl enol ethers were employed as coupling partners with hydroxamate substrates to access highly... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p14m6fn Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cao, Yujie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kb7s54x This dissertation consists of three independent research papers exploring how public policies affect behavior in the education and criminal justice system. The first chapter investigates the impact of criminal histories and high school misconducts/discipline questions within college applications on undergraduate students’ enrollments. Using a dataset of all colleges and universities in the U.S. over multiple years along with students' survey datasets, I find that these questions caused a decrease in enrollments of 6.1% within public universities driven by students’ dislike of the academic environment. Analyzing a statewide initiative to remove these questions, I find that enrollments increase. The findings support the initiative to remove misconduct-related questions from undergraduate college applications and encourage school-level interventions designed to reduce the negative stigma associated with negative backgrounds. The second chapter examines the effect of raising... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kb7s54x Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pridanonda, Pete https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gh3w0hq Mental health, respiratory health, and barriers to accessing healthcare are examples of health-related concerns that disproportionately impact minority populations, which may include the Latino community in Riverside County. In this study, we incorporated two large geographic areas of Riverside County: Riverside City and the Coachella Valley. We chose these specific areas for investigation as Riverside City and the Coachella Valley are geographically distinct: the former is a cityscape, while the latter is a highly rural, agricultural region. Based on the literature and discussions with community members, researchers, and residents identified several commonalities: mental health stigma, environmental injustices leading to a higher risk of respiratory diseases, and inaccessible health care. These topics have shown strong implications not only for public health but also highlight how structural and policy-level inequities shape health outcomes for communities. Therefore, this study... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gh3w0hq Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Trinidad, Ashley Jazmine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gh0b7jp A narrative of longing and frustration; in other words, a discourse on painting. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gh0b7jp Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Reiner, Matt https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66p4g6jb Despite a two-fold increase in doctoral attainment among Latinas in the U.S. over the past two decades, disparities in completion persist compared to other racial-ethnic groups. A lack of social support in academia contributes to isolation and intentions to drop out among Latina doctoral students, highlighting the need to better understand and address their experiences. Guided by Latina/o Critical Theory, Community Cultural Wealth, and Ecological Systems Theory, this dissertation examined how Latina PhD students in U.S. social science programs navigate relationships with mentors, advisors, and peers, focusing on support and conflict. It also explored their use of social media for support and their interactions with institutional resources.This study addressed five research questions related to culturally responsive mentoring, advisor conflict navigation, peer support and conflict resolution, online social support, and institutional support. Using a multi-method design, Study A... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66p4g6jb Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rincon, Brenda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5wv7c7xv High-performance computing (HPC) systems are increasingly deployed at extreme scale, exposing applications to silent data corruptions from transient hardware faults, data volumes that overwhelm storage and I/O bandwidth, and geo-distributed workloads that demand low-latency coordination across continents. This dissertation addresses these three challenges through a series of architecture-aware GPU kernel designs and system optimizations across three research thrusts: fault-tolerant linear algebra, high-ratio scientific compression and neural operator acceleration, and diameter-optimized geo-distributed overlay networks. First, we present a suite of high-performance GPU kernels with online fault tolerance targeting foundational linear algebra and signal processing operations. We introduce FT-GEMM, a high-performance general matrix multiplication with algorithm-based fault tolerance (ABFT) that achieves performance comparable to or faster than the closed-source cuBLAS, while... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5wv7c7xv Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Shixun https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5w35p6pf This dissertation is comprised of Inner Bullseye: A Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra, a new double bass concerto based on the theme of archery, and its relevant musical analysis. The piece is my 9th orchestral work created by fusing Korean traditional music (Gugak) and the Western orchestra.This dissertation stems from two concerns. First, although the double bass is an essential instrument in the orchestra, it has been marginalized in the concerto repertoire as a solo instrument. Through this work, I have made an attempt to fill a gap in the double bass repertoire. Second, while many existing intercultural works have chosen to incorporate Korean traditional instruments, this work attempts to realize the structural and expressive characteristics of Korean traditional music using only Western instruments. This approach attempts to increase performance possibilities regarding elements of Korean music reaching the global stage. Accordingly, this dissertation examines the structural... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5w35p6pf Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lee, Hyunjoo Amelia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t04s0d5 This dissertation examines the conceptual ambiguities and systemic vulnerabilities of meritocracy, arguing that it risks devolving into a hereditary cognitive elite – a technocratic aristocracy that undermines social mobility, equal opportunity, and solidarity. I analyze a wide range of scholarship from Michael Young’s dystopian critique to contemporary critics such as Daniel Markovits, Michael Sandel, David Goodhart, Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille, and apologists such as Adrian Wooldridge and Thomas Mulligan. Drawing on their works, I identify three interrelated dangers: the narrowing of merit (the reduction of valued abilities to cognitive skill, symbolized by the college diploma), the solidification of hierarchies (declining social mobility as elites transmit advantage intergenerationally), and the steepness of hierarchy (growing cultural and attitudinal distance between a cosmopolitan cognitive elite and the rest of society).These problems are not inherent to meritocracy itself.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t04s0d5 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dorson, Zachary https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pq6g5zh The widespread accessibility of generative artificial intelligence has transformed the digital information environment, accelerating the production and circulation of synthetic media. As young people increasingly encounter AI-generated images, videos, and text in their everyday media consumption, questions arise about their capacity to critically evaluate the authenticity of online content. Situated within the broader field of media literacy, this dissertation advances the concept of synthetic media literacy, defined as the ability to discern between authentic and artificially generated media and to evaluate such content using systematic verification practices. In this three-paper dissertation, this research examines undergraduate students’ baseline capacities to evaluate synthetic media, the impact of an inquiry-based instructional intervention, and the role of politically motivated reasoning in shaping evaluation processes. Findings from the first study indicate that students’... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pq6g5zh Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Alkam, Samia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5np6h68m This thesis examines how alchemical secrecy was preserved, transformed, and renegotiated in the transition from manuscript to print in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German-speaking Europe. Focusing on "Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit" (Konstanz, 1410–1419) and "Pandora, das ist, die edelste Gab Gottes" (Basel, 1582) as case studies, it analyzes how textual strategies, visual programs, and material formats shaped access to alchemical knowledge across different media environments. Drawing on close examination of manuscripts and printed editions across collections in Germany, this study argues that print did not dissolve alchemical secrecy through wider dissemination. Instead, it reorganized secrecy by reshaping the relationship between image, text, and reader interpretation. While print introduced greater standardization and expanded circulation, alchemical works continued to rely on allegory, coded language, and forms of visual and textual interpretation that depended upon... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5np6h68m Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Allen, Rebecca Lynn https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5kj741gh Multimodal learning seeks to develop models capable of reasoning over heterogeneous inputs such as vision, language, audio, and sensor data. Despite significant progress in recent years, three key challenges remain: (i) supporting arbitrary combinations of input modalities, (ii) maintaining robustness when modalities are missing at inference time, and (iii) integrating capabilities from multiple expert models without costly joint retraining on large paired multimodal datasets. This dissertation addresses these challenges through a series of principled methods that progressively relax assumptions on modality availability, supervision, and data requirements. First, we study multimodal fusion under heterogeneous modality combinations. We propose MMSFormer, a Multimodal Segmentation Transformer with a novel fusion strategy that effectively integrates information from diverse modalities. Unlike prior approaches limited to fixed modality sets, MMSFormer supports arbitrary modality... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5kj741gh Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Reza, Md Kaykobad https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bq4x30m This dissertation examines literature written by Colombian women as a critical site for engaging histories of violence that remain fragmented, overlooked, or distorted within institutional archives. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the project interrogates the limits of archival memory and historiography, arguing that literature functions as an aesthetic and ethical practice capable of making audible what dominant regimes of legibility, shaped by colonialism, racism, ableism, and patriarchy, have rendered inaudible. Rather than treating literature as a supplement or alternative archive, the study approaches it as a space of critical listening that exposes the epistemic violence embedded in archival forms. Methodologically, the dissertation draws primarily on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, in dialogue with theories of testimony developed by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Testimony is understood as a performative and relational act emerging... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bq4x30m Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Espíndola Ramírez, Liseth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/55x7w7tk I study the problem of partial identification in the presence of nuisance functions in terms of moment inequality models in three dimensions. First of all, I discuss the inference for partially identified parameters of interest in unconditional moment inequalities while there are point identified nuisance functions. The parameters of interest are partially identified by the confidence set of the true parameters of interest that satisfies the uniform asymptotic size control property. Secondly, I apply the method to develop a novel structure model to infer the partially idenfied interaction effects of radio stations in the U.S. while the conditional choice probabilities serve as the nuisance functions. Our empirical results indicate negative interaction effects among different radio commercial markets. In the third dimension, I discuss the inference for partially identified parameters of interest in conditional moment inequalities while there are point identified nuisance functions.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/55x7w7tk Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fang, Keren https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4tb4k26p Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a public health concern, with 2.5 million people sustaining injury every year and over 70,000 fatalities per year. Due to physical impact on the cerebral vasculature, individuals with TBI are at greater risk of secondary neurodegenerative cascading which potentially leads to diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. Currently, the leading treatments only manage symptomatic conditions without preventing vascular and neurodegeneration. The objective of this study was to assess if post-TBI ACE2dm-s1 immediate treatment could blunt vascular loss and promote vascular regrowth and vasodilation. To test this theory, 2-month-old wildtype C57Bl6 adult male mice were subjected to a closed head injury (CHI). ACE2dm-s1 (ACE2 conjugate developed by Heinzelman and collaborators) diluted in sterile phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) treatment was immediately started and continued for 4 continuous days. At 4 days post injury, ultrasound imaging was done to measure cerebral... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4tb4k26p Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Thai, Alan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gw9v12b The rational design of heterogeneous catalysts requires precise controlling of the active site structure, coordination environment, and interfacial properties to achieve superior performance in practical applications. This dissertation systematically investigates these key factors across precious and base metal catalysts, with relevance to greenhouse gas and air pollution issues. For precious metal catalysts, a tunable Ru/MgO system was developed, ranging from single atoms to small clusters, to probe size-dependent effects in CO2 hydrogenation. The result presented that the mixed Ru structure, combined with single atoms and few-atom clusters, has been proved to obtain maximized CO yield in this research. Then to further improve CO yield on Ru/MgO catalysts, incorporating CeO2 onto MgO created Ru-CeO2 interfaces was studied, which greatly enhanced H2 dissociation, delivering higher CO yields. Finally, by tuning Ru coordination environment at single atom sites, the most efficient... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gw9v12b Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ye, Kailong https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4fn0w7m2 Drug delivery platforms for tissue engineering must simultaneously achieve structural stability, sustained therapeutic delivery, and effective biological integration, yet these requirements are often mutually exclusive in many systems. Bicontinuous interfacially jammed emulsion gels (bijels) represent a new class of biomaterials in which nanoparticles irreversibly arrest spinodal liquid–liquid phase separation, generating highly interconnected bicontinuous porous architectures with exceptional structural tunability and stability. Here, we introduce a Bijel-Integrated Porous Engineered System (BIPORES) that leverages this architecture to unify structural persistence, controlled therapeutic release, and cellular compatibility within a single platform. BIPORES was fabricated by jamming silica nanoparticles (SiNP) at a spinodally decomposed interface within a poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) matrix, producing self-stabilized bicontinuous networks in which the SiNP diameter... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4fn0w7m2 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Basaranbilek, Merve https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4726j9t0 Locomotion in complex environments requires animals to maintain performance across substrates that vary in roughness, compliance, and incline. These environmental properties influence the transmission of propulsive forces and can substantially alter locomotor mechanics. Geckos represent an ideal system for examining how animals cope with such challenges because different lineages possess specialized pedal morphologies adapted to distinct habitats. Arboreal geckos rely heavily on adhesive toe pads to navigate rough vertical surfaces, whereas desert-dwelling species such as the Namib web-footed gecko, Pachydactylus rangei, possess enlarged webbed feet associated with locomotion on compliant sand. Here, we investigated how substrate properties influence locomotor performance and kinematics in two gecko species, Phelsuma laticauda and Pachydactylus rangei, that occupy mechanically distinct environments.First, we examined how surface roughness affected frictional adhesion and locomotor... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4726j9t0 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cadima, Zachary William https://escholarship.org/uc/item/411965w6 Interfacial interactions between water and calcite promote electrostatic interactions, ion adsorption, dissolution, and reactive transport. The specific ion behavior at various pHs remains unresolved. In this project, the zeta potentials of NaCl, CaCl2, Na2CO3, and CaCO3 at the pH’s of 3.8, 7, 8.5, and 10 over an ion concentration range were obtained using a custom-made steaming potential apparatus. The main objective was to see how the surface charge changes with pH. The zeta potential starts positive at around +47 mV to +48 mV for the NaCl and CaCl2 and at around +32 mV for the Na2CO3 at the acidic pH of 3.8. The zeta potential value decreases to zero until it reaches the isoelectric point. The isoelectric point for the NaCl and Na2CO3 is around the pH of 7 and the isoelectric point for the CaCl2 is around the pH of 8.5. As the pH continues to increase from the isoelectric point, the zeta potential decreases into the negative region for NaCl and Na2CO3 and reaches around -31... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/411965w6 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Olivier, Phillip Alan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3t82r6df As computing has spread across science and industry, its dominant cost has shifted from computation to the movement of data between memory and the processor. This movement is also a security concern, because data in transit is exposed to the rest of the system. By performing computation inside or next to memory, processing-in-memory (PIM) and, more broadly, memory-centric computing reduce both the cost and the exposure. After nearly three decades of research, the open question is no longer whether PIM is feasible, but whether it is deployable: efficient across diverse workloads, secure under realistic trust boundaries, and programmable through compiler and verification support rather than by hand. Existing memory-centric designs meet these requirements only partially: most commit to a single execution layout that suits some workloads and leaves the array underused on others, are evaluated as isolated accelerators rather than under real addressing, coherence, and trust constraints,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3t82r6df Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Jingyao https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3r58g03x This study compares the effects of engaging with LEGO engagement tasks on undergraduates’ learning of 3D spatial information. Using a between-subjects design, participants were assigned to one of three conditions: virtual construction, physical construction, or tracing. Participants in the construction conditions assembled eight LEGO figures using either the Bricasso2 app on a tablet or Classic LEGO bricks. The tracing condition served as an active control. During the LEGO engagement phase, students reported their level of cognitive load and anxiety after building each model using Likert scales. Participants then completed the LEGO figure recognition test (LFRT) where they recognize and select the correct images of the target LEGO models from a set of alternatives containing 3D spatial errors. The LFRT captures students’ learning of the models’ 3D spatial properties, including the intrinsic spatial errors (e.g., brick size and rotation) and the extrinsic spatial errors (e.g. relative... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3r58g03x Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fenger, Alexis Leandra https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qz4t12z Synthetic biology increasingly relies on genetic circuits that sense user-defined small molecules, yet progress remains limited by the availability of programmable biosensor scaffolds. This dissertation develops and applies SPRINT (SPlit-T7 PyR1 bIoseNsor plaTform), a modular bacterial platform that adapts the plant abscisic acid receptor PYR1 and its partner ABI1 to drive split T7 RNA polymerase-induced gene expression in E. coli. Chapter 2 establishes SPRINT by optimizing expression context, host strain, and a three-part reporter operon that enables fluorescence readout together with positive and negative selections. Chapter 3 applies SPRINT to identify new ligand– sensor pairs. Screening refined PYR1 libraries against a chemically diverse pilot set and a coumarin-focused panel uncovers functional sensors in E. coli, including several not observed in yeast. Chapter 4 extends the framework from sensing to actuation by expressing plant prenyltransferases in E. coli to convert... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qz4t12z Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hartley, Zach https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qg414j8 Background. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been linked to later cognitive decline and dementia-related outcomes, but less is known about how this association appears in large-scale electronic health record (EHR) data or how it should be interpreted across Black and Latino populations. Methods. This retrospective cohort study used de-identified TriNetX U.S. Collaborative Network data to examine whether documented PTSD was associated with later documented dementia-spectrum neurocognitive disorder (NCD). Documented PTSD was identified using ICD-10-CM diagnosis coding. The primary outcome was a composite of later documented Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, unspecified dementia, dementia in other diseases classified elsewhere, frontotemporal dementia, and mild NCD due to a known physiological condition. Patients with prior dementia spectrum NCD or selected alternative causes of cognitive impairment were excluded v before follow-up. Propensity score matching accounted... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qg414j8 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tull, Leilani https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gx6g53f This dissertation is a deep dive into the factors that impact the onset and social regulation of reproduction in early nesting bumble bee queens. Bumble bee queens, as with other eusocial insects, start their nests independently and perform all nesting tasks. After successfully raising their first workers, these caregivers then take over all brood care and foraging, allowing queens to fully specialize in reproduction. Reproductive transitions in bumble bees are an essential but understudied piece of life-history and provide a unique opportunity to examine social regulation and the downstream behavioral changes.In this dissertation, I examine the social cues from nestmates, as well as the sensory mechanisms that regulate this transition of behaviors in early nesting queens. In Chapter One, I found that queens housed in limited nesting space have an accelerated timeline of ovarian activation and nest initiation. In Chapter Two, I show that direct contact with nestmates and more... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gx6g53f Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Moore, Meghan Elysse https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3f10x3x9 In my dissertation, I argue that early literary developments of wonder that narrativize practices of collecting, cataloging, displaying, and taxonomizing set the stage for later theories and practices of museum collection and curation––a history that can often be obscured because of the emphasis on the ingenuity of the modern museum. My research examines the history of medieval and early modern wonder as a discourse of empire, following its material legacy in works by John Mandeville and Geoffrey Chaucer into drama through Christopher Marlowe, and ultimately into the nineteenth-century, in the collection practices of one of the founding curators of the British Museum, Augustus Wollaston Franks. I argue that wonder serves as a guiding ethos for practices of collecting and curation, both material and literary in form, as collection practices shifted from private and personal in the medieval and early modern periods to public and institutionalized in the eighteenth and nineteenth... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3f10x3x9 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mocsi, Amanda Jean https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b70s25k Conservation of natural species requires an understanding of organisms' geographic ranges and existential threats that occur within these ranges. A species’ rarity or commonness is ultimately determined by taxonomy which defines boundaries between closely related species. As rare species tend to be at inherently greater extinction risk than widespread ones, taxonomy interacts heavily with conservation. Similarly, hybridization strongly interacts with taxonomy because it points to limitations in species boundaries. Hybridization also interacts directly with conservation in that hybrid individuals are difficult to classify in terms of legal conservation status, and outbreeding may be beneficial or harmful to species’ persistence depending on context. Thus, the topics of conservation, taxonomy, and hybridization are heavily intertwined, but they have not been expressly studied together as a conceptual framework. To develop this conceptual framework, I use the study system of manzanitas... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b70s25k Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Abbo III, Tito Augusto https://escholarship.org/uc/item/35d81200 Directed input generation aims to produce inputs that trigger bugs at specific program locations and is critical for bug reproduction, patch validation, and rapid triage. Existing directed fuzzers suffer from three major inefficiencies: (1) suboptimal seed scheduling caused by inaccurate exploration policies, (2) sample-inefficient online learning that requires extensive exploration before convergence, and (3) inability to efficiently solve branches guarded by high-level semantic constraints. We address the first two challenges with reinforcement learning (RL). We formulate directed input generation as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) in latent space, where actions encode branch-level state transitions, states capture execution context, and rewards indicate whether the target location is reached. Using off-policy expected SARSA, the system continuously refines its exploration policy online. To improve sample efficiency, we introduce a pre-training scheme based on whole-program... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/35d81200 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zeng, Haochen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/35c2s60j This dissertation examines how housing markets shape political attitudes in the United States, focusing on immigration, foreign real estate investment (FREI), and redistribution. Despite housing's centrality to twenty-first century upheaval, it remains an understudied driver of mass political attitudes. Across three papers, I use Cooperative Election Study (CES) data and pre-registered survey experiments to test how housing concerns shape policy preferences. In the first chapter, I ask how affordability shapes FREI attitudes. I argue rising costs and stagnant wages create "lateral insecurity," prompting restrictive FREI preferences; causal mediation analysis confirms this pathway, and ZIP code-level data show preferences track local affordability. In the second chapter, I ask whether FREI exposure shifts redistributive preferences. I find that although exposure increases nativism, it does not move redistributive preferences except among Republicans, highlighting the limits of... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/35c2s60j Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hobbs, Adam LeGrand https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3475h02j The integration and analysis of multi-modal data are increasingly essential across various domains including bioinformatics. As the volume and complexity of such data grow, there is a pressing need for computational models that not only integrate diverse modalities but also leverage their complementary information to improve clustering accuracy and provide insights, especially when dealing with partial observations with missing data. We propose Generalized Probabilistic Canonical Correlation Analysis (GPCCA), an unsupervised method for the integration and joint dimensionality reduction of multi-modal data. GPCCA addresses key challenges in multi-modal data analysis by handling missing values within the model, enabling the integration of more than two modalities, and identifying informative features while accounting for correlations within individual modalities. In addition, we also propose two extension models of GPCCA: GPCCA-Pois and GPCCA-Bern, tailored for multi-modal... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3475h02j Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yang, Tianjian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3109v0zk Freshwater systems in California and other semi-arid Mediterranean-climate regions face intensifying pressures from human activity, resulting in widespread ecological degradation alongside growing demand for water resources. This dissertation evaluated freshwater health by examining biodiversity threats, ecosystem condition, ecosystem service delivery, and governance perceptions, revealing imbalances between ecological integrity and water use. Across California, freshwater taxa are disproportionately threatened compared to terrestrial and marine species. The most pervasive and severe threats, including habitat loss, biological invasions, altered hydrology, and climate change, affect freshwater taxa across regions and taxonomic groups. Threat severity is closely aligned with spatial extent, indicating that threats to freshwater biodiversity in the state are both widespread and systematic. These patterns highlight the vulnerability of freshwater ecosystems in Mediterranean-climate... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3109v0zk Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Qin, Gary https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tw8g9ds Many animals use celestial cues, such as the sun or moon, to maintain heading during short or long distances of travel, but how Drosophila melanogaster, a non-migratory species, select and maintain heading using these cues during flight is poorly understood. Here, we used a magnetic tether arena, where tethered flies can rotate freely around their vertical axis, to characterize how self-motion cues and properties of visual cues including wavelength and intensity, shape Drosophila orientation during flight. In the flight arena, we used a single LED as a small bright object to simulate the sun. We found that flies select and maintain a stable heading relative to a single green or UV LED, but require both wavelengths set 180° apart to maintain heading when there are large changes in stimulus position. Additionally, we found no evidence of a time-compensated sun compass, consistent with the non-migratory ecology of Drosophila. When presented with paired green and UV cues, flies preferred... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tw8g9ds Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pae, Haneal https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sr853d7 Tick-borne Orthonairoviruses of the family Nairoviridae encode an ovarian tumor domain protease (OTU) homologue that serves as a viral virulence factor enabling evasion of the host immune response through the deconjugation of ubiquitin (Ub) and interferon-stimulated gene 15 (ISG15) from intracellular targets in processes referred to as deubiquitination (DUB) and deISGylation. Unlike Ub, ISG15 is poorly conserved among species suggesting efficient viral deISGylase activity is founded in an evolutionary pressure to evade the immune responses of commonly infected maintenance hosts. The premiere method for the quantifiable detection of DUB and deISGylase activity is through 7-Amino-4-Methylcoumarin (AMC) enzymatic assays. Currently, substrate options for the testing of deISGylation are limited to a human ISG15-based platform restricting our ability to screen for species-specific deISGylase activity against various animal ISG15 substrates. To enhance our understanding of variations... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sr853d7 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Garcia, Joseph Santino https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sp172jh This thesis studies a search-and-return extension of aerial vision-language navigation (VLN), in which a drone follows a language instruction to a target and then returns to its starting point. The main challenge is that the return phase must reuse information collected during the search. We extend OpenFly-Agent with a return trigger, a landmark memory module, and a return policy with an optional LoRA adapter, and construct SAR-Drone-VLN-3K, a paired search-and-return dataset for training and analysis. Experiments show that the base OpenFly-Agent returns only weakly even with landmark prompts, while the LoRA adapter often reaches the start area but fails to stop reliably. These results suggest that search-and-return navigation is harder than one-way aerial VLN and demands stronger memory and stopping decisions. To our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly model the return phase as a separate component in language-guided aerial navigation. Code and data are available... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sp172jh Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yu, Kunyi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sb635g9 Hybrid zones have been used to examine how gene flow, selection, and environmental variation shape patterns of ancestry across space. Because hybrid individuals contain mixed parental genomes, they provide an opportunity to test whether introgression is associated with climatic gradients and whether genomic ancestry corresponds to functional traits. We examined genomic admixture and heat tolerance across a hybrid zone between the ants Formica pacifica and Formica transmontanis in the Cascade Range of Washington and British Columbia. The subjects were workers collected across four mountain passes where the ranges of these species come into contact across a steep west–east climatic gradient. We used genome-wide SNP data to characterize ancestry, genome-wide association analyses to test for SNPs associated with climatic variables, and genomic cline analyses to evaluate whether particular loci showed exceptional patterns of introgression.Ancestry shifted across the Cascades, with... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sb635g9 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nonacs, Thomas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2nk9837r Intercellular adhesions depend on cellular adhesion proteins for both physical attachment and for triggering signaling pathways that reinforce that adhesion. Adhesion G-protein coupled receptors (aGPCRs) are powerful signaling molecules implicated in a wide range of cellular adhesion contexts. This dissertation aimed to characterize differential splicing of aGPCRs across cell types in the brain, where adhesions are essential for both synaptic specificity and cerebrovascular integrity, and to determine the functional consequences of those isoform differences for the cerebrovasculature.Across a single-cell transcriptomic survey of the mouse cortex and hippocampal formation, we found that Latrophilin-2 (also known as Lphn2 or Adgrl2) is the most differentially spliced aGPCR between neurons and non-neuronal cells, with the primary axis of splicing variation distinguishing neurons from endothelial cells. The differentially spliced exons cluster in functionally critical regions of the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2nk9837r Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 King, Alexander Julian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2j06v986 This study examines the implementation and affective impact of critical pedagogies, specifically Critical Sociocultural Linguistic Literacy (CriSoLL; Holguín Mendoza, 2022; Holguín Mendoza & Sánchez Walker, 2024) and what I term Critical Nepantla Literacy (CNL; see Anzaldúa, 2015), in AP Spanish Language and Culture courses that I taught in Southern California over a five year period. Despite increasing scholarly attention to critical pedagogies, Heritage language instruction continues to reproduce deficit discourse that privileges monoglossic, standardized language norms that often generate linguistic anxieties, linguistic and cultural erasure, and internalized deficit narratives (Rosa, 2019; Valdés, 2001). To join the efforts of repairing this damage and reimagine the Heritage classroom as a site of linguistic, cultural, and epistemic affirmation, this study rejects Eurocentric research paradigms, centering Borderlands theory as a foundational epistemological framework (Anzaldúa,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2j06v986 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sanchez, Cristina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2fs204jx This dissertation investigates the use of magnetotactic bacterial genes, mms6 and magA, as functional transgenes in human colorectal adenocarcinoma cells (HT-29) for two applications: genetically encoded MRI contrast generation and selective magnetic hyperthermia cancer therapy. This work characterizes the co-expression of mms6 and magA in HT-29 cells using a bidirectional CMV promoter construct delivered by the Sleeping Beauty transposon system. Stable dual-gene expression significantly enhanced intracellular iron accumulation (0.612 ± 0.032 pg/cell) compared to single-gene and wild-type cells and produced the highest transverse relaxation rate (R2 = 7.875 ± 0.293 s⁻¹). A 1.73-fold improvement over cells expressing mms6 alone, demonstrating that co-expression of both genes provides a synergistic advantage as an endogenous iron-based MRI reporter. Later we evaluated whether stable lentiviral expression of mms6 alone in HT-29 cells is sufficient to generate selective hyperthermic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2fs204jx Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Masjedizadeh, Vala https://escholarship.org/uc/item/292467jm This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century literature across the Americas represents geography as an uneven and contested production shaped by empire, racial formation, and mobility. Bringing hemispheric American studies, Black geographies, borderlands theory, and transnational literary studies into sustained conversation, the project argues that literary representations of movement, territorial conflict, and displacement reveal the unstable relationship between race and space within U.S. imperial expansion. Rather than proposing another spatial framework for American literary study, this dissertation develops a method centered on “traveling figures”: mobile literary forms that move across regions, national borders, and ideological systems while exposing the contradictions embedded within them. Through the figures of the pícaro, the filibuster, and the cowboy, the project traces how literature registers the uneven geographies produced by colonialism, racial capitalism,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/292467jm Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mulvihill, Emily Ann https://escholarship.org/uc/item/28v6289t This dissertation investigates the macroeconomic consequences of labor market frictions, with a particular focus on (1) the impact of unemployment structure on aggregate productivity, (2) the cyclical behavior of frictional wage dispersion, and (3) state-dependent skill loss during unemployment. The research consists of three interrelated essays combining search-and-matching theory with empirical analyses using longitudinal microdata.The first essay examines how the structure of unemployment affects aggregate Total Factor Productivity (TFP) through the channel of skill loss. As the share of highly educated workers in the unemployed pool increases, their disproportionately large skill loss drives productivity below its long-run trend. Furthermore, introducing heterogeneous skill loss adds an additional channel through which unemployment affects productivity, and the combination of these two effects generates a nonlinear amplification of productivity loss. This demonstrates that... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/28v6289t Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Han, Ilsoo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1hz598w0 This research project captures the experiences and stories of racialization, discrimination, and strategies of resistance on behalf of Mexican and Latina/os growing up during the 1980s-1990s in Fallbrook, CA. Despite decades of research on inequality in education, policing, and immigration enforcement affecting Latina/os, much of the literature continues to conceptualize this group as an ethnic and/or immigrant group. These frameworks often obscure the complexity of Latina/o racialization and omits them from the broader racial imaginary in the U.S. While scholars have documented structural inequalities, less attention has been paid to how Mexican and Latina/o communities are actively racialized across institutional and everyday context, and how these processes shape identity, belonging, and political engagement. This dissertation addresses these gaps by examining how Mexican and Latina/o residents experienced racialization across multiple institutions and how they responded. Grounded... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1hz598w0 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Higinio, Luis Miguel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1d86b9bg Eukaryotic chromatin is packaged within the nucleus in the form of a highly organized structure, with nucleosomes as basic units. Each nucleosome is comprised of an octamer of histone proteins, wrapped by 147-base pair DNA. The chromatin environment, orchestrated by high-order nucleosome assembly, critically influences various genome activities, such as epigenetic regulation. Increasing evidence has indicated that the multivalent interaction between an epigenetic modifier or effector and the nucleosome array dictates the epigenetic states, and consequently, genome organization and gene activity. To date, due to the complexity of high-order nucleosome assembly, the structure and mechanism of epigenetic complexes have mostly been characterized at the mono- and/or dinucleosome level, which has limited our mechanistic understanding of their nucleosome interactions in a native chromatin environment. To extend this limit, we have reconstituted an epigenetically modified tetranucleosome... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1d86b9bg Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yoon, Sol https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vd740xz The Salton Sea is a man-made, endorheic lake known to exhibit extreme polluted conditions. Due to increasing concerns of high levels of salinity, sulfur, pesticides, heavy metals and endotoxins residing within atmospheric particulate, effects are being made to research and examine the extensive conditions of the Salton Sea, and its effect of dust associated respiratory health issues in nearby communities. Even though conditions are unfavorable, a set of microbes called extremophiles thrive in such environments. Culturable analysis was performed on dust, water, and soil samples plated on Starkey’s Sulfur and 5% NaCl media. Across the abundant sub-ecosystems, the most dominant genera consisted of Bacillus spanning across all sites, with few contributions from secondary microbial communities. Within the culturable set of microbes, two-gram negative isolates, Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolated from dust andHalomonas alkaphilia isolated from water, were identified and analyzed through... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vd740xz Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lyew, Abigail Jasmine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mv4p41g The overarching goal of this work is to provide infants with technology to assist them in performing (and learn from performing) reaching actions. Reaching is an important early motor milestone that allows infants to explore their environment and positively influences their motor, perceptual, social, and cognitive development. Infants with or at risk for upper extremity (UE) impairments show delayed emergence of reaching, limiting their exploration, and affecting the UE motor abilities and potentially the overall quality of life. Providing these neurodivergent infants with opportunities for movement through the use of assistive devices can lead to improvements in their motor function. However, the available assistive technology, especially for infants (age up to two years), whose early movement experiences shape overall development, is limited. The notable ones are mainly passive, including the rigid P-WREX and the garment-based Playskin Lift. There is a need for an infant-friendly... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mv4p41g Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sahin, Ipsita https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0h0913kk Type 2 immunity is classically associated with helminth defense and allergic inflammation, but also regulates tissue repair, extracellular matrix remodeling, and metabolic homeostasis. Environmental exposures can alter the magnitude and quality of type 2 immune responses, yet how these changes affect tissue outcomes across metabolic and inflammatory disease settings remains incompletely understood. This dissertation investigates how distinct environmental exposures reshape type 2 immunity and tissue remodeling using two models of Nippostrongylus brasiliensis induced inflammation.In a western diet induced obesity model, we examined whether transient helminth infection protects against metabolic dysfunction through the type 2 associated immunoregulatory protein resistin like molecule alpha, or RELMα. Wild type and RELMα deficient mice were fed a western diet and infected with N. brasiliensis after weight gain had developed. Helminth infection attenuated weight gain, improved glucose... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0h0913kk Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jennett, Jennell Jeniecia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0g45f07k This project examines the cultural and economic interests behind monster narratives in popular texts, as well as audiences’ emotional, psychological, and social responses to these stories. By staging invasions, confrontations, and the elimination of monsters, monster narratives and their related mythologies (such as those generated around Dracula or Frankenstein) reflect the extent to which our culture perceives and tolerates abnormality. Scholars in monster studies, including Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Jack Halberstam, and Angela M. Smith, have criticized the ways these narratives maintain social hierarchies by constructing monsters as fictional stand-ins for women, people of color, queer and gender non-conforming people, and disabled people. However, the intent to reinforce hierarchies does not automatically produce the effect of audiences feeling threatened by the forms of difference on display, nor does it guarantee that they will celebrate the monster’s destruction. This project... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0g45f07k Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Barbour, Loren https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0802p1s5 Suppression of recombination on sex chromosomes creates a genomic environment characterized by repetitive sequence accumulation, structural rearrangement, rapid gene content evolution, and a reduced efficacy of selection. Although the mammalian Y-chromosome is characterized by extensive degeneration, it has also acquired and amplified multicopy gene families that may contribute to male-specific reproductive functions. However, the mechanisms underlying the evolution of these multicopy gene families remain unclear. Specifically, we lack understanding of whether, in closely related species, shared Y-linked multicopy gene families retain orthologous copies inherited from a common ancestor or instead undergo independent lineage-specific amplification. To investigate this question, I analyzed two Y-linked multicopy gene families, Spin2l and Kmt5a, across seven closely related Microtus vole species. I combined whole-Y sequence similarity heatmaps, genome-based copy number estimates,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0802p1s5 Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Adhikari, Swopnil https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rh145bh University students may recognize signs and symptoms of autism in themselves and may choose to seek a diagnosis in adulthood as executive planning and social demands become increasingly difficult. Autism presents with an increased rate of psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and depression (Jadav & Bal, 2022), with rates of co-occurrence being especially high for autistic university students. Concerningly, autistic individuals are five times more likely to attempt suicide than neurotypical individuals (Santomauro et al., 2024). These poor mental health outcomes can lead to a substantial negative impact on quality of life (Mason et al., 2019), especially when unaddressed. These results, thus, point to a need to screen for co-occurring psychiatric conditions in autistic adults and to provide mental health supports. This study will analyze the rates of co-occurring anxiety and depression in university students who are seeking an autism diagnosis. Additionally, this study will... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rh145bh Wed, 6 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Touati, Sarah https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rq393kw Populations residing, working, or attending schools near major highways experience elevated exposure to particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀), leading to increased health risks. Traffic-related particulate pollution arises from both vehicle exhaust and non-exhaust sources, including resuspended road dust, and is strongly influenced by roadway design and near-road mitigation strategies. This dissertation develops and evaluates a comprehensive modeling framework to quantify highway-generated particulate matter and to assess the effectiveness of vegetation barriers as a near-road air quality mitigation measure.The first component addresses particulate emissions from paved roads, with emphasis on the limitations of commonly used empirical emission factor models. A mobile measurement platform was developed to quantify road surface silt loading and particulate concentrations on high-traffic highways without disrupting traffic flow. Using these measurements, the performance of existing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rq393kw Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Saeidi, Amir https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6mh4f3dg Window queries are important analytical tools for ordered data in modern data management systems, yet existing approaches (like SQL OVER or XQuery windowing) are lacking when it comes to expressing and processing window queries over large datasets in a parallel and efficient manner.This dissertation introduces WindowBy, a new SQL++ windowing construct that provides an intuitive way to express window queries. It unifies the strengths of SQL OVER and XQuery windowing while extending them with richer and more intuitive semantics. WindowBy supports fixed-length, fixed-duration, content-based, and LABEL-based window definitions within a single expressive syntax. As window query expressiveness increases, efficient evaluation becomes substantially more challenging—particularly in distributed environments where windows may span partition boundaries. In today’s large-scale data environments, efficient and scalable window processing is more essential than ever.To address these challenges,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6mh4f3dg Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fang, James https://escholarship.org/uc/item/03j1w4mk Achieving secure wireless communication without pre-shared keys is a fundamental challenge, especially when eavesdroppers possess a significant channel advantage. Conventional physical-layer security (PLS) schemes, such as the standard single-trip wiretap channel (ST-WTC) model, inherently fail to provide a positive secrecy rate when the eavesdropper's channel strictly dominates the legitimate link. To overcome this bottleneck, a round-trip protocol known as secret-message transmission by echoing encrypted probes (STEEP) has been developed. STEEP can deliver a positive secrecy rate even when eavesdropping channels are much stronger than those between users, subject to sufficient asymmetric power allocations. This thesis investigates the optimization of the STEEP protocol over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and multiple-input multiple-output multiple-eavesdropper (MIMOME) channels. Specifically, we formulate a secrecy rate maximization problem to jointly optimize the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/03j1w4mk Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yu, Dinglin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9s94r2jd Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), the most common inherited cause of intellectual disability and autism, is marked by cognitive rigidity and atypical sensory responses. Predictive processing models propose that higher-order cortical regions generate expectations about sensory inputs and adjust behavior when predictions are violated. Here, we tested these computations in Fmr1 KO mice using a whisker-based sequence-learning task with wide-field calcium imaging. Wild-type (WT) mice learned to anticipate a patterned air-puff sequence linked to reward and adapted their responses to unexpected changes. In contrast, Fmr1 KO mice showed impaired flexibility and failed to adjust to sequence violations. Imaging revealed enhanced frontal and somatosensory cortical activation in WT mice during learned sequences, while Fmr1 KO mice exhibited weaker sensory responses and disrupted frontal dynamics. These findings identify a specific cortical mechanism, frontal–sensory decoupling that underlies predictive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9s94r2jd Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Garcia, Dominic Anthony https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p16947n Unlike the original Kitaev honeycomb model, where each spin interacts with three nearest neighbors through ??, ??, and ?? interactions determined by bond orientation, the Kitaev-type models considered here relax this strict orientation dependence while still requiring each spin to participate in all three interaction types. Despite this generalization, all Kitaev-type models remain exactly solvable, for example via the Jordan--Wigner transformation. A natural question arises: Which Kitaev-type model has the lowest ground-state energy? Using reflection-positivity arguments, we show that the Kekulé--Kitaev model, distinguished by its high degree of reflection symmetry, attains the lowest ground-state energy across the entire parameter space. In addition, we rigorously determine the ground-state flux sector for the Kitaev and Kekulé--Kitaev models for arbitrary couplings, thereby extending Lieb's flux theorem to anisotropic couplings in the Kitaev model. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p16947n Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Shixiong https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gz7k6fp Timely, safe propagation of patch in the Linux kernel is a challenge with direct security consequences for the vast upstream–downstream ecosystem. This thesis presents an integrated program of work spanning measurement, machine learning, and automated validation to reduce windows of vulnerability without sacrificing stability. First, we deliver the large-scale, comparative characterization of patch porting practices across different Linux distributions. We formalize core metrics—patch delay, porting rate, and bug inheritance ratio—and quantify the trade-offs among group-porting from LTS, targeted cherry-picks, and (minor/major) rebases. We also assess the practical impact of hinting tags (e.g., fixes tag, cc stable tags) and identify process gaps that systematically slow the adoption of critical patches. Then, we introduce DUALLM, a dual-model pipeline for fine-grained security-patch classification with a focus on high-impact memory-safety bugs (use-after-free and out-of-bounds).... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gz7k6fp Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Xingyu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7p24t80v Robotic control policies and Embodied AI models struggle to match the robust, generalizable performance of large language models. Among other reasons, data quantity and diversity remain a major bottleneck. Simulation environments are used to bypass the resource-intensive nature of real-world task demonstrations and data collection and are purposefully designed to be as close to the real-world task as possible. This research proposes that by intentionally distorting physics parameters, making them less realistic, we can extract richer spatial signals from simulation with minimal architectural changes. We demonstrate that zero-gravity training can create a more information-rich training environment for widely used tabletop manipulation tasks. By varying the gravity on the primary object, we force the policy to engage in 3D dynamics for tasks previously confined to the 2D tabletop. To manage object flyaway at first contact, we introduce selective containment volumes (virtual... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7p24t80v Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Amin, R M Asif https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dx2125w Concolic execution is widely used to explore input-dependent programs, but the differences between source-level and binary-level concolic execution remain unclear. This thesis presents a controlled study in an asynchronous concolic framework. To control the condition, we replace Marco’s source-level execution front end of the framework with the binary engine SymFit while keeping the solver and scheduler unchanged. This design isolates execution level abstraction effects and can directly compare exploration behavior. Our results show that binary-level execution generates significantly larger and more complex constraints due to instruction-level lifting, leading to an increase in solver cost and rapid CSTG expansion without coverage grows accordingly. We further introduce a module-aware constraint filtering mechanism to control library-generated predicates and quantify their impact on solving efficiency. These findings indicate that abstraction level fundamentally determines constraint... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dx2125w Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Tao https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dp5h3q7 Drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) affects millions of individuals worldwide who continue to experience recurrent and often debilitating seizures despite optimal pharmacological therapy. Electrical neuromodulation offers a means of influencing seizure dynamics, yet current clinical systems remain largely reactive and rely on empirically tuned stimulation parameters. A principled closed-loop framework grounded in prediction, subject-specific modeling, and formal stability analysis remains an open challenge. This dissertation develops a principled control-theoretic approach to closed-loop seizure suppression. We first investigate multiscale seizure forecasting using long-term intracranial EEG recordings from human subjects. By explicitly modeling the temporal evolution of seizure-relevant features and estimated risk through autoregressive and nonlinear dynamical models, we demonstrate substantial improvements in pseudo-prospective forecasting performance across patients, including... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dp5h3q7 Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Acharya, Gagan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k72d91p This dissertation examines the protracted “unsettlement” of working-class Southeast Asian refugees in California, with a focus on political institutions and actors. Through archival research and participant observation, I show that such unsettlement — sustained through the intertwining welfare, carceral, and immigration enforcement systems that maintain the threat of removal — has kept working-class Southeast Asian refugees in a continuous state of legal, political, and social liminality tied closely with the underlying threat of exclusion and expulsion. However, such liminality has also created opportunities for group identity and consciousness formation, as group similarities are made more salient and further politicized. I argue that this shared liminality enabled the emergence of “Southeast Asian refugee” as a shared panethnic identity among refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, beginning with refugee resettlement programs in the late twentieth century and persisting... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k72d91p Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Do, Mai Nguyen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k2239bq The study of quarks and gluons, the most fundamental constituents of matter, offers intriguing insights into physics. These particles are confined within nucleons, making it impossible to observe them individually. Instead, scientists employ statistical observables to analyze the collective behavior of particles produced in heavy-ion collisions. One key observable is anisotropic flow---the azimuthal anisotropy in particle emission arising from collective expansion driven by pressure gradients in the collision zone. Additionally, ongoing investigations are being conducted into the formation of light nuclei in these collisions, with various theoretical and experimental approaches, including coalescence, fragmentation, and thermal models, being explored. This research utilizes data from the Beam Energy Scan-II (BES-II) and the fixed-target program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), specifically through the STAR (Solenoid Tracker At RHIC) experiment. Here, flow measurements... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k2239bq Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Ding https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5x2399kr Ensuring efficient and verifiable performance of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) is crucial for their widespread deployment in real-world applications. While ADS have recently achieved significant improvement by both academia and industry, optimizing their runtime performance remains a challenging problem. This is primarily because multiple sensing and processing chains with complex dependencies need to be coordinated while efficiently utilizing modern multi-core platforms with predictable performance guarantees. The use of middleware frameworks, such as Robot Operating System (ROS), further complicates this problem due to additional abstractions and runtime behavior. This dissertation focuses on improving real-time scheduling and timing optimization of ADS software stacks, represented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) on multi-core platforms. The first part addresses the limitations of ROS 2, one of the most widely used open-source middleware frameworks for ADS and intelligent... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5x2399kr Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sobhani, Hoora https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jv8f5px Transnational Internet performance is an important indication of a country’s level of infrastructure investment, globalization, and openness. We conduct a large-scale measurement study of transnational Internet performance in and out of 29 countries and regions, and find six countries that have surprisingly low performance. Five of them are African countries and the last is mainland China, a significant outlier with major discrepancies between downstream and upstream performance. We then conduct a comprehensive investigation of the unusual transnational Internet performance of mainland China, which we refer to as the “Great Bottleneck of China”. Our results show that this type of bottleneck is widespread, affecting 79% of the receiver–sender pairs we measured. More than 70% of the pairs suffer from extremely slow speed (less than 1 Mbps) for more than 5 hours every day. In most tests the bottleneck appeared to be located deep inside China, suggesting poor network infrastructure... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jv8f5px Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhu, Pengxiong https://escholarship.org/uc/item/50b070t1 Z-type ligands have emerged as a powerful tool for the stabilization of electron-rich metal centers, enabling unprecedented catalytic reaction mechanisms. Work in the Harman lab focuses on utilizing 9,10-dihydro-9,10- diboraanthracene as a platform for ligand design, employing its dual-site σacceptor capability, along with the inherent two-electron redox properties of diboraanthracene. With the strategy of including σ-donor substituents such as phosphines to facilitate the coordination of transition metals and maximizing metal-borane interactions, unique transition metal complexes capable of multielectron redox chemistry have been explored and subsequently shown capable in terms of the activation of small molecules (e.g. CO2, H+ , N2). The most notable example of these being a diphosphine-diboraanthracene, “B2P2”, which exhibits coordination of a range of transition metals. Observations of these systems has shown that the inclusion of transition metal centers modify the redox... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/50b070t1 Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Farias, Phillip https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4hg962pw Photomechanical molecular crystals provide a promising route for converting light into mechanical work, but predicting their response properties a priori requires detailed insight into how molecular packing and intermolecular forces evolve during a photochemical reaction. A topochemical replacement framework enables this prediction directly using computational chemical methods. In this work, I examine the structural and energetic factors that govern photomechanical behavior across several representative and experimentally relevant systems. Diarylethene crystals illustrate the central role of packing, with changes in crystal packing altering the maximum work density up to 40‑fold. The largest work outputs arise from highly anisotropic deformations, revealing key packing motifs that produce large photomechanical responses. Molecular modification also shapes photomechanical performance, as shown in a series of 9‑anthracene carboxylic acid derivatives. We find that large, bulky halogens... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4hg962pw Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Perry, Cody