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 Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:07:57 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xf6c4zc Ribosomes are essential macromolecules that convert mRNA to polypeptides and functional proteins. Ribosomes can be regulated by multiple mechanisms, including limiting the biogenesis of ribosomal subunits, sequestering 70S ribosomes, dimerizing 70S complexes into translationally inactive 100S ribosome, and “silencing” the 50S subunit to prevent the assembly of active 70S ribosomes. In this review, we focus on the protein that carries out ribosomal silencing, called ribosomal silencing factor S (RsfS), that has been shown in multiple species to bind to the L14 ribosomal protein in the 50S subunit and prevent 50S-to-30S subunit joining. RsfS is a highly conserved small protein found across most bacterial species and in eukaryotes. The direct target of RsfS, L14 (RplN), is one of the most conserved ribosomal proteins. RsfS has been primarily studied for binding interactions with L14 and the downstream effects of preventing 70S ribosome assembly. rsfS null mutants exhibit defects... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xf6c4zc Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Elshenawi, Yasmine O https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0450-6610 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cq5r8xd Marine populations were long expected to exhibit weak genetic structure because many species possess pelagic larvae, large population sizes, and few barriers to dispersal. However, strong population structure is shown to be widespread across marine taxa even among species with high dispersal potential. Understanding how population divergence arises and persists in such dynamic systems remains a central challenge in evolutionary biology. This dissertation examines how historical isolation, environmental gradients, and selection shape population structure in marine fishes using physiological and genomic approaches. In Chapter 1, I examine population-level variation in thermal physiology between Pacific and Sea of Cortez populations of the longjaw mudsucker (Gillichthys mirabilis). Although broad thermal performance curves were largely similar, Sea of Cortez individuals showed lower thermal sensitivity and higher acute thermal tolerance after warm pre-conditioning, patterns that... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cq5r8xd Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sawkins, Allyson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0591-4381 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rq5k10r Host-microbe systems are core to some of biology's most consequential interactions, from the pathogens that drive infectious disease to intracellular symbionts mitigating vector-borne disease transmission. Yet unlike the model organisms that have driven most of modern molecular biology, the microbes at the center of these interactions are rarely genetically tractable. Many intracellular bacteria cannot be cultured outside a host, resist standard tools for genetic manipulation, and are annotated largely by homology to distantly related free-living relatives. This dissertation develops genomic, proteomic, and computational methods to work around this lack of infrastructure and contribute techniques and tools to the study and further understanding of host-microbe systems. Using Wolbachia cultured in Drosophila melanogaster cell lines, I demonstrate that chemical mutagenesis can be used to perturb intracellular genomes leaving a detectable mutational signal. I employ a low error rate... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rq5k10r Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Penunuri, Gabriel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gj6v58k The present work examines five virtues that promise to be helpful for public philosophers as they seek to promote knowledge in non-academic or non-traditional spaces through teaching and dialogue. These five virtues, in order of discussion, are self-forgetfulness, graciousness, Murdochian charity, creativity, and courage. In particular, these virtues promise to be epistemically ameliorative, by which I mean they help public philosophers both promote norms of reasoning that are conducive to knowledge in others, but also in themselves. The ineliminable dialogue at philosophy’s core is a key theme in this work, as is reflected in appendix 1, which serves as a model both for myself and others who are interested in a public-facing philosophy in the spirit of Plato and Socrates. Appendix 2 examines the public philosopher’s epistemic life as it intersects with a challenging case in aesthetics. Appendices 3 and 4 serve as creative prose expressions of the virtues recommended here for... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gj6v58k Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Read, James Patrick https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6581-5636 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gh6w7d3 Strong gravitational lensing is poised to become one of the strongest probes of cosmology. Though rare, strong lensing is highly sensitive to the geometry of the universe and the distribution of mass in foreground galaxies or clusters. While strong lensing has long been used to study distant magnified objects, the past decade has seen rapid progress in applying SL to novel studies of dark matter and dark energy. I provide a survey of these possibilities, with a focus on studies of dark matter in lensing galaxy clusters. I present the most rigorous constraint to date on Self-Interacting Dark Matter (SIDM) at cluster scales, combining strong lensing with resolved stellar kinematics in lens system MACS J0138-2155. Additionally, I discuss a powerful possibility for constraining the dark energy equation of state with strong lensing, a technique known as compound lens cosmography, and encouraging results with a remarkable lens system known as the Carousel Lens. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gh6w7d3 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 O'Donnell, Jackson Humphrey https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4083-1530 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94r9h469 There are many valid reasons for someone to browse the internet privately, and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are one method of achieving this. Although primarily used to provide confidentiality and anonymity by encrypting internet traffic and masking IP addresses, users may choose to use a VPN for multiple purposes. However, this raises questions about whether, and how differently, content across the internet is portrayed to VPN users. VPN providers do not all route their traffic the same way, and this study analyzes these differences by investigating two major VPN providers, NordVPN and Surfshark. We measure and quantify the accessibility of popular websites to users of these two VPNs, comparing outcomes against a non-VPN control connection to determine whether, and to what extent, VPN use affects a user's ability to reach and use ordinary websites. This raises a central question: is VPN-related blocking better explained by the network a VPN happens to use, or by... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94r9h469 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sinha, Pakhi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92b3c5h0 Quantifying cetacean diet is critical for understanding ecological and physiological processes but remains inherently challenging. Quantitative fatty acid signature analysis (QFASA) is a diet determination method with the potential to generate detailed, long-term diet estimates, but its use in cetaceans has been limited. My dissertation presents the first application of QFASA in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus, hereafter “dolphins”). It addresses key impediments to QFASA’s broader application in cetaceans, evaluates its performance in professional-care and free-ranging dolphins, compares it to other diet determination methods, and explores the estimates’ ecological implications. In Chapter 1, I used dolphins under professional care with known diets to derive calibration coefficients (CCs) and explore the temporal integration period of blubber fatty acids. I found that dolphin- and blubber layer-specific CCs produced lower-error estimates and identified major prey more... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92b3c5h0 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tatom-Naecker, Theresa-Anne https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8777-0644 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x7319fc As datacenters scale up and become more geographically distributed, wide-area network inter-datacenter traffic, which typically consists of data-heavy tasks, has become increasingly prevalent. Some of the noteworthy challenges raised by the coexistence and interaction between inter- and intra-datacenter traffic are the differences in their QoS requirements, link utilization, and round-trip times. To the best of our knowledge, these challenges have not yet been addressed by current datacenter load balancers. To highlight this gap, we conducted a comparative performance study of state-of-the-art datacenter load balancers. Through extensive simulations, we study how they perform under different network topologies and workloads, including intra-datacenter, inter-datacenter, and mixed intra- and inter-datacenter workloads that reflect how datacenters have evolved to keep up with their continuously changing driving application landscape. Our study shows that current load balancers are... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x7319fc Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Krishnaswamy, Lakshmi https://orcid.org/0009-0004-1042-2239 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8f94n09j This thesis investigates the observational and phenomenological consequences of large gravitationally coupled dark sectors, using black holes and high-frequency gravitational waves as the primary probes. The work spans four interconnected studies, progressing from broad model-independent constraints on dark sector size, through the physics of primordial black holes as a dark matter candidate, to a detailed reexamination of black hole evaporation dynamics, and culminating in a quantitative assessment of high-frequency gravitational-wave signals from superradiant boson clouds. The first study derives comprehensive constraints on the number of dark degrees of freedom N from multiple astrophysical and collider observables. Hawking evaporation of stellar-mass black holes observed by LIGO/Virgo provides the dominant bound: using the merger event GW190924 021846, with chirp mass 5.7 M⊙ and inferred age (1.16±0.04)×1010 yr, we constrain N ≲ 5×1058 for massless spin-0 dark sectors... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8f94n09j Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ewasiuk, Christopher https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5319-7890 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8741q167 The equidistant surfaces in a Fuchsian manifold form a canonical foliation by constant mean curvature surfaces. It is therefore natural to ask whether a prescribed leaf of this foliation can be reached by evolving an arbitrary graphical surface. We answer this question affirmatively using the modified mean curvature flow. Let (M³, ḡ)=(ℝ×Σ, dr²+cosh²(r)g₀) be a Fuchsian manifold, where (Σ,g₀) is a closed hyperbolic surface. For any σ∈(−2, 2), we consider the flow ??/??=−(?−?)? starting from an arbitrary smooth closed geodesic graph over the central totally geodesic surface. We prove that the flow exists smoothly for all time, remains graphical, and converges smoothly to the unique equidistant surface Σ(?_?), where ?_?=arctanh(?/2) whose mean curvature is ?. The initial graph is required only to be strictly graphical; no smallness assumption or quantitative angle–height pinching condition is imposed. The main difficulty is that strict graphicality alone does not provide... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8741q167 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lam, Yuk Shing https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7x34w63n In this thesis, we study barcode growth functions of the symplectic homology of Liouville domains. We show that the barcode growth function of a smooth convex/concave or real analytic toric domain grows at most like a polynomial of degree half the dimension of the domain. In particular, the barcode entropy of such a domain is zero and its slow barcode entropy is bounded by half the dimension, reflecting the complete integrability of the Reeb flow on the boundary. We extend the definition of barcode growth functions to star-shaped domains with non-smooth boundary via smooth approximations in the symplectic Banach–Mazur distance, and show that the polynomial bound persists for non-smooth convex/concave toric domains. We also show that barcode entropy and slow barcode entropy are invariants of the exact symplectomorphism type of the interior. As applications, we obtain obstructions to exact symplectomorphisms between interiors of Liouville domains. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7x34w63n Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Barut, Erol https://orcid.org/0009-0004-5941-6649 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7sv4z77h This dissertation investigates works of Li Xiaojiang (1951-2025), a foundational figure in the development of women’s studies in post-socialist China who received comparatively little attention in international scholarship. Li has been criticized for essentialist understanding of sex and gender and for advocating women’s self-improvement in ways that appeared complicit with China’s state-led modernization and emerging market economy. Without dismissing these criticism, this dissertation argues that they capture only part of Li’s theoretical and political significance. Reading her work across four decades, I recover a sustained concern with a fundamental political question: how might women cultivate subjective capacity and political agency under conditions that seem to leave little for either? The dissertation traces Li thought roughly chronologically. I first examine her writings of the 1980s for which she received the most criticism for. Drawing on the body of texts that... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7sv4z77h Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Feng, Yudi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rb805tz We study the problem of enumerating the satisfying assignments of smooth multivalued d-DNNF circuits in sum order. We measure the cost in terms of a preprocessing phase and the delay between consecutive answers, charging for both the size of the circuit and the number of variables. Producing each answer as a complete assignment takes time linear in the number of variables. We propose an algorithmic framework that avoids this cost by producing answers in an implicit representation. After preprocessing quasilinear in the size of the circuit, the delay for tree-shaped circuits is logarithmic in the number of answers already produced and independent of the number of variables. For general circuits, preprocessing incurs an additional factor of the number of variables, and one further term remains in the delay, logarithmic in the number of variables. An answer can be recovered explicitly from its implicit representation in additional linear time. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rb805tz Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hu, Jiayin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kz7s7pd Racial trauma (i.e., trauma resulting from racist experiences) is a persistent and harmful psychological consequence of racism, yet it is denied or minimized by dominant cultural narratives and ideologies. The current work explores how Black communities can heal from racial trauma and how racial trauma is perceived in White communities. Study 1 examines Black community healing from intergenerational racial trauma, using secondary analysis of interviews with Black participants who visited key historical sites from the transatlantic slave trade in Ghana, West Africa. I employed an integrative methodological framework rooted in Black epistemologies, including the methodology of surrender, the daughtering method, and the H.U.N.C.H. method. Findings illuminate how place-based, community-centered, and ancestrally grounded experiences can facilitate healing from intergenerational racial trauma. Study 2 examined how White participants perceive racial trauma, exploring how different levels... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kz7s7pd Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cheek, Jada https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9429-1497 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7167474p This dissertation examines how the secondary position of music to drama in South Korean ch'angjak musicals (창작뮤지컬, originally created musical theater) has been historically and structurally established. Integrating archival research, score analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork in the Taehangno theater district of Seoul, it argues that the genre's production mechanisms, its development processes, the curricula that train its practitioners, and the conventions of its criticism and audience feedback are all organized with dramatic considerations taking priority.The musicians in ch'angjak musicals often experience frustration at this secondary position, and at having musical judgments that diverge from those around them. This dissertation, however, does not read this as a musical deficiency of the genre. Rather, it demonstrates that the resulting sound reflects a negotiation among differently formed musicalities—that of the music team, shaped by musical training, and that of the writers,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7167474p Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jung, Jiyoon https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6927-1229 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wh9b9vk Multiwavelength spectra of active galactic nuclei (AGN) are affected by intrinsic AGN emission mechanisms fueled by the source environment and cosmic propagation along our line of sight (LoS), neither of which is fully understood. This thesis explores the former through multiwavelength data analysis and modeling of a particular blazar using a synchrotron-self-Compton model, and the latter specifically LoS effects due to photon-induced electromagnetic cascades developing in and out of cosmic voids through simulations of energetic (E> 100 MeV) photon propagation over cosmological distances.Three very high-energy (E > 100 GeV) states of the distant (20.45±0.10) blazar 1ES 0647+250 observed by the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System are identified, and the emission zone is modeled using a leptonic synchrotron-self-Compton and blob-in-jet framework. It is found that one of the simplest scenarios that can describe the multiwavelength properties of the three... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wh9b9vk Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Splettstoesser, Megan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3407-9936 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6b25k0rg In the literature on X-ray transform and Transport Twistor (TT) space, blow-down maps describe the degeneracy of the TT space of an oriented Riemannian surface, while collapsing (yet separating) geodesics of the unit tangent bundle of that surface. In the literature [3], such maps have been constructed for simple surfaces of near-constant curvature (see Definition 1.1), showing that the interior of their TT space is biholomorphic to an open set in standard C 2 . The construction there relied on a microlocal argument leveraging the absence of conjugate points.In this dissertation, we construct explicit circularly symmetric examples, including examples with conjugate points, whose transport twistor spaces admit a global blow-down map.  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6b25k0rg Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Qi, Zhengyi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/67h4r9pd California’s Franciscan mélange is well-known for hosting persistent, slow-moving earthflows, a landslide style favored by the unit’s significant local variability in shear strength (e.g. Medley, 2001; Kim et al., 2004; Roering et al., 2015). Big Sur’s mélange, however, is unusual: landslide mapping there reveals both recent (e.g. the 2017 Mud Creek landslide) and prehistoric rotational landslides on slopes that are unusually steep for this lithology. Because rotational landslides and earthflows pose markedly different hazards, understanding what drives the shift in failure style is critical for hazard assessment. Here we test the hypothesis that the rate of base-level lowering governs the transition between earthflow and rotational failure. We synthesize landslide mapping and analysis of high-resolution topography across two Franciscan mélange settings with contrasting rates of base-level lowering: the South Fork Eel River canyon, where river incision drives base-level lowering... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/67h4r9pd Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fakrai, Nessa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6286x524 Genomic conflict arises when genetic elements increase their own proliferation despite imposing costs on their hosts. This dissertation examines how these conflicts emerge, persist, and reshape genomes across evolutionary timescales through three studies integrating gamete sequencing, comparative transcriptomics, long-read isoform sequencing, and population genomics. First, I investigated pollen-acting segregation distortion in crosses within and between Arabidopsis lyrata and A. halleri populations. Distortion was absent from crosses between closely related parents but widespread and variable in more divergent crosses, including crosses within species. Repeated, opposing distortions across chromosomes and genome-wide non-independence among loci were more consistent with negative epistatic incompatibilities than with independent single-locus drivers, demonstrating that reproductive barriers can arise early during population divergence. Second, I examined transcript processing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6286x524 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Condon, Christopher https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7804-0745 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5k39g59z Planetary exploration requires extracting physically meaningful information from incomplete measurements acquired under environmental, instrumental, and operational constraints. This dissertation integrates Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), mineral physics, and computational analysis to expand the information recoverable from measurements of Mars-relevant materials. Raman spectroscopy provides the central connection among these studies because its vibrational frequencies, intensities, and spectral shapes encode not only mineral identity, but also bonding, hydration, crystallinity, temperature, structural disorder, and crystallographic orientation. Three studies progressively examine mineral phase identification, mineral physical state, and how it is crystallographically organized. A convolutional neural network trained using high-volume, wide within-class Raman datasets and demonstrated robust mineral classification under dusty, low-signal, and otherwise nonideal conditions... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5k39g59z Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Berlanga, Genesis https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7666-6966 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gc906gb This thesis investigates iterative methods for solving elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), with particular emphasis on self-gravity modeled by Poisson’s equation. Available solution strategies—including direct factorizations, FFT-based methods, multigrid, and classical relaxation schemes—offer different balances among computational cost, scalability, implementation complexity, and adaptability to changing boundaries and mesh structures. In this work, we examine how hyperbolic pseudo-time dynamics can be used to balance these considerations while providing a simple, local route to an elliptic steady state.To explore this question, we develop SORh, a relaxation framework derived from a hyperbolic pseudo-time reformulation of elliptic equations. Its linear discretization belongs to the established accelerated over-relaxation (AOR) family and reduces exactly to classical successive over-relaxation (SOR) at unit CFL. The derivation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gc906gb Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Guite, Jonathan https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6545-4914 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58q2d4wd This dissertation examines how public policy and infrastructure shape environmental quality, local economic activity, governance, and health. Across three chapters, it combines spatial data, village-level survey evidence, and quasi-experimental research designs to study the effects of environmental and infrastructure policies in Indonesia and India. The first chapter studies the environmental consequences of China’s 2018 National Sword policy, which restricted waste imports and redirected large volumes of plastic waste toward Southeast Asia. Global plastic waste generation has increased significantly over the past two decades, while recycling rates have remained low, and high-income countries continue to export low-quality waste to countries with limited processing capacity. Using spatial and temporal variation in exposure to waste pollution, this chapter estimates the causal effect of increased plastic inflows on fine particulate matter (PM2.5) across Indonesia. The analysis... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58q2d4wd Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shandal, Monica https://escholarship.org/uc/item/574572b4 Electrochemical water splitting provides promising technology for green hydrogen production. Among different electrolysis technologies, alkaline water splitting is attractive because it can use earth-abundant electrode materials and relatively low-cost materials. However, efficient operation at industrially relevant current densities remains challenging due to gas bubble accumulation, ion-transport resistance, sluggish anodic kinetics. These limitations become more severe under high-rate conditions, where rapid gas generation and fast ionic consumption can reduce electrode-electrolyte contact and increase the overall cell voltage.This dissertation focuses on advanced electrode design and interfacial engineering strategies to address these challenges. First, nickel nanocone-modified surfaces were developed to improve gas bubble detachment. The nanocone structures created a superaerophobic interface, leading to shorter bubble residence times and smaller bubble detachment sizes during... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/574572b4 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ren, Qiu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4371-6298 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4m6216v5 This study examines how American English listeners use two temporal parameters, amplitude rise time (ART) and transition duration (TD), to diagnose consonant manner, replicating previous work on the /b/-/w/ contrast (Shinn & Blumstein, 1984). A tripartite free response pattern is found, replicating stop and approximant responses at fast-ART, fast-TD, and slow-ART, slow-TD regions of the stimulus space, respectively, and replicating critical fricative responses in the slow-ART, fast-TD region of the stimulus space. This confirms that listeners do not require frication to report hearing fricatives. However, likely due to changes in synthesis parameters, we fail to replicate the original categorization responses, and find approximant responses in the fast-ART, slow-TD region of the stimulus space, akin to the results of Walsh & Diehl (1991), where the original experiment finds stop responses. Taken together, these results present a complex –if early– picture about the role... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4m6216v5 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Boye-Lynn, John Callahan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/46q7r6tj Hormones provide a direct measure of the physiological state of wild animals. Yet, the natural variation that underlies endocrine biomarkers remains poorly characterized in North Pacific humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), a population recovering from commercial whaling while facing increasingly variable ocean conditions. In this dissertation, I characterized variation in reproductive steroids and glucocorticoids measured from minimally invasive skin–blubber biopsies collected on the Hawaiʻi breeding grounds (2014–2025) and the Southeast Alaska feeding grounds (2023–2025), spanning sex, reproductive class, season, social context, and region.In male humpback whales (Chapter 1), androgens and progesterone were elevated on the breeding grounds, and androgens declined across the breeding season, consistent with males arriving in a heightened reproductive state and exhibiting reduced androgen production as the breeding season progressed. Reproductive hormone profiles did not... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/46q7r6tj Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Spears, Haley https://orcid.org/0009-0000-3495-437X https://escholarship.org/uc/item/408649w0 The COVID-19 pandemic generated genomic data at unprecedented scale, with tens of millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes deposited in public repositories and thousands of new sequences added each day. This dissertation develops methods for analyzing genomic datasets at this scale, unified by the idea that encoding genomes according to their evolutionary relationships can make otherwise intractable computations practical. First, I evaluate online phylogenetic inference, in which new genomes are continuously added to an existing tree, and compare parsimony-based methods with maximum-likelihood approaches under pandemic time constraints. For densely sampled SARS-CoV-2 genomes, online inference with UShER and matOptimize produces trees comparable to established maximum-likelihood methods while requiring orders of magnitude less time and memory. I then develop tools that make phylogenies containing millions of genomes useful for downstream analysis and visualization. ShUShER enables privacy-preserving... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/408649w0 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kramer, Alexander https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3630-3209 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3w37h3kw In March 2024, a backdoor was discovered in xz Utils, a widely-used open source data compression library present in nearly every major Linux distribution. The attack was discovered days before merging into major distributions, and if this had happened, it would have allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code on millions of systems worldwide via SSH.The success of this backdoor was enabled by two failures. The first was technical: weaknesses in the software supply chain allowed a malicious actor to inject code into a widely trusted release. The second was human: the project's only maintainer, overwhelmed and burned out after years of maintaining critical infrastructure alone, was the target of a multi-year social engineering campaign, in which a malicious actor built trust under a false identity and gradually obtained commit access to the project. This incident shows that software security failures and sustainability failures are not independent: an overburdened, unsupported maintainer... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3w37h3kw Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gomez Romero, Juanita https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1593-3404 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q77k3sn Medical image representation has long been dominated by voxel-grid matrices. While their inherent structure and order work efficiently for various linear transformations and provide a seamless visualization method on monitors, they fail to preserve the topology of the scan and to encode sparse information in a memory-efficient way.The recent emergence of machine learning-based continuous coordinate-based scene representations such as neural radiance fields and Gaussian splatting has provided alternative representation techniques. These approaches overfit the weights of a model by iterative differentiable rendering and have been shown to be more compact than grid representations. Moreover, they are then able to perform novel view synthesis from any given camera pose.Off-grid representations translate directly to Cone Beam Computed Tomography sparse-view acquisitions, where streaking and quantum noise artifacts are dominant. Using differentiable rendering, a continuous representation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q77k3sn Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Nikolakakis, Emmanouil https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5467-3950 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3nc6f708 This dissertation explores writing and translation as modes through which to interpret problematics of language and gender in literature. In relation to the community I study, translating and writing are not separate gestures, but rather two vital pieces of a queer, feminist ontology that resists hierarchies and binaries within language. I examine the practice of writing-translation in a group of women living and working in Montreal during the 1980s and 90s—the Montreal lesbian feminist network. This period, together with the physical space of urban Montreal and its radical history, influenced the experimental art produced. During this time, Montreal served as a central meeting place for lesbian and feminist writers, poets, artists, literary translators, and performers from Anglophone and Francophone backgrounds. Though incredibly diverse in their experiences and histories, these women shared a common interest in expressing anti-hierarchical perspectives on gender, sexuality,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3nc6f708 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Burgdorf, Arielle https://orcid.org/0009-0003-1319-7252 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gs35336 First-generation Latina graduate students navigate multiple and often contradictory expectations and experiences across different settings (e.g., academia, home life). For example, while graduate education can create opportunities for professional growth and future possibilities, it can also position students within settings that privilege dominant ways of knowing and being while devaluing their own cultural knowledge, familial relationships, and lived experiences. These contradictory experiences can create tight spaces that foster emotional turmoil and fragmentation while also creating opportunities for reflection and transformation. To understand these experiences, I draw from Gloria Anzaldúa's (1987) Borderlands theory, which examines how individuals navigate multiple, often contradictory social, cultural, and political worlds. Anzaldúa also theorizes that through the seven-stage process of conocimiento, individuals critically make meaning of these contradictions, ultimately... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gs35336 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Quinteros, Katherine https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4144-3767 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gn2f7kx What does it mean to take the dispossession of Indigenous land as central to the history of American higher education? This dissertation examines the history and context of the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act to pose a theorization of the land-grant college system as a critical site of settler-colonial dispossession. Looking at the problem and process of the material basis of disciplinary formation and institution building, this inquiry is organized along three lines of flight. First, how does the land-grant university produce institutional history that crops out its dispossessive conditions of possibility? I examine the university archives of Pennsylvania State University and Michigan State University alongside genres of commemoration and memorialization to position the production of forgetting as a key feature of the settler-colonial university. Secondly, how have Indigenous modes of agriculture been delegitimized and displaced through the disciplinary formation of scientific agriculture?... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gn2f7kx Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fosburg, Arlo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3dz9x76g In my dissertation I investigated how we expect artificial agents (e.g., chatbots, voice assistants, robots) to ground with people. I focused on two aspects of grounding: (a) how people interpret errors from an agent and (b) how people expect agents to contribute to resolving errors in communication. Two experiments inform how we expect technology to engage in navigating grounding in a conversation. Additionally, these experiments offer insight into how similarly we want technology to mimic human speech behaviors or if we have differing expectations for how technology should communicate.Experiment 1 uses a Wizard of Oz (WOz) design where a voice assistant (VA), in this case an Alexa, commits phoneme level speech errors (swaps, anticipations, and perseverations) across three between-subjects conditions: (1) no errors (no speech errors committed), (2) errors (speech errors are committed), and (3) errors with correction (speech errors are committed and immediately self-corrected... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3dz9x76g Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Duffau, Elise https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tv952c3 On January 16, 2025, a major fire occurred at the Moss Landing Power Plant Facility located adjacent to the Elkhorn Slough, one of the largest remaining coastal wetlands in California. The fire burned 3 days becoming the largest battery-facility fire in the world to date. Lithium-ion battery fires potentially pose a risk to human and ecological health, as they can release trace metals, specifically: nickel, manganese, and cobalt that can be dangerous when surpassing safety exposure limits (Pennington, 2025). As societies shift towards alternative energy formats, there is a greater demand for battery energy storage infrastructure; however, these infrastructures carry risks. This study aimed to extend initial post-fire assessments by examining long-term effects of trace metal release and metal transport pathways. Sediment samples and random quadrat vegetation surveys were collected from 2 marsh sites, in the Elkhorn Slough. Samples were analyzed utilizing field portable X-ray fluorescence... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tv952c3 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fuller, Amy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1r06n541 Climate change poses an existential threat to tropical corals, but corals vary in their thermal tolerance at multiple spatial scales. Here, I evaluate the spatial scales at which corals show potential and evidence for local temperature adaptation.In Chapter 1, I evaluate the scale at which microclimates are detectable by comparing remotely sensed sea surface temperatures to data from in situ temperature loggers on reefs worldwide. I found that the remote dataset constitutes a good proxy for maximum monthly mean temperatures, but missed sub-daily variation as well as peak temperatures in the hottest microclimates. In Chapter 2, I used Acropora tenuis samples from the Philippines to evaluate isolation by distance patterns in both coral hosts and their algal symbionts. I found four near-panmictic taxa within our Acropora cf. tenuis samples, consistent with long (20km+) larval dispersal distances, but significant spatial structuring in their symbiotic algae. In Chapter 3, I looked... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1r06n541 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bos, Jaelyn Teresa https://orcid.org/0009-0007-7877-3862 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/14s7k4m5 Protein and glycan antigens synthesized by gut microbes stimulate circulating and secreted antibody production. Despite continuous exposure of hosts to the plant glycans that constitute dietary fiber, it remains unclear whether these foreign structures induce mucosal immune responses. We report that humans and mice generate antibodies specific for common glycans in plant foods. Oral exposure to individual fiber types induced T cell-independent, glycan-specific IgM and IgA. The induction of anti-fiber antibodies required colonization by particular microbes, since germ-free mice and mice harboring representatives of several bacterial phyla failed to respond. The OMM12 model community was sufficient to rescue antibody induction, and dietary fiber glycans were detected on the surfaces of OMM12 microbes, suggesting a route by which bacteria trigger anti-fiber immune responses. Our results reveal a direct impact of dietary fiber on the adaptive immune system with implications for host... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/14s7k4m5 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vega, Giovanni https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3202-5408 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10q338m8 Electrochemical water splitting is widely recognized as a promising strategy for sustainable hydrogen production, where the development of efficient, stable, and cost-effective electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is of critical importance. Among various transition metal catalysts, ruthenium (Ru)-based materials have attracted significant attention due to their remarkable catalytic activity, tunable electronic structure, and relatively lower cost compared to platinum-group metals such as Pt and Ir. However, challenges remain in optimizing Ru utilization efficiency, regulating its electronic configuration, and achieving rapid and scalable synthesis of high-performance bifunctional catalysts. This dissertation focuses on the rational design, rapid synthesis, and mechanistic understanding of Ru-based nanostructured electrocatalysts for efficient electrochemical water splitting. Chapter 1 introduces the fundamental principles... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10q338m8 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pan, Dingjie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sr8r68j Real-time monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks calls for statistical models that recover interpretable quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number from noisy count data, track posterior uncertainty, and run on time scales compatible with daily updates. Existing methods address these aims through separate model classes. Discrete-time Hawkes-type models, Poisson autoregressions, and distributed lag models each capture self-exciting transmission through alternative parameterizations of the same conditional mean structure, but they have been developed across separate software packages with model-specific inference routines, which makes structural model comparison cumbersome in practice. This dissertation develops a unified Bayesian framework for count time series in disease surveillance, organized around three threads. First, a class of dynamic generalized transfer function models places the three modeling families inside a common modular state-space class built... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sr8r68j Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tang, Meini https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pf595rq This dissertation consists of three essays in macroeconomics. The first essay examines labor-market efficiency by incorporating part-time employment. 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 extends the sufficient-statistics formula for efficient unemployment developed by Michaillat and Saez (2021a) to account for part-time employment. I introduce two additional sufficient statistics that measure the share of part-time employment and part-time hours relative to full-time hours. Applying the framework to the United States (1951–2026) and Japan (1970–2025), I compare the effects of total part-time employment and involuntary part-time employment on efficient unemployment. Total part-time employment has substantially larger effects than involuntary part-time employment. While involuntary part-time employment provides information about labor-market slack, the main change... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pf595rq Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Rongjin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0m30p5c2 Cationic antimicrobial peptides (CAMPs) are key components of innate immunity that provide defense against bacterial pathogens. Vibrio cholerae, the causative agent of cholera, colonizes the small intestine, where it encounters CAMPs produced by the host epithelium. Although several CAMP-responsive pathways have been characterized, the full complement of genetic determinants that enable V. cholerae to sense, adapt to, and survive CAMP stress remains incompletely understood. Bacterial responses to environmental stress often involve two-component signaling (TCS) systems, including the CarRS system, which is critical for CAMP resistance and is one of the few regulators known to negatively regulate biofilm formation in V. cholerae. However, the mechanisms underlying CarRS-mediated antimicrobial resistance and biofilm regulation remain poorly understood. To comprehensively define the genetic and regulatory mechanisms underlying the V. cholerae CAMP response, we combined whole-genome... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0m30p5c2 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gonzalez Carreon, Lizett J https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7587-3517 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dc011rw The purpose of this dissertation is to consider an alternative methodological framework for studying popular music and musicians particularly within historically marginalized groups. I explore the parasocial relationships between online fan audiences and musicians with Lizzo the artist as a case study. I chose Lizzo as a case study because of her platform online, where she communicates with fans to shape her musical culture and the art she produces. Moreover, Lizzo was faced with online “cancel-culture” due to sexual assault allegations that are complicated through her background as a marginalized woman of color. Through the social media platforms Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok, this dissertation examines how online communities are mediated through an appreciation of Lizzo’s music. I also consider the implication of technology and a lack of shared geographical location, to question the imagined community’s authenticity for fans. I investigate negative responses to Lizzo... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dc011rw Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Solian, Savanna https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09r5m852 In this thesis, we investigate the category of equivariant sheaves on a locally finite tree. We view this setting as an interesting junction between the representation theory of p-adic groups, and the geometric methods coming from quiver theory. Inspired by methods from quiver theory, we show that the category of (smooth) equivariant sheaves on a tree X is equivalent to a certain hereditary module category HX-mod. We construct HX explicitly as the endomorphism ring of a projective generator, which emulates the construction of path algebras for quivers, and Hecke algebras for p-adic groups. In this light, we investigate the implications of Auslander-Reiten theory in this context. In particular we provide a thorough investigation of a large class of sheaves known as the pre-injective component, and give recursive formulae for their cohomology. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09r5m852 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Johnson, Samuel https://orcid.org/0009-0003-4445-3239 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/08v330vc As climate conditions become warmer and drier, there is an increased threat to agricultural productivity. Increased temperatures and reduced water availability can impede crop performance and reduce yields. However, the relative effects of drought on different crops and the consequences for yield is less well understood, specifically, the physiological and structural principles that underpin crop performance under water deficit. Understanding the limits of economically important crops, especially as growers transition towards more sustainable forms of agriculture, is critical. In order for these transitions to occur, it is useful to identify the crop varieties and the suite of traits that will allow them to thrive under limited resources. To identify these suite of traits that allow crops to survive under water deficit, I studied a combination of physiological, anatomical, and morphological traits in strawberries, tomatoes, and beans, grown under well-watered and water-deficit... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/08v330vc Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Castro, Viridiana https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6358-6588 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/08r611mb This dissertation argues that DP arguments cannot and should not be subsumed under a c(ategory)-selectional analysis, and are not licensed by the mechanisms that guide head-complement relations. I present three in-depth investigations of Sino-Korean loanwords and the construction of Sino- and native Korean complex predicates, making the following claims about the nature of internal argument realization: 1.) Internal arguments, unlike external arguments, cannot be severed from the lexical predicate, and are not introduced by a functional projection, of either the verbal or nominal domain (Chapter 2). In fact, Sino-Korean loanwords empirically necessitate that a categorical syntactic entities— Roots— are themselves internal argument introducers.2.) DP arguments are not always syntactically projected, though they are always semantically represented (Chapter 3). Syntactic argument projection, rather than being obligatory, is in fact one of two possible routes for the syntactic realization... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/08r611mb Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Webster, Nikolas Eugene https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2861-2773 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