http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/ucsc_etd/rss Recent eScholarship items from UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Sun, 30 Aug 2026 06:34:53 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z0407q6 Preparing for natural hazards can feel overwhelming or abstract for non-experts. While playful extended reality (XR) has shown potential to support learning around climate-related topics, empirical evidence on its role in natural hazard preparedness remains limited. We employed an iterative, user-centered design approach to develop two Augmented Reality (AR) minigames, Build a Kit and Kit at Home, designed to support emergency preparedness skill-building and real-world action-taking. We evaluated both games in a mixed-methods study (N=22), with participants completing gameplay both independently and during guided community pop-up events at a flood-prone riverfront location, to examine how environmentally situated play shapes user experience. Results indicate that playful AR effectively supported participants' understanding of and confidence in individual emergency preparedness, while locally situated gameplay heightened situational awareness. This work contributes early empirical... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z0407q6 Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kosolapova, Katherine https://orcid.org/0009-0005-7800-0419 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gd7v497 In recent years, the superconducting properties of compounds containing lighter elements have proven to be a promising area of research. For example, highly pressurized hydride superconductors were predicted and experimentally shown to have extremely high superconducting phase transition temperatures. This motivates investigations of other light element superconductors: e.g., those containing nitrogen. Here we report results for the synthesis of bulk polycrystalline zirconium nitride. This was done by reacting zirconium under a nitrogen atmosphere using two separate methods: (i) an electrical arc furnace and (ii) an induction furnace. This is followed by crushing and annealing of the resulting specimen under a nitrogen atmosphere. Powder x-ray diffraction measurements confirm that the crystalline structure matches that of ZrN. Temperature dependent electrical transport measurements reveal metallic behavior for high temperatures with a superconducting transition at Tc = 10.4 K,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gd7v497 Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Barton, Tyler S https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6771-2421 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dr4170p Coralline algae, calcifying red algae of the orders Corallinales, Hapalidiales and Sporolithales, are important components of many marine ecosystems, providing stability and protection from high energy waves in coral reefs, and providing shelter, substrate and nutrients for many organisms across a range of marine environments. Corallines are thought to be amongst the most vulnerable marine organisms in the face of climate change, as their high-Mg calcite mineralogy makes them especially vulnerable to ocean acidification. Corallines also require light to perform photosynthesis and are therefore vulnerable to siliciclastic sedimentation which can reduce illumination and bury corallines. Lab based acidification experiments show most coralline species respond negatively to elevated CO2 conditions, but the nature and magnitude of effects vary between species, and the rate of experimental CO2 increase is much faster than natural rates, making it difficult to use experimental data to... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dr4170p Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hassell, Keenan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vv1w286 The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is designed to map the large-scale structure of the Universe, but its growing spectroscopic dataset also enables a broad range of astrophysical studies beyond its primary cosmological goals. This dissertation explores two complementary applications of DESI spectroscopy: improving redshift calibration for weak-lensing surveys and characterizing the structural evolution of dwarf galaxies in the nearby Universe. For weak-lensing cosmology, accurate redshift distributions are essential for translating observed galaxy shapes into robust constraints on dark energy and cosmic structure. Using DESI spectroscopy in the COSMOS and XMM\/VVDS fields, we investigate the potential of DESI to calibrate the photometric redshift distributions of KiDS-1000 source galaxies through a self-organizing map framework. The resulting redshift distributions are broadly consistent with previous calibrations, but the measured mean-redshift offsets are... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vv1w286 Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Blanco Hernandez, Diana Charlot https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8443-2905 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7761c5wj My dissertation project, “Activising Museums: Paths towards Decolonizing Memories of Empire, War, and Peace in Japan’s Long Postwar,” uses the frameworks of nation, peace, human rights, activism, and memory to investigate how Japanese museums address Japan’s colonization of Korea. I ask: how have war, peace, and other museums that engage with the colonial era changed as Japan’s post-generation struggles with remembering the Asia-Pacific War? What memories or feelings have the post generation (those without direct experience of the war) inherited from these museums? How do these inherited memories impact the ability for Korean history to be decolonized in Japanese society? What is the relationship between peace, activism, and the potential for decolonization?For my research, I focus on national museums (Museum of Ethnography, Museum of Japanese History), war and peace museums (Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Yūshūkan, Shōwakan), prefectural museums (Peace Osaka, Liberty Osaka),... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7761c5wj Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Mengying Christina https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5748-5801 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/765101cs This dissertation develops a systems view of quantum computing infrastructure, spanning the path from quantum network protocols to distributed quantum program execution. As quantum technologies mature from proof-of-concept demonstrations toward large-scale deployment, progress depends not only on better devices, but also on the network, planning, and runtime systems that connect those devices into usable infrastructure. The central thesis of this dissertation is that quantum infrastructure must be designed as a stack: entanglement must be routed efficiently, the physical network must be constructed for the physics of entanglement distribution, hardware resources must be provisioned intelligently, and distributed execution must be scheduled dynamically.The dissertation makes four principal contributions along this stack.First, we address a critical limitation in quantum network routing. Existing algorithms typically assume a Synchronized Single-time-slot model that forces all entanglement... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/765101cs Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gan, Yuhang https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5674-9178 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7641n5j5 This dissertation examines how teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico design digital pedagogies in ways that challenge the promise of access and skill-based frameworks for understanding teaching and learning with digital technologies. Drawing on sociocultural theories of learning, Indigenous scholarship on relationality, and ontological approaches to design, this work conceptualizes digital pedagogies as socially, culturally, and materially organized practices through which teachers and students make meaning with and through digital technologies in relation to students, languages, communities, and local ways of knowing and being. Based on one year of sustained ethnographic fieldwork with five teachers across Indigenous and non-Indigenous educational contexts in Oaxaca, including interviews, classroom visits, digital artifacts, and participation in community and union events, this study examines how teachers design with, repurpose, and sometimes refuse digital tools as part of their broader... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7641n5j5 Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Suarez Jimenez, Emanuel https://orcid.org/0009-0007-8752-9773 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7035x0xr Pushing Towards Zero: Harold Budd, Networks and New Music in Southern California (1964–1991) recovers a history of American experimental music obscured by narratives centered on New York, minimalism, and “ambient” music. Using Harold Budd as its central figure, the dissertation reconstructs a Southern California musical ecology formed through universities, museums, concert series, independent publications, friendships, performance collectives, and recording studios. It argues that Budd’s music emerged not through solitary stylistic development but through the movement of sounds and ideas across institutions, media, and relationships.Budd’s path begins in Los Angeles, where jazz, Hollywood labor, European concert music, and the landscapes of the American West shaped his early listening. His Army years with Albert Ayler, modernist training at San Fernando Valley State College and USC, and encounters with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown led him toward sparse notation,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7035x0xr Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Finkel, Joseph https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m27w0pd Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs, have emerged as powerful parallel computing platforms, offering significant performance advantages for a wide range of applications beyond traditional graphics rendering. To harness this power, compute-focused GPU frameworks have been developed, providing general-purpose parallel programming models. One aspect of these programming models is their memory consistency specification (MCS), which defines the semantics of concurrent shared-memory operations. The MCS also interacts with other aspects of the programming model to describe language-level security guarantees like memory safety, i.e., preventing access to out-of-bounds or uninitialized memory. Understanding when implementations conform to an MCS, and to what degree the MCS provides a sound and useful abstraction of real machines, is crucial for reasoning about GPU programs and for designing effective conformance tests. This thesis develops several techniques and large-scale studies... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m27w0pd Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Levine, Reese https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1324-0738 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64f5x4br Many scientific applications produce repeated point pattern realizations across subjects, regions, or time. While such point patterns exhibit individual variation, we assume they arise from related point processes that share a common distributional structure. This dissertation develops a Bayesian nonparametric modeling framework built around an interpretable baseline. We work with Poisson processes, such that the point process stochastic mechanism is characterized by the total intensity and a density with compact support. Flexible, parsimonious weighted combinations of beta densities represent both the baseline and the replicate-specific densities. The weights corresponding to each replicate encode the features that characterize its density and are pooled hierarchically across replicates to estimate the shared baseline. Throughout, we illustrate the framework using bike-share demand at a Chicago Divvy station, where weekly demand shares a common daily pattern while its features... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64f5x4br Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Le, Andrew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5kq128mk The electric grid is an essential part of modern society, enabling the reliable and efficient transport of electricity from generation sources to end users. Recent developments in the electric grid, including the increased penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs), battery energy storage systems (ESSs), and the proliferation of microgrids (MGs), have necessitated the adoption of novel computational methods for determining planning and operational actions. Such methods can further harness recent developments in machine learning in order to learn from historical and simulated operating points to take actions that improve grid resilience, as well as reduce the wall-clock time needed to compute operational decisions. In this dissertation, we consider different learning-based algorithms that can be used to either accelerate or act as proxies for traditional optimization-based problems in the electric power grid. We also consider auxiliary tasks such as load forecasting, which... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5kq128mk Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bose, Shourya https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2081-9545 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56m1w2h3 Occlusion remains a persistent failure mode for camera-based autonomous driving perception systems. In crowded urban scenes, pedestrians and vehicles can remain physically present even when they are partially or fully hidden from direct observation. Standard object detectors operate primarily on visible pixels, while tracking systems often rely on short-term motion extrapolation when detections disappear. This thesis studies whether generative occlusion reasoning can improve hidden-object localization inside a multi-object tracking pipeline. I present a diffusion-guided residual occlusion recovery framework for pedestrian tracking under occlusion. The system first uses an object detector and tracker to maintain visible trajectories. When a track becomes temporarily missing, a handcrafted motion hypothesis predicts the hidden object location using ByteTrack trajectory continuity, constant-velocity extrapolation, and the last known bounding-box geometry. A conditional diffusion... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56m1w2h3 Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lee, Karen https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9217-9100 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/54p8f039 Flavor is a perception the brain constructs, binding taste, smell, chemesthesis, texture, temperature, sound, and sight with expectation, memory, and cultural meaning into a single experience. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has begun to engage this perception directly yet this effort has largely treated flavor as a signal to be delivered or simulated, leaving aside the affective, and meaning-making dimensions that determine what flavor means to a person. This thesis synthesizes a cross-disciplinary literature spanning sensory neuroscience, flavor-engaging technology, hedonic psychology, and interaction design to reframe flavor as simultaneously technical, affective, and meaning-making. From this synthesis it identifies the limitations that single hardware advance can hardly resolve, extracts seven technological guidelines for building flavor interfaces, and demonstrates three theoretically grounded design cases that situate flavorful interaction in everyday, mnemonic, and narrative... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/54p8f039 Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Choi, Eunsol https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4397-5751 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4796w6tm Centromeres are essential chromosomal structures that orchestrate accurate chromosome segregation during cell division, yet the epigenetic mechanisms that define and maintain centromere identity remain incompletely understood. Centromere protein A (CENP-A), a histone H3 variant, epigenetically specifies centromere identity by marking sites for kinetochore assembly, while histone modifications including H3K9me3 and DNA methylation (mCpG) shape the surrounding chromatin landscape. Despite the fundamental importance of centromere function, the precise organization of centromeric chromatin at single-molecule resolution, and how this organization responds to changes in cellular context, had not been characterized across a complete, haplotype-resolved diploid human genome prior to this work.This dissertation leveraged the complete diploid T2T-HG002 "Q100" benchmark assembly together with ultra-long-read Direct Methylation and Long-read sequencing (DiMeLo-seq) and adaptive sampling enrichment... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4796w6tm Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Xu, Yuan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3st178xz This thesis studies the interaction between nonpositive sectional curvature, convexity, and the algebraic structure of groups of isometries acting on Riemannian manifolds. The central result is the Flat Subspace Theorem of Gromoll and Wolf (1971): if M is a simply connected manifold of nonpositive sectional curvature and Γ is a properly discontinuous group of semi-simple isometries of M, then every solvable subgroup Σ of Γ preserves a flat totally geodesic submanifold E isomorphic to ℝ^k on which Σ acts with finite kernel and compact quotient, so that the induced action is crystallographic. This result generalizes the Flat Torus Theorem of Lawson and Yau (1972) and extends the rigidity underlying Preissmann's theorem — that nontrivial abelian subgroups of the fundamental group of a compact negatively curved manifold are infinite cyclic — to the more flexible setting of nonpositive curvature, where flat totally geodesic regions may occur. The proof combines tools from comparison... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3st178xz Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Al-Idrisi, Yousra https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mz194gs In this thesis, I examine Theatre of the Sphere: The Vibrant Being, by Luis Valdez, through a Chicana feminist lens. Theatre of the Sphere is a philosophy of performance developed by El Teatro Campesino, rooted in Chicano culture, that emphasizes the actor as a “vibrant being” within the ensemble.I will be using my directorial production of Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, written by Alexis Sheer, as a case study. I will analyze how practices such as ritual and ensemble-based exercises were used to create a collaborative rehearsal environment in which interruption was not only encouraged but necessary. Throughout this process, I will investigate how Theatre of the Sphere both supports and complicates the Chicana feminist performance process. I will also discuss how I use caretaking as a central point of my directing. I will also discuss the relationship of women of color and the way they are represented in horror media.In this thesis, I argue that while Theatre of the Sphere promotes... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mz194gs Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rangel, Angela Valeria https://orcid.org/0009-0008-2667-6128 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38m960j8 Changes in Pleistocene Antarctic temperatures often coincide with variations in Northern Hemisphere summer insolation. While models invoking global CO₂ changes and shifts in oceanic and atmospheric circulation explain the temperature coherence between the poles, the role of Southern Hemisphere insolation in local Antarctic temperatures remain unclear. Here we present a temporal and geochemical record of Antarctic surface melting recorded by evaporitic carbonate formation from eight sites spanning the Amundsen Sea to the Ross Sea and 365m - 2000m in elevation. Isotopic data indicate water sourced from surface melt that weathers local rock and saturates carbonate through evaporation. U–Th dates restrict carbonate formation to three of the five most recent periods of high Southern Hemisphere summer insolation. These observations calibrate the effective albedo of darkened surfaces near nunataks and identify a Southern Hemisphere summer insolation threshold at which surface melt can... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38m960j8 Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Brigham, Noah Caulfield https://orcid.org/0009-0004-2188-7154 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2z12k9rs Eliminativist usage-based and classical generative speech production models differ fundamentally in two respects: (i) the nature of speech representations and (ii) the locus of linguistic knowledge. In this dissertation, I ask what levels of abstraction and detail are present in speech representations and whether a lexicon of detailed speech memories is sufficient to explain a speaker’s linguistic knowledge of their language. I investigate these questions using phonetic, phonological, experimental, and computational evidence from two understudied Pakistani languages, Punjabi and Mankiyali. First, I present evidence from Punjabi that lexical representations can be completely covert, containing information that is not present in any experienced realization of a lexical item. I then demonstrate that, given an appropriately structured learning architecture, a learner can acquire covert speech representations efficiently. At the same time, a pilot study provides preliminary evidence... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2z12k9rs Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Paramore, Jonathan Charles https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6611-5439 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/29n6z6wb Medical image analysis is constrained by a structural mismatch: clinical decision-making demands fine-grained understanding across diverse populations, body sites, and disease severities, yet expert annotations are scarce, demographic coverage is uneven, and rare presentations are nearly absent. This dissertation develops deep learning algorithms that compensate for that mismatch through four connected works in dermatology and wound care, domains where the limitations are most acute, and the downstream stakes for under-imaged populations are highest. We develop four methods spanning unsupervised, self-supervised, and supervised strategies, with both non-parametric and parametric generative paradigms. When there are no labels, we learn unsupervised from temporal structure (HealNet); when there is no temporal structure, we learn supervised from a frozen diffusion backbone (FEDD); when the data themselves are too few and too imbalanced, we generate them with sensitive-attribute control... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/29n6z6wb Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Carrión, Héctor https://orcid.org/0009-0004-5750-2551 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/29g7q56g Natural photosynthetic systems achieve remarkable light-harvesting efficiency through the precise supramolecular organization of chromophores, where non-covalent interactions govern excitonic energy capture and directional transport. Conjugated polyelectrolytes (CPEs), semiconducting polymers bearing pendant ionic side chains, offer a synthetic platform capable of replicating these design principles in aqueous environments. Their tunable electronic structure, combined with electrostatic and hydrophobic driving forces for self-assembly, enables the formation of conjugated polyelectrolyte complexes (CPECs) that support long-range exciton migration on timescales comparable to biological antenna systems. Despite this promise, the fundamental exciton dynamics governing energy transfer and charge generation in these materials remain insufficiently understood, limiting the rational design of CPE-based light-harvesting architectures.This dissertation pursues a two-pronged investigation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/29g7q56g Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Richards, Rachael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/294608pg Chapter 1 provides background information on the current standards for producing hydrogen peroxide, as well as a foundation for the oxygen reduction reaction as a possible replacement. Then delving into electrocatalytic, piezocatalytic and photocatalytic nanomaterials for reactive oxygen species generation. Finally the effect those species can have on bacteria.Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 detail two studies focused on the use of porphyrin based electrocatalysts to generate H2O2. In Chapter 2, copper chlorophyllin modified via magnetic induction heating was found to selectively produce hydrogen peroxide via the two electron oxygen reduction reaction. Chapter 3 is an expansion of this, utilizing tetraphenyl porphyrin to examine the effects of changing side chains and metal centers has on material synthesis catalytic activity. Here copper tetraphenyl porphyrin and cobalt tetraphenyl porphyrin were found to produce hydrogen peroxide via the two electron oxygen reduction reaction, but at... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/294608pg Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tressel, John Timothy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pz0w52k The Lake Tahoe Basin struggles with litter issues including plastic pollution. Microplastics were first documented in the Tahoe Basin in 2019 and since then have been documented in several environmental compartments in the area. One environmental compartment that is not well understood is Lake Tahoe's lakebed sediments. This thesis examines sediment samples collected from 5 transect sites along Lake Tahoe’s east shore to better understand the distribution and chemical composition of microplastic particles in Lake Tahoe's sediments. Using density separation, digestion with hydrogen peroxide and chemical analysis using Raman spectroscopy and microscopy quantification using Nile Red dye, I found that across all sampling sites, the mean blank-corrected abundance was 2.70 ± 1.69 particles g⁻¹ dry sediment (mean ± SD). Particle (63 µm to 5 mm) abundances ranged from 1.01 to 4.96 particles g⁻¹ dry sediment across the five sampling sites. The highest abundance was observed at East Incline... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pz0w52k Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wallner, Madison Mavericks https://orcid.org/0009-0000-4719-1252 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0274f1bc This dissertation determines the fusion rules for the fixed-point vertex operator algebra ? ?4 ?2 , where ?2 denotes the rank-one even lattice satisfying (?, ?) = 2. The main idea is to identify certain irreducible ? + ℤ? -modules as direct sums of irreducible ? ?4 ?2 -modules. These identifications allow us to compute the relevant entries of the ?-matrix for ? ?4 ?2 . Applying the Verlinde formula, we then obtain the complete fusion rules for ? ?4 ?2 . https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0274f1bc Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Liao, Junwen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9v45c7dc Metal halide nanomaterials, including molecular clusters (MCs), nanocrystals (NCs), and low-dimensional perovskites, have attracted significant interest because of their tunable optical properties, strong excitonic effects, and potential applications in optoelectronic and spintronic devices. However, the relationships among structure, excited-state dynamics, lattice vibrations, and spin relaxation remain insufficiently understood, especially in highly confined metal halide systems. This dissertation addresses how chemical composition, structural confinement, lattice softness, and dopant incorporation influence the optical, vibrational, excitonic, and spin properties of metal halide clusters and nanocrystals. A combination of synthesis, steady-state spectroscopy, ultrafast spectroscopy, structural characterization, and vibrational analysis was used. Amino metal halide molecular clusters were synthesized and stabilized in the solid state, and their structural and optical properties... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9v45c7dc Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Heng https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rp0q5jp Haunting often refers critically to the presence of a repressed past with its lost futures and has especially been used in critical theory to call attention to colonial violence. What function, then, might haunting serve when it emerges in the narratives of colonized subjects who have been victims of such historical violence? This thesis examines two instances of Indigenous hauntings in the work of Indigenous authors Stephen Graham Jones and Mona Susan Power. Published three years apart, the proximity and similarities of The Only Good Indians (2020) and A Council of Dolls (2023) elicit a literary and critical grounded analysis that effectively responds to past and contemporary struggles within Indigenous communities, including issues of identity, sovereignty, environment, and politics.Transcending simply telling fictional stories, The Only Good Indians and A Council of Dolls provide sources of healing as they disrupt dominant narratives and instead prioritize Indigenous voices... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rp0q5jp Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hiler, Katie Lynne https://orcid.org/0009-0001-2919-9557 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9mc6s9t9 Despite spanning more than ten orders of magnitude in physical scale, common-envelope interactions and galactic bars are governed by the same fundamental process: gravitational torques redistribute angular momentum, drive dissipation, and reshape self-gravitating systems far from equilibrium. In common envelopes, this transport proceeds through hydrodynamical drag and shock-driven dissipation in collisional gas, while in barred galaxies it emerges through largely collisionless stellar dynamics. This dissertation explores how these processes govern the evolution of astrophysical systems across vastly different environments.This thesis is divided into two parts. The first and primary part investigates interacting binary evolution, focusing on common-envelope (CE) inspiral, stellar mergers, luminous red novae, and Thorne–Żytkow object (TŻO) formation. Using one-dimensional stellar evolution calculations together with three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations, I examine how orbital... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9mc6s9t9 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hutchinson-Smith, Tenley https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gw7m8zr Artificial intelligence has produced a growing collection of powerful pretrained foundation models, including large language models, multimodal large language models, image and video diffusion models, image-to-3D generators, and depth estimators. The embodied AI community has, in parallel, begun training vision-language-action models on large-scale robot data. Yet generalist embodied competence spans more than any single pretrained model is designed to cover: grounding instructions in physical action, communicating through coherent multimodal content, and constructing 3D worlds. This dissertation studies how to build embodied systems by composing pretrained foundation models, rather than training new large-scale embodied systems from scratch. The central claim is that, for each capability needed by an embodied agent, a strong pretrained model already exists, and the right interfaces between such models can turn independently trained components into capable embodied agents.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gw7m8zr Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zheng, Kaizhi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97p7n6nq Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) agents promise effective security automation with minimal human intervention, yet their deployment raises three interconnected challenges: agents must be realistic (reproducing diverse attacker sophistication), secure (preventing autonomy from becoming an attack surface), and feasible (safely replicating human behavior at full autonomy).We argue that these three properties are requirements for ACO agents. Existing approaches do not address them together and lack diverse adversarial coverage, formal threat models for attacks against the agents themselves, and systematic evaluation of multi-agent topologies.We advance all three ACO properties: (1) For realism, we establish adversarial foundations by discovering Windows OS vulnerabilities and releasing two exploits reliable across XP through 11. (2) For security, we formalize ACO meta-attacks and meta-defenses, propose the first invariant-based Meta-IDS detecting both sensor and actuator meta-attacks,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97p7n6nq Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Castro, Sebastian https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5364-0708 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9623x5pf Telomeres are TG rich sequence repeats at chromosome ends that protect the ends from being recognized as DNA break. Telomeres shorten at each round of cell division because the replication machinery cannot synthesize DNA to the very end, referred to the end-replication problem. The enzyme telomerase adds de novo telomeric repeats onto telomere ends which compensates for the end replication problem. Telomere shortening and lengthening is a tightly regulated process that establishes an equilibrium of length distribution. If telomeres become critically short, they trigger a DNA damage response that leads to cellular senescence or death. In humans, the accumulation of many cells with short telomeres limits the generative capacity of the tissue, leading to age-related degenerative disease. However, excessively long telomeres causes a predisposition to cancer because cells are protected against senescence. Thus, there are many redundant and interconnected pathways that promote telomere... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9623x5pf Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mayangsari, Rini https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3818-3802 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94q2t0pw This dissertation argues that broadening the set of factors on which we evaluate educators -- and their impacts -- reveals important effects that conventional approaches miss, and that these effects matter for educational equity. In my first chapter, I show that teachers whose effectiveness lies in developing the skills that grades capture, rather than test scores, are not visible through conventional measures of teacher effectiveness, and that their impacts matter most for the students falling behind. In my second chapter, my co-authors and I show that faculty hired through an aggressive affirmative action policy, despite weaker formal credentials, are as effective as those hired unrestrictedly -- and that a credential-based evaluation understates both their effectiveness as well as the policy that made their candidacy possible. In my third chapter, my co-authors and I show that female faculty improve female students' achievement and also affect outcomes that achievement measures... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94q2t0pw Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sachdeva, Gagandeep https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94p04870 Following the murder of George Floyd and the release of “We See You White American Theater,” many arts organizations rushed to enact vague DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) practices and a churn of artistic leaders that prioritized performative representation. This churn of artistic leaders is compounded by the prevailing normalcy of blaming organizational failures on leaders of color in the United States. Conversely, in 2020, Penumbra Theater restructured its organization to foreground racial healing practice both in and outside the theatrical space. In collaboration with psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem, they have instituted somatic abolition– an approach that bridges mindfulness with theoretical understandings– to encourage active consideration of racial trauma. In this thesis, I ask how somatic abolition and mindfulness, when consciously integrated into an arts leader’s pedagogy, can serve as a restorative practice for arts leaders of color. Drawing on Penumbra’s leadership... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94p04870 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jackson-Wilkins, Darren Elijah https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2295-5918 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94h21271 Branching narratives in games are traditionally understood as systems in which player choice produces divergent story paths and outcomes. This thesis proposes an alternative framework, termed “bear trap narrative design”, in which branching emerges from shifting player interpretations, rather than from changes to the underlying narrative structure. Drawing on research-through-design methodology, this work argues that uneven access to contextual information can create epistemic branching within a fixed sequence of events. This framework is explored through the development and analysis of “Silent Numbers”, a 2.5D side-scroller and visual novel created by Studio T12. The game employs systems such as optional memories, environmental storytelling, layered character perspectives, naming conventions, and a “Mind Map” mechanic to distribute narrative information unevenly across playthroughs. These systems function as “totems,” contextual clues that shape player expectations, emotional... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94h21271 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lafosse, Celine Rose https://orcid.org/0009-0005-6897-2433 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92z1d9gm Aging of the hematopoietic system has profound consequences for organismal health and longevity, attributed to the well-characterized functional aging of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Here, I tested whether progenitor cells may demonstrate age-resistance to enable hematopoietic homeostasis throughout life despite the functional decline of upstream HSCs. Strikingly, my results revealed unwavering reconstitution capacity by young and old progenitors, demonstrating that intermediate progenitors are functionally unaffected by aging and placing multipotent progenitors (MPPFs) as a potential source of age-resilience. This unique finding was emphasized by unchanged transcriptomic, proliferation, and mitochondrial capacity of young and old MPPFs, revealing remarkable similarities upon aging. Considering that HSCs functionally decline with age, yet intermediate progenitors remain unperturbed and “age-resilient”, I posit that MPPFs may play an essential role in protecting downstream... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92z1d9gm Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Myers, Jenna https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0092-4654 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92x3d131 This dissertation tracks some adjacent, while interconnected music communities in downtown New York, commonly the area south of 14th Street in Manhattan, from approximately 1977 through 1987. The research incorporates some histories before this period, and places outside of New York, to better illustrate how the communities developed, as well as motivations and circumstances for collaboration. I focus on the “loft jazz” network, post-punk “no wave” scene, and other, less defined circles of primarily improvising musicians, sometimes working together in a broader experimental context. The research includes performance attendance, personal interviews, physical and online archives, liner notes, video footage, press coverage, books, and articles. Most of the musicians discussed in this research lived nearby the respective performance venues in downtown neighborhoods, such as The East Village, The Lower East Side, SoHo, and Tribeca. The performance venue The Kitchen seemed to play an... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92x3d131 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Keenan, Sean https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91q2c8td Advances in microscopy have transformed our understanding of biological systems, yet the high cost and limited accessibility of commercial imaging platforms continue to restrict their use in many research settings. This thesis presents the design and development of open hardware microscopy tools for neuroscience research, with a focus on integrating user- centered design principles into the instrument development process. Two primary methods are introduced: augmenting existing microscopes with new imaging capabilities, and the creation of modular microscopes that are designed for continuous, long-term live-cell imaging. Both platforms are built around open hardware principles, prioritizing low cost, modularity, and adaptability to the practical needs of working researchers. Alongside the hardware contributions, this thesis presents user experience research methods for examining how neuroscience researchers interact with novel microscopy technologies, providing a methodological... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91q2c8td Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ehrlich, Drew https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6794-6800 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zj8j3qk This dissertation traces the emergence of machine learning as a concept before its realization as a technology. It examines how learning came to be understood as adaptation under conditions of uncertainty in contrast with earlier accounts of learning in terms of psychological development and the acquisition of knowledge. Drawing on archival research, the dissertation reconstructs debates among Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch, Heinz von Foerster, and other cyberneticians whose work helped shape the early history of artificial intelligence. These postwar debates over learning as adaptive behavior and knowledge as successful control are situated within an intellectual genealogy extending from nineteenth-century thermodynamics and psychophysics to early psychoanalysis and neurophysiology. Tracing this history reveals a question that continues to animate contemporary artificial intelligence: how one determines that an organism or machine has learned and on what basis that determination... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zj8j3qk Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jeon, Won https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zd9c3q4 Clock networks are critical to the performance, power efficiency and reliability of modern high performance VLSI systems. Although clock mesh architectures improve robustness to On-Chip Variations and reduce skew sensitivity, they incur significant power overhead. Since mesh performance metrics such as skew, slew, and power are highly dependent on buffer sizing, identifying optimal buffer configurations becomes a critical design challenge. This work addresses buffer sizing in clock mesh architectures using machine learning based surrogate models. Two predefined Graph Neural Network models trained on SPICE data are used to predict mesh performance metrics from a graph representation of clock mesh, enabling optimization without requiring SPICE simulations at every iteration. A Genetic Algorithm based approach is used to explore discrete buffer sizing design space guided by a cost function which optimizes power while enforcing specified skew and slew constraints. Final selected solutions... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zd9c3q4 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Thottiparambil Manikandan, Arya https://orcid.org/0009-0004-2253-8204 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ws635fh This thesis computes the 1-point functions associated with a special type of holomorphic vertex operator algebras (VOAs) obtained by orbifolding the holomorphic VOAs associated with positive definite, even, unimodular lattices. The orbifold is obtained by adjoining the fixed-point subspaces of the (-1)-involution acting on both the lattice VOA and its unique twisted module.1-point functions for classic examples like Heisenberg VOAs and Lattice VOAs have been computed earlier using Zhu’s recursion. Recently, Mason and Mertens have modified Zhu’s recursion to produce recursion formulas useful to compute the 1-point functions in the fixed spaces of the (-1)-involutive automorphism of Heisenberg VOA and lattice VOA. The Z2-twisted Zhu recursion produced by Mason and Mertens is obtained by rewriting the 2-point functions traced over the fixed subspace of the (-1)-involutive automorphism of the lattice VOA in itself. We extend the Mason–Mertens framework to the twisted sector by deriving... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ws635fh Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ampagouni, Maneesha https://orcid.org/0009-0006-3183-5440 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8r14g826 The Sierra Nevada Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch (Leucosticte tephrocotis dawsoni) is a range-restricted alpine songbird whose breeding ecology depends on the alignment of nesting habitat and climate-sensitive food resources. This dissertation quantifies how abundance, population distribution, and diet vary with snowpack, terrain, hydrology, vegetation, and prey availability across the subspecies’ breeding range. I combine detection-corrected field surveys, landscape-scale abundance modeling, and stable isotope analysis to evaluate how environmental constraints operating across spatial and temporal scales shape climate vulnerability. In Chapter 1, I used mark-recapture distance sampling and hierarchical distance sampling to estimate local density across five breeding seasons while accounting for imperfect detection. Detection probability was high and consistent, supporting robust abundance estimation in remote alpine terrain. Density varied strongly among years, increasing from... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8r14g826 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Brown, Timothy https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5854-8648 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jj196ff BackgroundTelomere length is a biomarker of cellular aging and may be linked to early-life nutritional exposures. We aimed to evaluate whether micronutrient status in early life is associated with telomere length at age 28 months in rural Bangladesh.MethodsWe conducted an observational analysis on a subset of children enrolled in the WASH Benefits trial. We analyzed concentrations of micronutrient biomarkers, including ferritin, hepcidin, soluble transferrin receptor, hemoglobin, retinol-binding protein, vitamin B12, and folate in serum samples. Micronutrient deficiencies were determined using clinical thresholds. We measured whole blood relative telomere length using qPCR in 704 children at age 28 months. Relative telomere length was calculated as a telomere to single copy gene (T/S) ratio and transformed into a z-score. Generalized linear models (GLMs) were used to estimate associations between micronutrients and telomere length. A sensitivity analysis was conducted using generalized... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jj196ff Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cadpakar, Sumukh Praveen https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7370-7418 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jg7m051 Modern software increasingly relies on distributed systems to provide accessible, scalable, and reliable services. Choreographic programming brings a global perspective to distributed system development: programmers write a single program that describes the behavior of a whole system, and a compiler projects that global description into local programs run by each node. By making distributed control flow explicit, choreographic programming can rule out important classes of errors, including deadlocks. This dissertation investigates library-level choreographic programming, an approach that embeds choreographic abstractions in existing host languages rather than implementing them as standalone languages. The central claim is that the library approach can retain the safety and global reasoning principles of choreographic programming while taking advantage of the host language’s features, tools, and ecosystem. First, we present HasChor, a first-of-its-kind library-level choreographic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jg7m051 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shen, Gan https://orcid.org/0009-0006-0947-9531 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85v4f2r6 Whole-brain connectomes of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, now provide synapse-resolution maps of every neuron in the central nervous system, yet anatomical connectivity alone is insufficient to predict how neurons integrate their inputs. A critical missing layer is the spatial distribution of an array of biophysical features, including voltage-gated ion channels, which shapes how synaptic signals attenuate as they propagate toward the site of action potential initiation. This is particularly consequential in descending neurons, which compress information from around 140,000 upper-brain neurons onto about 1,300 cells that relay commands to pre-motor circuits of the ventral nerve cord.Here I examine the distribution of the Drosophila voltage-gated sodium channel Paralytic (Para) on DNa02, a descending neuron implicated in steering behavior and positioned downstream of Central Complex navigation circuits. Using split-GAL4 targeting combined with an endogenously tagged Para... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85v4f2r6 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Harder, Cole Reid Kinchen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8565172w This dissertation examines the determinants and consequences of labor mobility in India across three distinct but complementary essays. When workers move, they are not merely adjusting to wage differentials but also navigating a host of institutions - welfare systems, transit networks, and physical/climatic environments. Each chapter studies a different barrier to movement - physical, administrative, and infrastructural - and asks how that barrier shapes migration decisions, household welfare, and labor market outcomes. Together, they make the case that mobility frictions in developing countries are not uniform in origin or effect, and that the design of policy responses must therefore be sensitive to the specific mechanism through which movement is constrained. The first chapter, co-authored with Anirban Sanyal, examines the impact of climate-induced temporary migration. This largely unexplored flow is widespread in developing countries and also responds to warming. The... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8565172w Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Das, Moumita https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8441b84c This dissertation consists of three essays in macroeconomics. The first essay examines the relationship between food availability and life expectancy. The second and third essays study real time recession detection, using labor market data in Japan and real time GDP data in the United States.Chapter 1 examines whether unequal access to food contributes to differences in life expectancy across countries. Access to sufficient and nutritious food is a fundamental human right, yet global access remains highly unequal. This paper uses global macro data to examine the relationship between calorie availability and life expectancy and finds evidence consistent with laboratory findings: both underconsumption and overconsumption reduce longevity. Additional calorie intake increases life expectancy at low levels but the effect diminishes with higher consumption and becomes negative beyond 2,944 kilocalories per person per day. At low intake levels, an additional 1,000 kcal per person per... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8441b84c Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sikand, Neha https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8228h1kb How can sound design function as a method for emotional healing and self-becoming/identity formation? By Sasha Miller The Sonic Sponge Theory depicts sound absorption as an embodied action that encapsulates the emotional process of internalizing. This thesis will examine this theory, particularly how sound design serves as a liberating method in shaping Black feminist identity. Drawing from an autoethnographic, feminist experience, music therapy, and performance and sound studies, I will expand on the sonically liberating work done on SpongeBob: The Musical. Informed by silence theory, sound will be positioned as an embodied, political force– one that directly resists the socialization of the Black female identity. Sonic Sponge Theory will describe the self as an absorptive being that metabolizes sound into a method for emotional regulation and artistic expression.Throughout history, especially within the performance arts, the relationship between the audiovisual production has... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8228h1kb Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Miller, Sasha https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8212z5f0 When presented with certain sequences of non-native speech sounds, listeners report having instead heard sequences which conform to the sound patterns of their native language – a process sometimes called phonotactic repair. Prior research has found that English listeners (among others) tend to misinterpret [tl-, dl-] syllable onsets as [kl-, gl-]. The present work investigates whether this phenomenon is attributable to universal principles or language experience, and to what degree phonological grammar and auditory biases are explanatory. In a series of eight experiments, we explore phonotactic repair in English (where [tl-, dl-] onsets are illicit), Mexican Spanish (where [tl-] is licit), and Mandarin Chinese (where all /Cl/ sequences are illicit). English listeners performed poorly, but accuracy was modulated by gating and task. Mexican Spanish listeners were much more accurate in identifying [tl-], whereas [dl-] accuracy was on par with English. Mandarin Chinese listeners... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8212z5f0 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kaplan, Max https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2374-2432 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/81g9501n This thesis examines rap music as a form of resistance to wetiko, a concept from Algonquian narratives developed by Indigenous scholar Jack D. Forbes describing systems of greed, domination, exploitation, and social imbalance. Drawing on Indigenous theory, decolonial scholarship, and hip-hop studies, I argue that rap functions as a contemporary anti-wetiko tradition rooted in storytelling, community, and resistance. Through analysis of American rap, German rap (Deutschrap), and Indigenous rap, I examine how artists confront colonialism, racism, genocide, authoritarianism, and other manifestations of wetiko in their historical and cultural contexts. Tracing rap’s roots to West African griot traditions, I show how oral storytelling preserves cultural memory, challenges dominant narratives, and sustains communities under oppression. By placing these traditions in dialogue, this thesis highlights global interconnectedness and shared struggles against systems of domination.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/81g9501n Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hoffmann Rushworth, Rico Waya https://orcid.org/0009-0001-4851-0232 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zr7h517 As large language models and multimodal systems are deployed in increasingly autonomous and high-stakes settings, preventing them from causing harm to humans and society becomes a first-order question. Their risks surface spans three levels: malicious misuse by adversarial users, operations crossing the safety boundaries, and inherent misalignment in which a model spontaneously pursues goals divergent from its operator's intent. The harms these models can cause range from generating toxic, illegal, or deceptive content, to taking consequential actions in the real world through tool use. The complexity of modern deployment environments: multimodal inputs, long reasoning chains, autonomous tool use, and open-ended interaction with users and the physical world, compounds these risks: a safety property that holds for a text-only chatbot may collapse the moment the same model is given an image, a chain of thought, a shell, or a long-running plan. Safety must therefore be addressed... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zr7h517 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhou, Kaiwen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ws714vp Pattern counting is a fundamental problem in computer science with applications in many domains. For a fixed small pattern H and given a large input graph G, our goal is to count the number of subgraphs or homomorphisms (edge-preserving maps) of H in G. For practical applications where the input graph can be very large, we are interested in finding efficient algorithms, that is, algorithms that run in linear or subquadratic time with respect to the size of the input. Finding such algorithms for arbitrary graphs is not possible for most patterns (assuming standard fine-grained conjectures). Instead, we restrict our input to sparse classes of graphs. One family of graph classes that has been widely studied in the context of subgraph and homomorphism counting is the family of bounded-degeneracy graph classes. Real-world graphs in many domains have bounded degeneracy, so studying these classes in theory can lead to practical algorithms. A series of advances in the study... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ws714vp Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Paul Pena, Daniel https://orcid.org/0009-0008-1073-6173 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tt7t1q7 Understanding how ecosystem states shift and identifying early signs of those transitions are critical for effective conservation. In kelp forest ecosystems, the collapse into urchin barrens represents a well-documented phase shift, yet transitional states and their early detection remain poorly understood. Traditional monitoring methods, such as SCUBA surveys with periodic ecological assessments, provide only snapshots of dynamic systems, often missing rapid and punctuated changes that define these transition states. Given the acoustic complexity of kelp forests, soundscapes may provide a continuous method to determine sensitive indicators of ecological transitions that visual surveys may miss. This study evaluates whether soundscapes can serve as reliable indicators of kelp forest ecosystem conditions in Sitka Sound, Alaska. Surveying three Macrocystis pyrifera kelp forest habitats and three urchin barren habitats revealed that soundscapes can distinguish between binary state... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tt7t1q7 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shenasa, Amina Mariam Anastasia https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7606-7216 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7nv9f136 This dissertation examines how Chicago Puerto Rican poets developed an anticolonial poetics of improvisation between 1966 and 2010, transforming the violent rupture of the 1966 Division Street riot into sustaining forms of resistance, relation, and insurgent worldmaking. While scholarly attention to Latine/x poetry has concentrated on the bicoastal narrative of New York's Nuyorican Poetry Movement and California’s Chicano Movement, Chicago’s distinct Puerto Rican poetic tradition—shaped by Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition, cycles of displacement and urban renewal, and a still growing excess of policing and police violence—has remained largely invisible within literary studies. Through close readings attentive to performance, sound, typography, visuality, public art, and spatial politics, I demonstrate how three pivotal Chicago Rican poets theorized the city itself as a site of anticolonial struggle, using improvisational practices drawn from Afro-Caribbean musical traditions,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7nv9f136 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Alicea, Joe https://orcid.org/0009-0008-1091-4726 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7f03d8jb Climate change is altering marine ecosystems through concurrent changes in temperature, carbonate chemistry, and dissolved oxygen. These changes are particularly important in coastal upwelling systems, where organisms already experience naturally variable environmental conditions. This dissertation integrates synthesis, experimentation, and modeling to evaluate how ocean change influences marine invertebrates and the fisheries they support. First, I conducted a meta-analysis examining the effects of ocean acidification and deoxygenation on marine invertebrates. Both stressors produced broadly negative effects on fitness-related traits, including survival, growth, development, and reproduction. Although vulnerability varied among taxa, responses were not strongly structured across broad taxonomic groups, suggesting that species-specific traits and environmental history are important determinants of sensitivity. Second, I investigated the effects of multi-stressor upwelling conditions... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7f03d8jb Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Walker, Benjamin James https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3753-6956 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dq2g529 Updating our beliefs based on scientific evidence can help us form and maintain accurate mental models about how the world works. However, scientific evidence can be ambiguous or conflicting, making it especially important to understand how we weigh different types of evidence against each other. Often, belief updating is studied as a passive process following exposure to evidence; yet, in real world contexts it unfolds as an active, multi-stage cycle involving not only evidence exposure, self-regulated search for more information, and integration of new information. The present research investigates how individuals update and maintain beliefs about scientific phenomena within a simulated online search environment, focusing on the roles of evidence type, information seeking and -selection behavior, and the motivational state of curiosity, with a focus on biases in evidence integration and selection.Participants were exposed to short science-blog style articles providing either... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dq2g529 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bittner, Dana-Lis https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6719-1363 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dh4s1xg Sequencing technologies have transformed population and evolutionary genetics, making it possible to ask questions at scales that were intractable a decade ago. Realizing that potential depends on tailored computational approaches, and on the tools and infrastructure those approaches are built on. My dissertation works across this spectrum. Using an in vitro Drosophila cell culture system, I show that mixed Wolbachia infections resolve rapidly and deterministically, with one strain competitively excluding the other across host species and starting frequencies, offering an explanation for why mixed infections are rarely observed in nature. In a deep-sea clam and its obligate bacterial symbiont, I use two ultra-accurate sequencing methods and demographic modeling to directly estimate the effective transmission bottleneck between host generations, finding it to be roughly eight symbionts, orders of magnitude below prior cell-count estimates. I also present two tools for population... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dh4s1xg Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mirchandani, Cade https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1970-430X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7c5466rp QCD axions with a decay constant lower than 1011 GeV are not abundant enough to explain all of the dark matter that we observe today. I posit that if such a QCD axion is the mediator between the Standard Model and Dirac fermionic dark matter, several mechanisms are possible to generate the relic abundance of dark matter. Motivated by axion-mediated interactions, I then study the vibrational response of crystals to dark matter scattering via spin-dependent interactions, finding that GaAs and sapphire offer complementary probes to stellar cooling bounds and traditional nuclear recoil experiments in the sub-GeV dark matter mass regime. Beyond direct detection of light dark matter, on the other end of the spectrum, I discuss the indirect detection of very massive decaying dark matter. Notably, I derive constraints on the lifetime of superheavy dark matter by examining the synchrotron emission from electrons produced after the showering process. I study the sensitivity of the bounds... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7c5466rp Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Munbodh, Pankaj https://orcid.org/0009-0000-1993-9542 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7b91q9hp The genre of body horror deals with transforming the human body in ways that evoke a visceral reaction in viewers, and is often used to explore societal anxieties and desires. Consequently, the field is frequently associated with gender upheavals and transgressions. Just as the subjects of many body horror films are marginalized and hystericized by the transformations undergone by their bodies, so too are many transgender people today. In this project, I seek to draw lines of liberatory monstrosity between this metaphorical transformation of the body through elevated scenes of horror, and the real life transformations undergone by trans people. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Susan Stryker and Paul Preciado’s ideas of the transgender subject as monster, I suggest an anti-assimilationist approach to body horror theater-making, where bodily difference and monstrosity are embraced—not in spite of their transgression, but because of it. This essay tracks the conception... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7b91q9hp Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bruckner, Charlotte https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6s2034c2 Let G be a fnite group and let F be an algebraically closed feld of prime characteristic p > 0. We associate to each bounded chain complex C of p-permutation F G-modules a G-poset of Brauer pairs, generalizing the Brauer pair theory of Boltje and Perepelitsky for p-permutation modules and refning their theory for virtual p-permutation modules. We give sufcient conditions for this poset to be an ideal and show that in this case, the maximal elements control the vertices of the constituents of C. When C is a splendid Rickard equivalence between blocks of fnite group algebras, we show that the Brauer pairs in the poset are precisely those at which the Brauer functor induces a splendid Rickard equivalence between the corresponding blocks of local subgroups, both at the centralizer and at the normalizer level. Furthermore, we show that the poset is an ideal, that there is a unique conjugacy class of maximal elements, and that any choice of maximal element determines an isomorphism... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6s2034c2 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Breland, Jadyn Valentine https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6901-752X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qz2f6pn This dissertation comprises three chapters that examine how health insurance companies respond to health care policies in the United States. In the U.S., the role of private insurers has expanded substantially within publicly funded health insurance markets such as Medicare Advantage and the Affordable Care Act Marketplace. Under these programs, health insurance plans are financed by the government but administered by private insurers. These programs were designed to reduce costs by leveraging competition among insurers and to expand the set of choices available to consumers. However, as insurers have gained market power and plan proliferation has made plan selection more difficult, it has become important to understand how subsidy systems operate in these markets and how policy can facilitate better consumer decision-making.The first chapter examines how insurance companies respond to government subsidies in the Medicare Advantage market. Specifically, I study the extent to which... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qz2f6pn Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yun, Hyunjin https://orcid.org/0009-0008-0241-4115 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qx4h1kb This dissertation examines how local health systems are formed in fragmented settings through a study of the Haiti–Dominican Republic border. While scholarship on health care access typically focuses on formal institutions, policies, and provider availability, residents of fragmented health systems frequently obtain care by coordinating across multiple organizations, sectors, and jurisdictions. Drawing on a most-different systems comparison across four rural border communities, this dissertation introduces the concept of Assembled Access, a theory of health system formation that explains how patients and front-line providers construct functional systems of care from below when institutional coordination is weak.The empirical foundation for this argument combines mixed methods data collected between 2021 and 2023, including a representative survey of 599 residents, 12 focus groups, 59 interviews with local, national, and transnational actors, and extensive field observation. The... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qx4h1kb Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vitale, Lucia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4347-0032 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m64n1tz Billions of people organize their lives around religion. Billions of people play videogames. For the most part, the scholarship studying these two phenomena has treated them as separate worlds. This dissertation argues they are not. Religion and videogames are both mobilization systems, each capable of moving people toward shared belief, collective action, and community through narrative, ritual, and symbol. What happens when you study them as the same kind of problem, and what becomes possible when you design them to work together, is what this dissertation is about. Games have borrowed from religion for decades. Hindu deities appear as playable characters in SMITE. Islamic architecture backdrops Assassin's Creed. Biblical narratives inspire The Binding of Isaac. Games that copy religious iconography without that understanding have repeatedly generated backlash from the very communities whose traditions they draw on. This dissertation takes a different starting point: rather... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m64n1tz Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Maram, Sai Siddartha https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0415-3341 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dt1156v Passive, device-free human identification is a potential alternative to camera- and wearable-based biometrics for privacy and access control, but most wireless sensing systems rely on gait- or activity-induced signal modulations and have been validated only in a small sample of humans. We present Argus, a passive Wi-Fi sensing system that identifies individuals at scale from commodity Channel State Information (CSI). Argus summarizes short CSI spans into compact statgrams of amplitude, phase, and phase-difference statistics, and feeds patches of this map to a lightweight decoder-only transformer which predicts identity. On a public 154-subject CSI dataset evaluated with a strict physical-segment train-test split, Argus achieves 78.28% Top-1 accuracy on true 1-second statgrams and 79.12% on the 50-row statgram window used by the main model, corresponding to approximately 6 seconds. Aggregating logits across nineteen overlapping statgram windows over a 60-second physical segment... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dt1156v Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bhatia, Nayan Sanjay https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3314-7928 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c17g957 An intelligent entity capable of complex reasoning should be able to inspect what it knows, identify what it needs, seek or construct useful information, and revise its reasoning by constructing and updating intermediate cognitive states. This dissertation studies this goal through the lens of Inner Monologue (IM), a mechanism that enables AI systems to coordinate internal components, acquire external information, and reason through structured intermediate states.The dissertation first establishes IM as a mechanism for internal coordination in static information systems. In this setting, the available information is fixed, and the key challenge is to elicit and organize information already present within the system. We study this setting through multimodal reasoning, where a language model coordinates with a vision-language model through natural-language inner monologue to solve visual reasoning tasks. The dissertation then extends IM to dynamic information systems, where... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c17g957 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yang, Diji https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1591-4846 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/69t8p2pq Complex societal problems (e.g. wicked problems) such as those brought on by climate change can be addressed through a combination of Research through Design (RtD), co-design, and Serious Games (SG) by inviting affected communities to take part in developing iterative, experimental solutions and exploring their potential impact. In the course of my research, I have proposed a framework for design research that engages with wicked problems at the community level through gameful design, which is based on existing literature in HCI drawing from RtD, co-design, and SG. Core elements of the framework include supporting diverse perspectives, interdisciplinarity, working with local knowledge, and aligning different concepts with specific gameful elements to support meaningful interactions and discussion. In a specific case study, my proposed framework is applied to create a gameful intervention to support wildfire resilience in communities at the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/69t8p2pq Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Johns, MJ https://orcid.org/0009-0002-4016-2517 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64w8x19m Wanda, Why Aren’t You Dead? concerns the life and work of Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman. Coleman is a renowned and prominent 20th -21st-century literary figure. It’s a reflection of her extensive body of work, her personhood, and her iconoclasts through a posthumous examination that gives way for contemporary readers to situate themselves, situate her writings, and situate our understanding of the world in proximity to the complexities, outcries, frustrations, contradictions, hilarities, and beauty that emanates throughout Coleman’s cosmos. It focuses on Coleman’s history, geography, and poetics through combining hybrid-genre writing, visual experimentations, essential interviews, and performative writing. The intention of utilizing a myriad of creative modalities is to emulate the writing practices Coleman mastered in her lifetime, including poetry, journalism, prose, and visual avant-garde. Ten years after her passing, Coleman is seen as an all-encompassing literary ancestor... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/64w8x19m Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Boykin, Mia Tempestt https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63h3d4k0 Research on fault-tolerance protocols for approximate Byzantine agreement (ABA) has largely focused on ensuring consistency among distributed processes in the presence of Byzantine faults. These protocols provide precision by ensuring that nonfaulty processes decide values within a predefined distance. However, precision alone is insufficient in sensor-driven cyber-physical systems, where estimates directly drive downstream actions and must therefore be accurate relative to an ideal fault-free baseline. This creates a central tension: ABA protocols bound disagreement among nonfaulty processes, but typically guarantee validity only with respect to a geometric region, such as the convex hull of the initial nonfaulty outputs, rather than closeness to the true system state. Existing ABA protocols also often rely on assumptions that are difficult to satisfy in these settings, including replica counts that grow with both data dimensionality and the assumed number of faulty processes,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63h3d4k0 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shadmon, Roy Michael https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7493-555X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/61w8x8qc Gaussian Process (GP) regression provides a high-order, polynomial-free reconstructor for finite volume compressible flow solvers, but produces non-physical oscillations near shocks without other shock-detection schemes. This thesis investigates using the marginal log likelihood (MLL) of the GP as a criterion for shock detection and kernel hyperparameter optimization.The MLL drops sharply when a stencil straddles a discontinuity. A threshold of zero cleanly separates smooth from non-smooth stencils in one dimension, and using that as a criterion to fallback to a TVD method automatically captures shocks. We further exploit the MLL to adaptively select the stencil radius r and kernel length scale ℓ at each cell by maximizing over small discrete candidate sets. Combined radius and kernel optimization substantially improves resolution of fine-scale features on the Shu–Osher benchmark while preserving correct shock capture, at a total per-cell cost scaling as O(r3 max nℓ).In higher... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/61w8x8qc Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dhamrait, Arjun Singh https://orcid.org/0009-0004-3219-7888 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5v68w75g “California Literary Ecosystems” is an ecocritical study of California literature. It explores the link between ecosystems and literary production by focusing on what has been called “climate fiction” within the Anthropocene. The study surfaces and interrogates the overlap between place and production within literary texts.This first chapter reads The Overstory as a book that represents other-than-humans in literature and contextualizes it as an effort to grapple with the ongoing climate crisis and the loss of a horizon for collective futures under neoliberal capitalism in the Anthropocene. The second chapter critically explores the poetics and life of Gary Snyder, reading and critiquing his commitment to Zen practice and appreciation for Indigenous and non-Western cultures, it explores how his poetics locally situates an awareness of the material world that requires replication in his readers. The focus on locality creates a throughline with Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5v68w75g Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Simmons, Matthew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5np024tx The AV1 video compression standard introduces significant compression benefits over prior standards. It achieves this in part due to an increase in both the size and shape of partition options as well as an increase in reference frame count. However, this leads to an increase in computational complexity and thus the encoding time. In this thesis, I analyze the possibilities of leveraging CUDA acceleration to accelerate the motion estimation process. For the largest block size of 128x128, my CUDA implementations provide a substantial 3.06x speedup for full pixel diamond search and a 3.4x speedup for subpixel search. However, due to the limits of communication overhead and of work batching at the block level, my whole encoder implementation only achieves a 1.01x speedup. Together, these findings indicate that with the larger block sizes of AV1 and newer video standards, GPU offload has potential, although additional work is required to achieve a practical encoder level speedup. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5np024tx Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dangat, Neil https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gx1z0hj Diversity in life-history traits, related to growth, reproduction, and survival, provides a species with evolutionary flexibility that allows it to adapt to changing conditions. In this dissertation, I show the diversity expressed in two life-history traits across two species of Pacific salmon, Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and steelhead trout (O. mykiss), in populations from Northern California. I studied the adaptive capacity of these species through understanding the genetic basis and genetic architecture of two important life-history traits, age at maturity and reproductive timing. In Chapter 2, I used a large-scale genetic parentage analysis to identify parent-offspring relationships in steelhead trout of the Russian River in Northern California and determined the population age structure, size-at-age distributions, family sizes, and estimated heritability of two life-history traits, age at maturity and spawn timing. I showed that both traits are highly... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gx1z0hj Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beulke, Anne K https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8754-7217 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gk5z7rh Galaxy clusters are powerful laboratories for studying dark matter, large-scale structure formation, and cosmology. Accurate measurements of cluster masses are essential for leveraging these systems as cosmological probes, particularly for constraining the growth of structure and the properties of dark energy. Strong gravitational lensing provides a direct probe of the total projected mass distribution of clusters, independent of assumptions about their dynamical state. In this work, I present a spectroscopic analysis of the strong-lensing galaxy cluster DESI-090.9854-35.9683, commonly referred to as the Carousel Lens. Using Gemini/GMOS multi-object slit spectroscopy and integral field observations from VLT/MUSE, I constructed a spectroscopic survey of galaxies in the vicinity of the cluster. Redshifts were determined using the MARZ spectral fitting software, and quality cuts were applied to ensure robust membership classification. Galaxies consistent with the cluster redshift... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gk5z7rh Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Williams, Demetrius https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1042-1995 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dt0d0kd Generative AI (GenAI) as embodied by assistant chatbots is rapidly reshaping education, offering scalable support through one-on-one interactions. However, these commonly dyadic interactions of GenAI in education overlook the social dimensions of learning, including peer interaction, accountability, and collective knowledge. This thesis explores how leveraging GenAI within small group and cohort structures can support more collaborative and engaging learning experiences. This was explored through two systems. Pathways supports a self-directed learning collective, reframing individual learning as a shared, collective process alongside AI guidance that supports both the individual and the broader community. Agora supports research presentation discussions by structuring small-group dialogue around shared, AI-mediated artifacts that support synthesis and critique. Findings show that GenAI can reduce friction in initiating participation, learning, and discussion, while group-based... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dt0d0kd Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gruender, Madison S. https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0669-0199 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cp1x089 As quantum computing transitions from theory to practice, understanding which algorithms suit near-term devices becomes critical. Current quantum computers are severely constrained by limited qubit counts, short coherence times, and high error rates that quickly degrade computation into noise. This thesis addresses two interconnected questions: what non-trivial computational tasks can near-term devices execute and how should algorithms be implemented to exploit available hardware? We examine circuit design as the bridge between these concerns, analyzing how gate choices determine algorithmic efficiency and computational hardness. By deriving explicit circuit constructions, we obtain tangible cost estimates for practical quantum computation, enabling precise comparisons to classical approaches and identification of break-even points in system size and error rates. Understanding these trade-offs is essential for near-term quantum computing, where experiments are expensive and error-prone.We... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cp1x089 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 kordonowy, steven https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56z2b3s9 This thesis explores how meaningful play within the PlayStation (PS) trophy hunting community, a specific community of play, shapes relatedness among members. While prior research on meaningful play has often focused on individual gameplay experiences and relatedness through synchronous, in-game interactions, this work examines how meaningful play becomes socially co-constructed and collectively sustained through ongoing community participation around PS trophy hunting. Using a qualitative approach, this thesis analyzes discussions collected from r/Trophies, the PS trophy hunting subreddit, through inductive thematic analysis. Across two interconnected projects, findings reveal that PS trophies function as more than just digital rewards; they become emotionally significant artifacts connected to players’ accomplishments, identity, memory, and long-term engagement with games and the community. Additionally, the PS trophy hunting community collectively shapes meaningful play... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56z2b3s9 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Baskaran, Derusha https://escholarship.org/uc/item/55q7g7b8 Colloidal quantum dots and perovskite nanomaterials are prominent candidates for next-generation optoelectronics; however, optimizing their performance requires a fundamental understanding of their underlying physical and electronic structures. Through strategies such as transition-metal doping, dimensionality reduction, and compositional engineering, their optical and charge carrier properties can be systematically modulated. This dissertation aims to synthesize, characterize, and investigate the ultrafast charge carrier dynamics of these advanced nanomaterials, correlating specific structural modifications with their resultant excited-state kinetics.The first chapter of this dissertation provides a comprehensive introduction to the broader scientific context, covering the fundamental motivation for studying colloidal quantum dots and lead-free perovskite nanomaterials, the structural and optical properties of these material classes, and the synthesis and characterization methodologies... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/55q7g7b8 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chou, Kai-Chun https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0282-3604 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/54q1z2s3 Let (?? , [?ˆ]) be the conformal infinity of an asymptotically hyperbolic Einstein (AHE) manifold (? ?+1 , ?+). We will take the normalized scattering operator associated to the AHE filling in as the fractional conformal Laplacian. Equipped with fractional conformal Laplacians defined via the AHE manifold, we can define a fractional Yamabe problem, looking for a conformal metric of (?? , [?ˆ]) which has constant fractional scalar curvature. We will present some new developments on the fractional Yamabe problem assuming an AHE filling in. Namely, we will discuss rigidity of the fractional Yamabe problem via lower bounds for the Gromov-Bishop volume comparison. We will also discuss how to use the fractional Yamabe constant as a lower bound on the volume comparison to further recover classical rigidity in this special geometric setting.  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/54q1z2s3 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Aiken, Aubrey Sophia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2179-1134 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51w1t2n8 Modern scientific studies increasingly rely on complex datasets exhibiting spatial and temporal dependence, particularly in social, environmental, and climate applications. This dissertation develops statistical models and computational methods for analyzing such data, with an emphasis on capturing dependence structures, nonlinear dynamics, and uncertainty quantification.A spatial deep learning framework is developed to extend classical geostatistical models by incorporating convolutional neural network architectures, allowing for flexible modeling of complex and nonstationary spatial dependence The proposed approach preserves principled uncertainty quantification alongside improved predictive performance for large and heterogeneous spatial datasets.In the temporal domain, a Bayesian hierarchical echo state network model is introduced for count-valued time series, providing a flexible alternative to traditional autoregressive approaches. By embedding reservoir computing within... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51w1t2n8 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Qi https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6527-8587 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t56s755 This thesis presents work in two interconnected areas of X-ray imaging: (1) the application of micro-computed tomography (µCT) to non-destructive plant root and soil imaging, including the application and evaluation of segmentation methods for low-contrast volumetric data, and (2) the design and simulation of a scalable CMOS based readout ASIC for a direct X-ray hybrid image sensor with visible to near-infrared (Vis-NIR) active pixel sensor enhancement. The plant imaging work demonstrates that adaptive, region-weighted segmentation algorithms outperform threshold-based methods for separating root structures from surrounding soil in low-contrast µCT data. The detector design work presents a 7 µm pitch, 6-transistor pixel architecture implemented in a 90 nm stitched CMOS process, enabling both direct conversion via amorphous selenium and indirect conversion via pinned photodiodes. Simulation results validate frame rates exceeding 30 fps, noise performance down to 21 e⁻... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t56s755 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kwe, Bryan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qw9812r HHDS (Hardware Hierarchical Dynamic Structure) is a C++23 library providing compact graph and tree containers for electronic design automation (EDA) and hardware compiler workflows. The library is built around three principles: declaration-first APIs that separate named module interfaces from optional implementation bodies, three traversal contexts (class, flat, hier) that share one body, and bit-tight storage where every graph node and pin fits in 32 bytes. Edges are stored bidirectionally with role-tagged identifiers, delta-compressed into 16-bit slots when the neighbor is nearby, and promoted to a shared overflow hash set only when inline capacity (9 for nodes, 6 for pins) is exhausted. Hierarchy lives on a per-graph structure tree so that hierarchical traversal is proportional to the number of subnodes rather than the number of graph nodes. Forward and backward topological iteration is cached across calls and patched incrementally on each edge mutation. A final benchmark suite... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qw9812r Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kayal, Soham Rajesh https://orcid.org/0009-0006-6105-2463 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4p60n3sd Prosocial behaviors, helpful actions directed toward the well-being of others, are an essential component of social behavior. Adolescence is a particularly sensitive period for the development of social behaviors, yet how social experience during this window shapes prosocial behavior remains poorly understood. I used mouse behavioral assays to examine how social isolation at different ages affects emotional discrimination and affiliative helping behavior. I found that adult mice raised in social isolation since weaning failed to allogroom distressed conspecifics and were unable to distinguish stressed from unstressed mice in an emotional discrimination assay. Remarkably, two weeks of post-weaning social isolation was already sufficient to impair both emotional discrimination and prosocial allogrooming, and these deficits persisted despite two months of resocialization. In contrast, two weeks of adult social isolation spared emotional discrimination but impaired allogrooming toward... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4p60n3sd Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lee, Hyogun https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3286-7368 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4hx3h3mw Autonomous systems, such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and drones, are increasingly deployed across a wider array of contexts for both civilian and military use. As these systems become more common, they may be targeted by malicious actors seeking to exploit and abuse them, compromising safety-critical operations. Among the ways to protect these systems simulation based testing frameworks have been developed. However, existing testing frameworks primarily focus on identifying logical flaws or system vulnerabilities, often emphasizing static scenarios and paying less attention to an adaptive intelligent adversary. To help reduce this gap, this dissertation develops and applies adaptive, adversary-aware methodologies to discover, formalize, and mitigate security vulnerabilities in autonomous systems spanning vehicle platooning, drone swarms, and vision-based drone recovery. We first apply NLP techniques to discover and formalize driving rules across North American and Australian... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4hx3h3mw Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ortiz Barbosa, Diego Esteban https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6013-3879 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4dg4c9jb Marble outcrops of the Gabilan Limestone in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Northern Gabilan Range represent some of the oldest rocks within the Salinian block, yet their depositional age and alteration history remain poorly constrained. This study uses 87Sr/86Sr and 87Rb/ 86Sr geochemistry to investigate the age of the marble protoliths and the processes responsible for radiogenic Sr enrichment. Analyses of nine marble samples across seven sites yield 87Sr/86Sr values ranging from 0.70847 to 0.71251, while 87Rb/ 86Sr ratios remain low (<0.0265), indicating negligible radiogenic ingrowth. Samples from the East side of the UCSC campus average 0.70852 and closely match Paleozoic seawater compositions, suggesting an Ordovician to Devonian depositional age for the Gabilan Limestone protoliths. In contrast, elevated 87Sr/86Sr values on the West side of the UCSC Campus, Fall Creek (west of Felton), and Fremont Peak (Northern Gabilan Range) indicate localized radiogenic Sr addition.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4dg4c9jb Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Giardino, Jesper https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6792-9701 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4c3484xh Modern language models derive much of their capability from Transformer architectures, but this capability is coupled to two increasingly important costs: memory that grows with context length through the key-value cache, and compute dominated by dense matrix multiplication and large parameter counts. This dissertation studies these two costs through the lens of neuromorphic computing and asks which brain-inspired computational motifs can be translated into practical neural language architectures without sacrificing competitive modeling quality. The thesis begins with strict spiking neural networks (SNNs) as a testbed for these ideas. SpikeGPT extends spiking computation to autoregressive language modeling, while Spiking Autonomous Driving applies the same strict-spiking regime to an end-to-end perception, prediction, and planning pipeline. Across these two domains, the same pattern emerges: spike-based models can deliver strong theoretical energy advantages and remain competitive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4c3484xh Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhu, Ruijie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4750h9s0 Recently, a class of non-invasive hardware side-channel attacks has been discovered in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These attacks extract remnants of prior users’ activity that persist as transistor defect states within reconfigurable routing resources. These remnants are known as FPGA Pentimenti. Resistive random-access memory (ReRAM) is a compelling candidate for pentimenti-like attacks beyond FPGAs. However, unlike FPGAs, where sophisticated on-chip sensors capable of detecting pentimenti have been well-studied, non-invasive pentimenti recovery in commercial ReRAM must rely on measurements of observable write latency. These measurements are dominated by data-dependent structural biases that obscure any underlying defect-dynamics signal. In this dissertation, we demonstrate that the structural and stochastic components of commercial ReRAM write latency can be decoupled and recovered through non-invasive timing analysis alone. Our results provide the reverse engineering... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4750h9s0 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sheaves, Tyler https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0163-5449 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4731b5tr This work addresses improvements in branch prediction mechanism to support high performance processors. The state of the art aims to balance the prediction latency and prediction accuracy using multi level correcting predictors [32]. Prior published work focusses on scalar designs and prediction accuracy improvement for hard to predict branches employing tailor made, non generic and non transferrable solutions [8]. Recent work also proposes ahead pre- diction [53–55] to solve the problem of low accuracy of L0 predictor. This work proposes efficent, generic and transferrable solutions to reduce mispredic- tions and to use the fetch bandwidth more efficiently. This includes a biased overriding multi- level hierarchy with three predictor levels (L0, L1, L2). L0 uses a High-Confidence-Only Taken (HOTP) predictor that only predicts high-confidence taken control-flow instructions. This work further uses L1-L2 biased training to decrease mispredictions by L2 while it trains on branches on... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4731b5tr Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Singh, Bhawandeep https://orcid.org/0009-0008-1181-214X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40h9m27p Macrocyclic peptides represent a promising molecular class for inhibiting challenging protein-protein interactions, yet their clinical utility is frequently limited by poor passive membrane permeability. This challenge stems from the energetic penalty of desolvating polar backbone amides, particularly in high molecular weight scaffolds that exist beyond traditional drug-like boundaries. This thesis details a rational design strategy to bias synthetic macrocycles toward permeability by utilizing Copper(I)-catalyzed Azide-Alkyne Cycloaddition (CuAAC) as a robust, bio-orthogonal cyclization tool.A diverse library of triazole-cyclized heptamers was synthesized via a mass-differentiated split-pool approach, incorporating systematic variations in N-methylation and stereochemistry. The physicochemical landscape of the library was evaluated using a multi-tiered screening process, comparing traditional partition coefficients with high-throughput chromatographic assessments of membrane... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40h9m27p Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Morfin, Cristobal https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3r2652sb This dissertation investigates the origin and evolution of chirality in metal-halide perovskite nanoclusters and precursor metal-ligand complexes. Chiroptical activity in these materials is often attributed to chiral ligands or asymmetric crystal structures, yet many colloidal systems show synthesis-dependent circular dichroism that cannot be assigned from the final nanocrystal alone. This work examines whether chiral bias can emerge during solution-phase formation, including at precursor, interfacial, and nanocluster stages. Chapter 1 reviews chirality, chiroptical observables, proposed origin mechanisms, and a core-surface framework for assigning where chirality resides. Chapter 2 reports achiral-ligand CsPbBr3 magic-sized clusters and metal-halide molecular clusters that display intrinsic CD. Chapter 3 examines cysteine-passivated CsPbBr3 nanoclusters and shows that ligand handedness does not uniquely determine the observed CD sign. Chapter 4 investigates PbBr2-DMF precursor... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3r2652sb Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Todd, Celia Fernanda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3n07t4b8 More than 6000 exoplanets have been discovered to date, but how well do we really understand them? Exoplanets give off their own thermal glow and by directly imaging this signal we gain key insight into a planet's size, rotational dynamics, and atmosphere. These characteristics are harder to study with other exoplanet observation techniques that indirectly infer planetary properties from the way a planet affects the star it orbits. The signatures of these planets are at a high contrast to their host star (i.e., much fainter), giving off less than 10^-6 times the amount of light for giant planets (for earth-like planets 10^10); this problem is often likened to searching for a firefly next to a lighthouse. Telescopes on the ground have the advantage of larger primary mirrors (i.e., collecting diameters for light) because they are not constrained by the Herculean efforts of space launches. However, observing these signatures from the ground means contending with Earth's atmosphere,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3n07t4b8 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fowler, Jules https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bj9t6k4 A growing body of research demonstrates that humans possess accurate and stable absolute pitch memory (APM) for familiar melodies in long-term memory (LTM), even without the rare ability known as absolute pitch (AP). This has been observed in voluntary recall of well-known songs (Halpern, 1989; Levitin, 1994) and in involuntary musical imagery (INMI; Evans, Gaeta, & Davidenko, 2024). However, while pitch interference reliably disrupts short-term memory for isolated tones (Deutsch, 1970; Deutsch, 1972; Pechmann & Mohr, 1992), little is known about whether such proximate interference affects the accuracy of absolute pitch in familiar melodies recalled from LTM.Sixty-four undergraduates from the University of California, Santa Cruz participated in a within-subjects study. Each participant completed two blocks of a 1- back letter-matching task. Prior to each block, participants heard a 30-second instrumental prime of a self-selected song they know well. For one block, the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bj9t6k4 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Evans, Matthew Gilbert Umansky https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5016-0470 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38n6v3pr For a finite ?-group ?, the Burnside ring ?(?) of ? codifies the different ways in which ? can act on a finite set. Given a saturated fusion system F over ?, we may restrict our attention to consider only those sets for which the ?-action is invariant under the morphisms of F. Such an ?-set is called F-stable, and the isomorphism classes of these elements form a subring of ?(?), which we denote by ? F (?). We are interested in determining the unit group ? F (?) × of ? F (?), which can be viewed as an ?2-subspace of ?(?) × . In [4], Jamison Barsotti and Rob Carman introduce a number of important preliminary results describing ? F (?) × . Using one of the main theorems found in [5], in which Serge Bouc describes an ?2-basis of ?(?) × for any finite 2-group ?, they are able to determine ? F (?) × completely when ? is abelian. In this paper, we introduce generalizations of some of the results found in [4], and discuss how we use these new results to extend the class of finite 2-groups... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38n6v3pr Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Owens, Brandon Rosevelt https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3090h7hr Short-period (<100 days) exoplanets are strongly irradiated throughout their lives by X-ray and extreme UV (XUV) radiation. In the atmospheric escape regime known as photoevaporation, X-ray (>100 eV, <12.4 nm) and EUV (∼10–100 eV, 12.4–91 nm) photons photoionize the atomic gas in the upper atmosphere (pressures ≲1 mbar) and heat it to temperatures of up to 10,000 K. This heating and resulting pressure gradient drive the gas to expand, accelerate to supersonic speeds, and escape as a transonic Parker wind (E. N. Parker, 1958). Depending on the mass loss rate, this process can strip away part or all of a planet’s atmosphere, potentially stripping sub-Neptunes or habitable super-Earths down to bare rocky cores (E. D. Lopez et al., 2012; J. E. Owen & Y. Wu, 2017; J. G. Rogers et al., 2021).Whether it is the primary driver of these features, atmospheric escape has been shown to contribute to exoplanet evolution-driven demographic features including the period radius valley,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3090h7hr Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Broome, Madelyn https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7520-5663 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2pb8x2jg Existing forms of player-assistance, such as game walkthroughs and strategy guides, provide broad, general advice that disengage players from gameplay when seeking help at a particular moment. Furthermore, the assistance is static, unable to adapt to a player's current situation and evolving goals. I introduce Live Coaches as a genre of integrated AI systems that provide high-context and real-time player-assistance. Live Coaches support players in game completion and beyond, through integrating two key design dimensions: liveness, the ability to maintain real-time contextual awareness, and coachness, the ability to leverage deep game knowledge. I analyze prior systems exhibiting Live Coach characteristics and present two newly created systems: ChozoMaps and Rotom. Furthermore, I propose a design framework that enables designers to develop future Live Coach systems within the genre. An ablation study of 10 participants examined ChozoMaps' individual and combined impacts of liveness... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2pb8x2jg Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Martinez-Arias, Ivan Alejandro https://orcid.org/0009-0003-2093-4978 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jz3721j This thesis examines how I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé (1934-2024) rethinks the limits of historical knowledge through “(re)reporting” the archive. A term coined to describe the way the novel revisits the documented event of the Salem witch trials, (re)reporting exposes the conditions that determined whose voices could appear as credible, coherent, or fully human subjects in the first place. Because Tituba’s interiority is inaccessible in colonial archives, Condé’s novel does not attempt to recover historical truth but rather reworks the terms of reportability through speculative narration, first-person voice, and formal experimentation. By positioning Tituba as a (re)reporter, the novel reassembles Puritan records and redefines religious fear as stemming from Puritan authorizing of the language of guilt, fear, and racialized difference. (Re)reporting operates in the thesis as a narrative practice that both engages and unsettles archival authority. The theological... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jz3721j Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yu, Sung Wok https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jt2c91m Internal waves travel along density interfaces in the stratified ocean and play a critical role in mixing, nutrient supply, and sediment transport. Their propagation encodes information about stratification that is difficult to access because continuously recording internal waves is challenging. Here, we use a year-long ocean-bottom pressure record in the South China Sea to measure changes in wave period and amplitude, and support these measurements with a decade of satellite imagery that records propagation speeds and arrival directions. The pressure data reveal a seasonal cycle in wave period that covaries with local stratification. The observed pressure signal requires that hydrostatic contributions from the downward deflection of the pycnocline and upward deflection of the sea surface largely cancel so that non-hydrostatic pressure dominates observable seafloor pressure. These results indicate that ocean-bottom pressure measurements can track temporal changes in stratification,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jt2c91m Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Syamsul, Amanda https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2030-3108 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2j54b6n7 Subsurface heat and fluid transport fundamentally shape planetary energy budgets, geologic evolution, and global chemical cycling. On Earth, most internal heat is transferred conductively through the oceanic lithosphere, with a substantial fraction redistributed advectively by subseafloor fluid flow, or hydrothermal circulation, which also delivers energy and nutrients that support the deep biosphere. Quantifying how and where heat and fluid flow occurs in the subseafloor is therefore essential for understanding planetary evolution and habitability. However, the physical controls governing this transport, particularly the scale, organization, and influence of subsurface heterogeneity, remain under constrained. This dissertation addresses these uncertainties by integrating geothermal and geophysical observations, data-driven analysis, and numerical modeling for a variety of geothermal and hydrothermal systems on Earth and other worlds. First, I present an open-source software framework... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2j54b6n7 Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dickerson, Kristin https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8131-7812 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2dc115vs This dissertation investigates how contemporary screen-based media—documentary film, animation, and virtual reality—represent and reconfigure human–plant relationships in the context of ecological crisis and dominant humanist paradigms. It asks whether technologically mediated images of the botanical world can foster multispecies visuality that is embodied, ethical, and relational, or whether they inevitably reproduce the disembodied gaze of modernity. To address these questions, the study adopts an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in ecocritical art history, ecomedia, Indigenous and feminist theory, and critical plant studies. Through close visual analysis and comparative interpretation, it examines works by Suzanne Husky, Lisa Jackson, Miwa Matreyek, and Amanda Strong. These case studies are paired with theoretical frameworks from posthumanism, ecofeminism, and feminist science and technology studies to interrogate the intersections of visuality, embodiment, and multispecies... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2dc115vs Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tedford, Matthew Harrison https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3386-6041 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2cg992cx Designing approximation and online algorithms remains a central challenge in combinatorial optimization. As modern computational systems grow in scale and complexity, the need for robust, highly efficient algorithms has never been more pressing. To achieve provable performance guarantees in these environments, it is essential to uncover and exploit a problem's underlying combinatorial structure. By understanding these core mathematical properties, we can systematically design algorithms that reliably approximate optimal solutions, even under strict computational limits or input uncertainty. This dissertation investigates these fundamental structures, focusing on two key domains: network design and scheduling. In the first part of the dissertation, we investigate the Survivable Network Design problems, which aim to construct a minimum cost communication network that remains operational despite component failures. Beyond the classic node-to-node communication, we study the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2cg992cx Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Qingyun https://escholarship.org/uc/item/275910xw Diffusion MRI encodes information about tissue microstructure through the restricted motion of water molecules, but existing analysis methods recover only voxel-level scalar parameters rather than explicit three-dimensional geometry. This thesis presents Spinverse, a differentiable physics-based inverse solver that reconstructs microstructural boundaries directly from dMRI signals by optimizing face-wise permeabilities on a fixed tetrahedral mesh. The forward model is a fully differentiable Bloch–Torrey FEM simulator, accelerated by a reduced-order model and paired with geometric regularization and a staged coarse-to-fine acquisition curriculum. On voxel-scale axon-like geometries, Spinverse recovers coherent interfaces across diverse topologies and outperforms learned graph-network baselines in both geometric accuracy and surface validity. These results establish differentiable MRI physics as a viable framework for explicit microstructure reconstruction from dMRI signals. Extension... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/275910xw Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Brenes, Mario https://escholarship.org/uc/item/24r4q7mn This dissertation studies debt maturity and credit risk as joint outcomes of financial frictions. Across firms and banks, debt maturity is not only a payment schedule. It is a margin through which borrowers, lenders, and financial intermediaries allocate rollover exposure, absorb economic shocks, and shape the distribution of default and investment risk. The three chapters show that the economic consequences of credit tightening depend on the timing of cash flows, the maturity of debt, and the composition of funding sources.The first chapter, written jointly with Tianyue Zhao, studies how bank credit disruptions affect corporate debt maturity and investment during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Combining firm-bank evidence from Compustat and Dealscan with a dynamic model of investment, debt maturity, and default, this chapter shows that adverse credit supply shocks shorten firms’ debt maturity and reduce investment. The debt maturity response is not simply a neutral redistribution... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/24r4q7mn Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Si, Yifan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1v07q9nh Wildlife dataset curation and re-identification (ReID) centers on mapping new images to an existing set of known individuals and are critical tasks for ecology, conservation, and the study of populations. Traditionally, domain experts have performed this task manually, but identifying individuals from images is both challenging and labor-intensive, complicated by long-tailed class distributions, high intra-class variance, and noisy datasets. To address these challenges, we present SHARKLINQ, an end-to-end system that integrates multimodal modeling and retrieval techniques with SHARK MATCHER, a human-in-the-loop tool for model-assisted ReID and general database management.We detail a parameter-efficient framework for fine-tuning computer vision back-bones, specifically evaluating Vision Transformers (ViT) and MiewID (EfficientNetV2). To leverage heterogeneous supplementary data, we introduce a weighted late fusion approach that constructs multimodal embeddings, combining visual... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1v07q9nh Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kurmann, Fabrice Leon https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gt7j5kw This dissertation is a heritage ethnography designed to examine the role that the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II had and continues to play in the development of community identity and meaning within the Japanese American community today. The trauma experienced by those incarcerated is undeniable and the psychological effects were both deep and devastating. This trauma continues to impact the Japanese American community. The lives of Japanese Americans have been structured by movement, first settling in the United States, being forcibly removed and incarcerated, and then resettled and dispersed throughout the country. These movements have had a profound effect on the way that the community has developed and continue to impact generations who did not directly experience these events. Social/political movements have sought to address and counter the difficulties/challenges/trauma that this process has had on our community. The redress movement that primarily... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gt7j5kw Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nuss Louis, Kathryn Fujiye https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8941-5004