2026-09-08T12:40:58Zhttps://escholarship.org/oaioai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt13d0m17n2026-09-07T06:31:28Zqt13d0m17nLiquid Magneto-Viscoelastic Materials for Soft Conformal BioelectronicsWan, XiaoChen, Jun2026-09-03Stable bioelectronic interfaces require functional materials to accommodate the complex geometry, continuous deformation, and dynamic mechanical environment of biological tissues. Conventional solid bioelectronics improve conformability primarily through material softening and structural engineering, but its adaptability remains fundamentally constrained by predefined device geometries and deformation of solid functional components. Here, this dissertation introduces liquid magneto-viscoelastic materials as an intrinsically reconfigurable material platform for conformal bioelectronics, in which fluidic rearrangement, magnetic interactions, and reversible phase transitions are exploited to integrate mechanical adaptability with sensing, energy transduction, and therapeutic functionality.Liquid magneto-viscoelastic materials were first engineered for ultrasound-to-electrical energy conversion. Their tissue-matched acoustic impedance (~1.66 MRayl) minimizes interfacial reflection, while ultrasound-induced translational and rotational dynamics of field-organized magnetic nanoparticles generate time-varying magnetic flux for electromagnetic induction. This mechanism enables programmable transducer geometries and wireless bioelectrical stimulation across cardiovascular and neural interfaces. Extending material reconfigurability to spatial control, a bioinspired ingestible transducer combines magnetic-fluid energy conversion with programmed soft-magnetic actuation, enabling navigation across complex gastrointestinal surfaces and subsequent wireless electrical stimulation at relocatable anatomical sites. To further reconcile liquid-state adaptability with operational stability, a thermos-reversible carrageenan-based magneto-viscoelastic composite was developed with tunable phase-transition temperatures near physiological conditions. The material can be patterned directly on irregular biological surfaces in its liquid state, solidified in situ to establish stable and highly conformal interfaces, and reversibly liquefied for material recovery. Conductive and magnetic functionalization further enables electrophysiological recording and biomechanical sensing.Together, these studies establish a material-centered strategy in which bioelectronic interfaces are not merely mechanically softened, but can reconfigure their geometry, spatial location, functional state, and material lifecycle, providing a foundation for adaptive, relocatable, and sustainable bioelectronics.BioengineeringBiomedical engineeringMechanicsHealth care managementConformal BioelectronicsLiquid BioelectronicsMagnetic MaterialsPersonalized HealthcareSoft BioelectronicspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/13d0m17netdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5sz9g12q2026-09-06T05:02:23Zqt5sz9g12qUnderstanding Anti-tuberculous Drug Resistance Detection, Prevalence of Resistance-Conferring Mutations, and Population Dynamics of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis complex in a High HIV and Tuberculosis Settingwang, qiaoBrewer, Timothy F2024-01-01Tuberculosis (TB) remains a global health challenge, particularly in regions with high human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevalence. HIV weakens the immune system, alters the natural history of TB disease, and is an important risk factor for both drug-sensitive and drug-resistant forms of TB. However, understanding of the transmission dynamics of various TB lineages in high HIV settings is limited. Additionally, the influence of HIV on the diagnosis of drug-resistant TB and the mutations that confer resistance to anti-tuberculous drugs remain unclear. Using whole genome sequencing (WGS) data from Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (Mtbc) isolates collected from a population-based TB study in Botswana, we sought to 1) evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of WGS-based method in detecting resistance to first-line anti-tuberculous drugs in HIV-positive and HIV-negative individuals; 2) determine whether Mtbc variants with high-fitness cost mutations occurred more frequently among individuals with HIV-infection; and 3) use Bayesian phylodynamic analysis to comprehensively delineate the spread of Mtbc lineages underlying the TB endemic in Botswana. Between 2012 and 2016, 4,331 participants with presumed TB in the greater Gaborone and Ghanzi districts were enrolled into the research study, of whom 2,162 participants had bacteriologically-confirmed TB. Mtbc were successfully cultured and sequenced from 1,426 participants. WGS was performed with the Illumina NextSeq 500 platform and data were analyzed with MTBseq pipeline. Overall, 1,350 participants had available WGS and culture-based phenotypic drug susceptibility testing (pDST; reference standard) results. Of those, 702 (52.0%) were HIV-positive participants, of whom 228 (32.5%) had advanced immunosuppression (≤200 CD4+ cells/mm3). Culture-based pDST (reference standard) indicated 104 (7.7%), 72 (5.3%), 58 (4.3%), and 27 (2.0%) Mtbc isolates had resistance to isoniazid, rifampin, ethambutol, and pyrazinamide, respectively; 49 (3.6%) had resistance to at least isoniazid and rifampin (multidrug-resistant TB). While the overall distribution of anti-tuberculous resistance-conferring mutations among isolates appeared to be similar between HIV-positive and HIV-negative participants, WGS-based detection may have lower sensitivity for identifying isoniazid resistance among participants who had ≤200 CD4+ cells/mm3 as compared to participants without HIV (37.5% vs. 71.7%; p-value=0.019). Furthermore, of the Mtbc isolates analyzed, we found the predominant lineage in Botswana was L4 (87.8%), followed by L1 (6.0%), L2 (5.3%), and L3 (0.8%). We identified multiple circulating L4 sublineages, with L4.3.4 being the most prevalent (29.5%). Temporally resolved phylogenies inferred the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) to have emerged around year 1727 (95% highest posterior density [HPD], 1607–1828) and 1900 (95% HPD 1854–1938) for L1 and L2, respectively. Time to MRCA varied among L4 sublineages; ranging from 1695 for L4.1.2 (95% HPD 1546–1817) to 1941 for L4.3.2 (95% HPD 1911–1966). Phylodynamic analysis revealed L4.3.4 expanded steadily from late 1800s to early 2000s. Conversely, L1, L4.4, and L4.3.2 showed population trajectories closely aligned with the HIV epidemic in the region. Meanwhile, L2 saw rapid expansion throughout most of the 20th century but declined sharply in early 1990s. Additionally, pairwise genome comparison of Mtbc highlighted differences in clustering proportions due to recent transmission at the sublineage level. These findings emphasize the diverse transmission dynamics of Mtbc lineages and highlight the potential for phylodynamic analysis of routine sequences to refine our understanding of lineage-specific behaviors, thereby enabling tailored public health interventions for more effective tuberculosis control in high burden settings. Epidemiologyenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5sz9g12qhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5sz9g12q/qt5sz9g12q.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7064b6bc2026-09-05T05:02:56Zqt7064b6bcA Narrative Analysis of the Cooling-out Process of Black and Latino/a/e Students Leaving Community CollegeChavac, LizaRios-Aguilar, Cecilia2024-01-01As community colleges have often been referred to as the equalizers in the U.S. higher education system, it is important to examine how these institutions reproduce inequities for Black and Latino/a/e students as they navigate their educational journeys. Through a narrative qualitative research design, this dissertation study collected 20 interviews with Black and Latino/a/e current and former students from three community college sites in addition to an analysis of online modalities to explore the structural and procedural challenges that cool-out these students from community college. This study implemented the use of institutional precarity (Hart, 2019) and procedural cooling-out (Anderson, 2015) to examine how the structural and procedural challenges in community colleges directly impact the educational goals of Black and Latino/a/e students. In addition, this study focused on the micro-decisions (Anderson, 2015) of students to explore how students made daily academic decisions as they encountered these challenges. Findings revealed Black and Latino/a/e students experience several structural and procedural challenges that influence their cooling-out. Additionally, Black and Latino/a/e students face unique challenges based on their race and ethnicity which are upheld by placement policies like AB705, the allocation of resources, and disciplinary and advising practices. For this reason, this dissertation study demonstrates that community college attrition rates can be attributed to the structural and procedural challenges along with racialized challenges embedded within the college. Research findings from this study suggest community college scholars should expand this work and focus on practices, policies, and reforms with a racialized lens as they often exacerbate inequities in the community college system. Additionally, this study calls for equitable legislation and practices that promote retention and academic support for Black and Latino/a/e community college students. Community college educationenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7064b6bchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7064b6bc/qt7064b6bc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4pg260w42026-09-05T05:02:33Zqt4pg260w4Evolutionary Response of Large Mammalian Predators to the Functional Biodiversity of Their Presumed Large Herbivore PreyDoughty, Evan MichaelVan Valkenburgh, Blaire2024-01-01The evolution of life on this planet is influenced by many factors, key among them being the means in which predators and their prey interact. Direct morphological evidence for how large mammalian predators evolutionarily respond to their presumed herbivore prey is lacking , but predator richness positively correlates with that of extinct and extant herbivores. In my dissertation, I apply statistical methods to investigate how predators respond to the biodiversity of their presumed herbivore prey over the Cenozoic (66-1Ma).Chapter 1 evaluates the strength of the correlation between North American predators and their presumed prey over the Cenozoic (66-1Ma). I quantify species richness of both the large mammalian predator and herbivore guilds relative to body mass and then apply statistical methods to determine to determine whether the species richness of predators tracks that of their presumed herbivore prey. I observed notable correlations between large (>21kg) wolf-size predators and herbivores of roughly equal size (25kg) and larger.
Chapter 2 evaluates whether the predator guild exhibits an evolutionary response to changes in the distribution of herbivore body sizes over the Cenozoic. I quantify species richness of both guilds relative to body mass and then apply statistical methods to determine when either guild underwent statistically significant changes in their distribution of body mass. I then compare these significant shifts to determine if changes in predator guild structure coincide with, or follow, that of the herbivore guild. I observed multiple significant shifts within predator guild that followed shifts in the herbivores and were suggestive of an evolutionary response.
Chapter 3 evaluates whether the relative abundance of herbivores, specifically those antelope-size and larger, could be a plausible explanation for species richness trends within the predator guild over the Neogene (23-1Ma). I quantify the occupancy, a proxy of relative abundance, of herbivore genera in relation to body mass and compare that occupancy with predator richness. I observed relatively high (>0.25) and stable occupancy for larger (>25 kg) herbivores despite declining herbivore richness over Neogene , which could explain the unusually high ratio of predator to prey species in the Plio-Pleistocene.
Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that body mass, predator diet, and taxonomic diversity influences the evolution of both predator and herbivore guilds and underpins how the former responds to the latter over geologic time.
PaleontologyPaleoecologyBiodiversityBody sizeCenozoicCommunity StructureEcometricsPredator-prey dynamicsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pg260w4https://escholarship.org/content/qt4pg260w4/qt4pg260w4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4m9179nm2026-09-05T05:02:27Zqt4m9179nmTissue Characterization in Reperfused Myocardial Infarction with Cardiac Magnetic Resonance ImagingZhang, XinhengDharmakumar, RohanLi, Debiao2024-01-01Cardiovascular disease (CAD) is still the most prevalent disease although there are extensive improvements in mortality and healthcare. More patients who received initial treatment for heart failure suffer greatly from reperfusion injury, resulting in myocardial infarction (MI). Hemorrhagic MI is proven to be the severest form of MI, and there is the calling for comprehensively characterize MI for patient’s long-term survival and quality of life. Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging has been developed as first-line imaging modality for tissue characterization: fibrosis, edema, microvascular obstruction (MVO), intramyocardial hemorrhage (IMH) and its residual iron, and fat deposition. Those substrates are independent predictors of major adverse cardiac events (MACE) and manifests as different severity of MIs. Thus, being able to characterize MVO, IMH, MVO and its fat deposition is of great significance. Current practice of MI characterization continues to demand strong needs and technical challenges. Three needs were identified: a fast-imaging protocol to identifying MI, non-contrast technique to characterize multiple substrates underlying MI, and overlooked influence of spatial resolution on IMH detection.First, the lengthy CMR protocol in multiple tissue characterization may have impeded its implementation. A fast, comprehensive acquisition to characterize MI, MVO, IMH, cardiac function is on demand. In Chapter 2, we developed a free-breathing, non-ECG gating 3D T1, T2* imaging approach based on low-rank tensor (LRT) framework to shorten the imaging protocol of the same conventional acquisition by factor of 3-4. This framework also overcomes critical image artifacts from undesirable cardiac and respiratory motion and provides additional information in MVO characterization. Second, native T1 mapping has been extensively studied to provide diagnostic values in identifying acute and chronic MIs by characterizing edema or fibrotic tissue with elevated their T1 values. However, we realized that the co-existence of fibrosis, IMH and/or its induced fat deposition are causing inhomogeneity of T1 values within MI. Instead of treating them as confounding factors, in Chapter 3, we demonstrated native T1 heterogeneity within MIs as a new look for MI characterization and theorized it as a potential application for MI patient risk stratification. Specifically, we probed the heterogeneity of MIs in T1 mapping using entropy analysis, known as T1 entropy. We have shown that T1 entropy is capable of distinguishing MI from remote myocardium in both acute and chronic MI. We found T1 entropy is strongly associated with fat fraction and R2* (iron content) in the high fat fraction and high R2* group. The results were also validated in patient studies. In conclusion, T1 entropy is a promising predictor for heterogeneity of MI, and it is a reliable biomarker for analysis of severity of chronic MI.Third, the current imaging protocol in T2* mapping for IMH and iron remnants detection is derived from iron overload from thalassemia. However, for iron deposits from chronic MI with wall thinning (< 6 mm), the long-overlooked influence of spatial resolution may play a significant role in its detection. The primary goal of Chapter 4 in this dissertation is to address the limitations by investigating the influence of spatial infarction on T2* mapping in the competing effect of partial volume and SNR with simulation phantoms, ex-vivo heart scans and in-vivo scans in detecting iron residuals from thinned myocardial wall. We found that the spatial resolution can be optimized given SNR greater than 10. However, the current in-vivo CMR protocol may be limited in detecting thinned narrowed iron band (< 1 mm) due to insufficient SNR level.
In general, this dissertation contributed MI tissue characterization with CMR by addressing the spatial, temporal, and contrast challenges. It paves the way for MRI to characterize MI for prognosis and therapeutic care of patients with the capability to characterize severe form of MI such as IMH. These challenges have been addressed in this dissertation.
In future work, our developed fully ungated free-breathing 3D LRT T1, T2* will be investigated for patients for MI characterization. And we will further specialize the technique due to its advantages in MVO characterization for delayed enhancement. The T1 entropy will be validated in post-contrast T1 mapping. We would also employ the free-breathing nature of LRT framework to improve the SNR profile for iron remnants detection in T2* mapping.
Biomedical engineeringMedical imagingPathologyCardiac Magnetic Resonance ImagingCardiac Outcome StratificationMicrovascular InjuryMyocardial InfarctionTissue Characterizationenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4m9179nmhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4m9179nm/qt4m9179nm.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4gc560m32026-09-05T05:02:18Zqt4gc560m3Synaptic Resistor Circuit based on Al Oxide and Ti Silicide for Neuromorphic ComputingGAO, DAWEIChen, Yong2024-01-01The human brain, a remarkably efficient system operating on minimal power, excels at processing complex sensory data and learning from experience. Inspired by this biological marvel, this dissertation reports the development of dedicated neuromorphic computing hardware, specifically focusing on a 20 by 20 synaptic resistor circuit based on aluminum oxide and titanium silicide material. By mimicking the brain's synaptic connections, these devices offer low-power, non-volatile memory and the ability to learn and adapt in real time, demonstrating the potential of the synaptic resistor circuit through a successful application in drone navigation. These findings pave the way for energy-efficient and adaptable neuromorphic computing systems with broad implications for artificial intelligence.EngineeringMaterials ScienceNeuromorphic Computingenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gc560m3https://escholarship.org/content/qt4gc560m3/qt4gc560m3.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3085d6j82026-09-04T06:38:46Zqt3085d6j8Learning to work with others: principles of cooperation from the brain to AIGu, LinfanHong, Weizhe2026-09-01The world is woven by our interactions with other people, animals, and nowadays, artificial intelligence. Cooperation is a fundamental aspect of human behavior throughout evolution, yet its underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. This dissertation employs a cross-modal approach to investigate the neural mechanisms of cooperation in both the biological brain and multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI). Chapter 1 contextualizes this research by summarizing the behavioral origins of cooperation across animal species alongside the emergence of cooperative AI.In Chapters 2 and 3, pairs of mice were trained to perform a cooperative nose-poke coordination task while recording neural activity from the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We found that ACC neurons encode successful cooperative actions, the movement trajectories of both self and partner, and strategic interaction dynamics such as waiting and coordinated engagement. These neural representations were especially pronounced in mice that exhibited stronger cooperative performance. Recent advances in multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI) provide an opportunity to further investigate the principles of cooperation in controlled artificial environments. In Chapter 4, I trained recurrent neural network (RNN)-based artificial agents to perform the same nose-poke coordination task. The agents developed waiting strategies similar to those observed in mice. Selective silencing of neurons associated with waiting versus initiating movement produced distinct behavioral phenotypes, suggesting that functionally specialized neural populations contribute to cooperative behavior. These results also demonstrate the potential of multi-agent AI systems as experimental testbeds for studying brain function. In Chapter 5, I applied neural principles of cooperation to design multi-agent AI systems that are more robust in novel social environments. In the brain, neural manifolds emerge that separately process self-related and partner-related information, while partner location is represented in egocentric coordinates. Inspired by these findings, we developed a two-head attention network that processes visual information egocentrically. We found that the agents spontaneously specialized their attention, with one head focusing on partner-related information and the other on environmental variables. Compared with one-head attention models and convolutional neural network (CNN) baselines, the two-head attention agents generalized significantly better to novel social scenarios and environments. Together, these findings demonstrate that neuroscience-inspired principles can inform the design of more adaptive and socially robust AI architectures.NeurosciencesArtificial intelligenceBioengineeringpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3085d6j8etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt17m1f6fb2026-09-04T06:38:41Zqt17m1f6fbCognitive, clinical, and environmental moderators of auditory processing impairment and its improvement in first-episode schizophreniaNesi, Emily Louise MartinezYee-Bradbury, Cindy M2026-08-21Cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia can be substantially improved with cognitive training (CT) interventions, such that durable cognitive gains emerge along with strengthening of relevant neural circuits. However, treatment response is often variable, and optimizing CT efficacy likely requires a deeper understanding of the pathophysiological processes associated with cognitive impairment in schizophrenia. Early auditory processing impairments, involving stimulus registration and sensory gating, are well established in schizophrenia. Further, these auditory impairments have demonstrated relationships with cognitive symptoms and may be indirectly strengthened through CT, though a range of internal and external factors may also influence these effects. Across three studies, the present dissertation examined auditory processing impairments and their potential predictors and consequences in adults experiencing a first episode of schizophrenia. Participants with schizophrenia and healthy comparison participants completed EEG recordings during a paired-stimulus procedure, along with clinical and neurocognitive assessments. Patients were evaluated before and after participation in a CT intervention. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) derived from EEG data were used to characterize auditory processing in both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Findings from Study 1 supported a combined model of sensory gating impairment in schizophrenia, reflecting both poorer registration of initial stimuli and less suppression of repeated stimuli. However, no systematic changes in auditory ERPs were observed following CT. Studies 2 and 3 examined potential sources of group- and individual-level variability in auditory and cognitive trajectories by testing the moderating effects of internal (auditory hallucinations) and external (noise pollution) factors. Study 2 demonstrated that sensory gating impairments were more pronounced in patients experiencing recent and persistent auditory hallucinations. Study 3 found evidence of larger between-group differences in sensory gating among participants exposed to high levels of environmental noise. Neither of the two factors accounted for significant variance in auditory or cognitive change trajectories, however. Although findings across the three studies were somewhat mixed, they collectively provide preliminary support for an integrated model of auditory dysfunction in schizophrenia and offer direction for future research aimed at identifying moderators of intervention response trajectories.Clinical psychologyEnvironmental healthPsychologyCognitive psychologyAuditory sensory gatingCognitive trainingElectroencephalographyHallucinationsNoise pollutionSchizophreniaapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/17m1f6fbhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt17m1f6fb/qt17m1f6fb.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6p88n9vs2026-09-04T06:38:35Zqt6p88n9vsDeep Learning for Ultrasound Imaging: From Task-Specific Architectures to Foundation ModelsRadhachandran, AshwathSpeier, William FArnold, Corey W2026-08-31This dissertation investigates the application of deep learning to clinical ultrasound imaging, progressing from task-specific models for thyroid nodule diagnostics to large-scale self-supervised foundation models for ultrasound. The first part begins with a systematic review of AI methods in the thyroid nodule diagnostic pipeline, identifying problematic gaps in benchmarking rigor and external validation that serve as a driver for following work. Building on those findings, we develop a joint detection and segmentation framework that addresses nodule localization in a multitask model, and ThyGraph, a graph-based architecture for multi-view feature aggregation across an ultrasound image study to improve study-level malignancy classification. These task-specific approaches demonstrate strong performance, but external validation reveals a generalization gap and supervised, single-task training demonstrates representational limits. These observations motivate the second part of the dissertation, which proposes self-supervised pretraining as a path toward more informative ultrasound representations. We develop US-JEPA, a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture adapted for ultrasound. In parallel, we curate the Open Ultrasound (OPUS) dataset, the largest public ultrasound corpus assembled to date, for model pretraining. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance on various classification tasks, and outperforms competing models in low-label regimes and under test set image corruption. Finally, we introduce UltraBench 2.0, a standardized benchmark and evaluation protocol for ultrasound foundation models. Dataset coverage spans multiple anatomies and clinical tasks, addressing the absence of a common framework that has made meaningful evaluation across models difficult. Collectively, these contributions outline a grounded transition from task-specific deep learning to foundation model development and rigorous benchmarking, establishing both practical tools and conceptual standards for future ultrasound-based AI methods.Medical imagingArtificial intelligenceBioengineeringapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6p88n9vshttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6p88n9vs/qt6p88n9vs.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt99c7q0882026-09-04T06:38:30Zqt99c7q088Quantitative Scanning (Transmission) Electron Microscopy: Pushing the Boundaries of Nanoscale Chemical, Thermal, and Electrical CharacterizationChen, YueyunRegan, Brian C.2026-08-28As devices are scaled to ever smaller dimensions, their performance becomes increasingly governed by nanoscale heterogeneity in the materials they made of. Rather than the bulk average, local variations in composition, structure, and electrostatic environment start to dominate the materials’ properties. Understanding the behavior, locating the failure point, and predicting the scaling limits of next-generation microelectronic components therefore require quantitative, spatially resolved characterization techniques capable of measuring chemical bonding, temperature, and electrical properties at the relevant length scales. This work advances three such techniques, each leveraging the unique capabilities of scanning (transmission) electron microscopy—STEM and SEM—to push measurement precision and characterization capability beyond what is conventionally considered possible.First, we demonstrate that energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS), despite its ∼140 eV energy resolution, can detect sub-eV chemical shifts in transition energies through statistical averaging in the shot-noise-limited regime. Systematic measurements across compounds of tungsten, titanium, and aluminum reveal that EDS chemical shifts can be either positive or negative—in contrast to EELS binding energy shifts—refecting the diferential perturbation of the two orbitals involved in each transition. We introduce a corrected paralyzable detector model accounting for the fnite response time of the event discriminator, which enables accurate dead-time characterization and quantitative evaluation of of pile-up artifacts. Built on top of the corrected paralyzable detector model, we develop a post-acquisition pile-up correction algorithm that improves data acquisition throughput by a factor of ten while preserving sub-eV energy precision.Second, we introduce Kikuchi Difraction Thermometry (KDTh), a non-contact nanoscale thermometry technique that operates on a standard SEM platform. By expanding the parameter space of cross-correlation-based pattern matching to include lattice constant variations, KDTh achieves 2.2 K/√Hz temperature sensitivity and sub-20 nm spatial resolution— comparable to TEM-based techniques and surpassing all existing SEM-based thermometries. Dynamic temperature tracking under both stepped and continuous power ramps on Joule-heated graphite devices demonstrates linear thermal response consistent with Fourier heat conduction theory.Third, we develop a methodology for predicting ferroelectric memory scalability through in situ STEM electron-beam-induced current (EBIC) imaging. An interleaved PUNDp/NDPUn pulse protocol enables pixel-wise hysteresis loop construction and extraction of local coercive and remanent felds across a functioning TiN/HZO/W capacitor. Statistical modeling of the distribution of device averaged polarization allows for predicting the manufacturing yield as a function of operating voltage and capacitor area. The analysis demonstrates that FeRAM cells with sub-1 V operation and sub-50 nm footprints can achieve >99.9% yield with the characterized 5-nm HZO flm.Together, these studies trace an arc from fundamental physical measurements to practical device metrology, forming a general toolkit for quantitative characterization of functional materials with electron microscopy.Condensed matter physicsApplied physicsPhysicsNanotechnologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/99c7q088https://escholarship.org/content/qt99c7q088/qt99c7q088.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt51p5h8fw2026-09-04T06:38:23Zqt51p5h8fwMulti-Functional Enzymatic Engineering for Biosensing and Microenvironment Control in VivoLi, ZongqiEmaminejad, Sam SEMoment, Aaron AM2026-08-28Enzymes have been employed as molecular recognition elements in electrochemical sensors, enabling the selective detection and continuous monitoring of small molecules across wearable, implantable, and ingestible platforms. Beyond molecular recognition, however, enzymes possess diverse catalytic and regulatory capabilities that remain underexplored in bioelectronic systems. This thesis investigates how enzymes can perform multiple functional roles to facilitate the operation of electrochemical devices in vivo. Two principal domains are addressed: expanding enzymatic biosensing capabilities and engineering microenvironments to support reliable device performance under physiologically challenging conditions.Chapter 1 addresses key limitations in dehydrogenase-based electrochemical sensors, including the need for cofactor immobilization, limited interfacial reaction kinetics, inefficient electron transfer, and the high oxidation potential typically required for reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH). Acid-treated single-walled carbon nanotubes were engineered to provide a conductive and electrocatalytically active interface for low-potential NADH oxidation. Building upon this material platform, we developed a tandem metabolic reaction-based sensing architecture in which enzymes perform complementary functions, including metabolite recognition, intermediation, and interference inactivation. By integrating these functions into coordinated enzymatic cascades, this strategy offers a generalizable framework for extending continuous electrochemical sensing beyond the limited range of metabolites accessible through conventional oxidase-based designs.Chapter 2 demonstrates that enzymes can also actively regulate the microenvironment surrounding electrochemical devices. Dynamic and highly acidic physiological environments can suppress enzymatic activity, destabilize molecular components, alter electrode responses, and compromise analytical performance. To address these challenges, we developed an enzymatic buffer-generation system inspired by microbial acid-survival mechanisms. Through the localized conversion of endogenous or externally supplied substrates, the system generates buffering species within the device microenvironment and establishes a self-regulated, near-neutral pH without requiring a large reservoir of conventional buffer. Two complementary configurations were investigated: interfacial buffering, which directly stabilizes the sensing interface, and peripheral buffering, which regulates the surrounding environment before acidic species reach the device.Collectively, this work expands the role of enzymes from passive recognition elements to multifunctional components capable of target conversion, signal transduction, reaction mediation, interference management, and microenvironmental regulation. This thesis establishes a broader framework for developing robust electrochemical devices for continuous in vivo molecular monitoring.Biomedical engineeringAnalytical chemistryCellular biologyNanotechnologyBiochemistryElectrochemistryEnzymatic biosensingIn vivo biosensingpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/51p5h8fwetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8zn0b59k2026-09-04T06:38:18Zqt8zn0b59kProgrammable RNA CondensatesLi, ShiyiFranco, Elisa2026-08-31Artificial biomolecular condensates have emerged as powerful tools for controlling cellular behavior. Here we introduce methods to build artificial condensates via annealing, co-transcription, and within living mammalian cells by designing modular RNA motifs composed of a single short RNA strand. These condensates emerge spontaneously, creating RNA-rich compartments that remain separated from their surrounding environment. The RNA sequences include stem–loop domains that fold as the RNA is transcribed and then condense in the nucleus and cytoplasm through loop–loop interactions. These sequences can be optimized and diversified, enabling the generation of distinct, non-mixing condensate populations and the programmable control of their subcellular localization. The RNA motifs can also be modified to recruit small molecules, proteins and RNA molecules in a sequence-specific manner to the RNA-rich phase. By introducing RNA linkers, we can build condensates with multiple sub-compartments, whose organization can be controlled by tuning the linker stoichiometry. These artificial condensates provide a versatile platform for studying and manipulating molecular functions inside living cells.BioengineeringGeneticsCellular biologyMolecular biologyBiochemistryapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zn0b59khttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8zn0b59k/qt8zn0b59k.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt84k2g5152026-09-04T06:38:13Zqt84k2g515Loom: Full-Stack Compilation and Automated Exploration of Heterogeneous Multi-Core Spatial Accelerator SystemsLiu, SihaoNowatzki, Anthony John2026-08-31Domain-specific accelerators deliver orders-of-magnitude gains in performance and energy efficiency, but each remains a bespoke, multi-year hardware and software effort, confining custom acceleration to a few organizations and stable domains. This dissertation shows that complete programmable accelerator systems — computational fabrics, memory systems, on-chip networks, and their compilers — can instead be produced by automated, evidence-driven, full-stack design space exploration.Four systems form a connected lineage, each widening the automatically explored scope. DSAGEN synthesizes single programmable spatial accelerator cores: hardware is a mutable graph of decoupled-spatial primitives, compiled by modular transformations that adapt to the graph’s features, and explored with a schedule-repairing spatial scheduler; its compiler reaches 89% of manually tuned performance across five reproduced spatial architectures, and its explorer’s designs average a 1.3× performance2/mm2 advantage over prior programmable accelerators. OverGen scales the explored object to a complete multi-core system-on-chip deployed as a runtime-programmable FPGA overlay, co-exploring tile fabrics with shared cache, network, and data-reuse provisioning; validated on FPGA hardware, it outperforms an untuned state-of-the-art high-level-synthesis design-space explorer by 1.2× geomean while compiling four orders of magnitude faster and reconfiguring in microseconds. OverNoC characterizes the hardened networks-on-chip of multi-chiplet FPGAs and composes hierarchical hybrid network overlays that support implemented networks up to 1.7× larger than the flat hard NoC and, with gains unlocked by near-data placement, deliver 2.5–3.3× speedups on three of four applications; scratchpad-limited matrix multiplication gains only 1.7× and slightly regresses against an equally optimized flat network. Loom consolidates the lineage into a full-stack compiler and exploration framework for heterogeneous multi-core spatial accelerator systems, built on a single semantic source of truth for hardware, immutable content-addressed artifacts, and a central evaluation substrate tying every layer into one reproducible feedback loop; validation spans drop-in compilation of an 892-operator-execution corpus dominated by unmodified vendor libraries and gem5-backed full-system execution of real applications, with the equal-area heterogeneous-versus-homogeneous comparison identified as the open frontier.Together, these systems demonstrate that the unit of automated design can grow from a datapath to a heterogeneous system without design effort growing with it: when design becomes compilation, iteration becomes cheap, and the evidence — not the designer’s habit — chooses the architecture.Computer scienceEngineeringEnergyElectrical engineeringCGRACompilerDomain-specific AcceleratorEDAFPGAReconfigurable acceleratorapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/84k2g515https://escholarship.org/content/qt84k2g515/qt84k2g515.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6jv692z92026-09-04T06:38:08Zqt6jv692z9Computational Studies of Molecular Motion and Chemical Reactivity Across Crystalline and Solution-Phase EnvironmentsShan, Jing-RanGarcia-Garibay, Miguel AHouk, Kendall N2026-08-31Molecular motion and chemical reactivity are two fundamental manifestations of molecular behavior, both of which are strongly influenced by their environments. In crystalline solids, carefully designed architectures can combine long-range structural order with substantial molecular freedom, giving rise to unusual dynamics and reactivity. In solution, interactions among substrates, catalysts, and solvents shape reaction pathways and selectivity. Computational chemistry provides a molecular-level framework for investigating these phenomena across distinct chemical environments. This dissertation presents a series of computational studies of molecular motion and chemical reactivity in crystalline and solution-phase systems.The first part of this dissertation, Chapters 1–4, examines the distinctive molecular dynamics and chemical reactivity that emerge in crystalline environments. Chapter 1 combines quantum mechanical calculations, molecular dynamics simulations, and NMR measurements to demonstrate gas-phase-like inertial rotation of cubane units in CUB-5, characterized by a nearly negligible rotational barrier and ultrafast gigahertz-scale dynamics. Chapter 2 extends this investigation to a series of cage-like rotors in isoreticular MOF-5 homologues, establishing a quantitative description of their rotational behavior, including inertia-dominated unidirectional motion, long-time Brownian diffusion, and differences in rotor–lattice coupling through a Langevin framework. Chapter 3 explores ground-state destabilization and dipole–dipole interactions in pillared paddle-wheel MOFs, showing how steric and electronic effects can tune rotational barriers and collective dipolar ordering. Chapter 4 turns from molecular motion to chemical reactivity in crystals, where calculations and experiments support a photochemically triggered thermal chain mechanism that amplifies the solid-state conversion of 2-azidobiphenyl derivatives relative to solution.The second part of the dissertation, Chapters 5–7, presents computational studies of catalytic organic reactions in solution. Chapter 5 investigates the N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC)-catalyzed radical acylfluoroalkylation of bicyclobutanes, where computational studies elucidate the formation of an NHC-derived ketyl radical and the origin of stereoselective radical–radical coupling. Chapter 6 describes a nickel-catalyzed, base-free Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling of organoboron reagents with aryl (pseudo)halides, where computational studies identify a cationic nickel(II) intermediate and reveal an electrophilic substitution pathway for the transmetalation step. Chapter 7 explores cobaloxime-catalyzed hydrogen atom transfer in the regiodivergent carbamoylation of branched alkenes, where computational studies reveal the steric origin of ligand-controlled regioselectivity.ChemistryComputational chemistryChemical engineeringOrganic chemistryComputational ChemistryMetal-Organic FrameworkOrganic Chemistryapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jv692z9https://escholarship.org/content/qt6jv692z9/qt6jv692z9.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9b79s5wv2026-09-04T06:38:03Zqt9b79s5wvComputational approaches to semantic change: the case of Christian LatinLunardi, ValentinaGoldstein, David MVine, Brent H2026-09-02The theory of semantic change remains comparatively underdeveloped within historical linguistics, partly because change is often driven by extra-linguistic forces that resist prediction, and partly because close reading, the traditional method for tracing it, cannot realistically cover the vocabulary of a whole language. This dissertation investigates what and under which conditions static and contextual word embeddings can contribute to the study of semantic change in historical, low-resource languages. Latin, and the effect of the spread of Christianity on its vocabulary, serves as the case study through which this question is pursued.
The dissertation builds and validates the resources this requires: a corrected and extended version of the LatinISE corpus, and a continuous, text-level measure of Christian lexical signal, developed collaboratively and validated against independently assessed texts. It also tests whether continued pretraining the contextual model on the working corpus yields a clear benefit (it does not). These resources support five case studies – dominus, pāgānus, commūnicō, commūniō, and uirtūs – selected computationally from a philologically motivated candidate pool to sample a deliberately uneven range of conditions.
The static and contextual embedding models recover the semantic developments already documented by philological scholarship to varying degrees. Their accuracy is not uniform: modeling change at the level of the whole lemma, for instance, can dilute a development that is concentrated in one part of its paradigm, and other conditions can distort the picture in different ways. Despite these limits, the models remain valuable. Even an imperfect result offers a glimpse of where change may be occurring, worth investigating further through close reading, and the models organize every occurrence of a lemma by distributional similarity into interactive projections, where occurrences using a lemma in a similar way tend to cluster together – letting a researcher compare with ease passages where the word under investigation has similar distributional environments, rather than encountering them scattered across a large corpus. The dissertation offers this combination as a template other researchers can adapt to other historical, low-resource corpora.LinguisticsPhilosophy of religionReligious educationChristian LatinHistorical linguisticsSemantic changeWord embeddingsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9b79s5wvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9b79s5wv/qt9b79s5wv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt96t7z9582026-09-04T06:37:58Zqt96t7z958From Community to Classroom: A Case Study of Principled Ethnic Studies in California’s Central CoastConcordia, ArtnelsonSolórzano, Daniel G2026-09-02In 2021, with the passage of Assembly Bill 101 (AB 101), California became the first state in the nation to make Ethnic Studies (ES) a high school graduation requirement. In conjunction with AB 101, the California State Board of Education (SBE) initiated the development of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC, 2022) to help “students see themselves as active agents in the interethnic bridge-building process we call American life” (p. 8). The graduating class of 2030 (incoming ninth-graders, fall 2026) is slated to be the first generation of students accountable to the ES mandate. The opportunity and potential to harness the energies and aspirations of millions of young people in service to the re/construction and expansion of our multiracial democracy is immense.Given the relatively little research on how to develop, implement, and institutionalize ES teaching and learning at the K-12 district level, and even less so at the state level, this study contributes to this area. Investigation of a medium-sized, suburban school district (13,000), reflecting comparable racial and class demographics (60% Latina/o/x; 30% White) to that of the state, merit examination. By reflecting upon their work to institutionalize ES, interviews with a range of classroom practitioners and administrators responsible for ES implementation can be a valuable resource to districts who are early in their development or have yet to begin. Additionally, analyzing student course satisfaction ratings and corresponding narrative feedback provide insight and perspective on the impact of their ES experience. Lastly, cross-referencing practitioner experience and student feedback with the grassroots community organization that fought for the initiative provide meaningful insight into institutionalization in relation to the liberatory purpose of the ES educational project.Educational leadershipEducational administrationEducationEthnic studiesEthnic Studies InstitutionalizationEthnic Studies Teacher DevelopmentK12 Ethnic StudiesPrincipled Ethnic Studies Institutionalizationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/96t7z958https://escholarship.org/content/qt96t7z958/qt96t7z958.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3zm9d7m32026-09-04T06:37:53Zqt3zm9d7m3Centroamericana Healing Genealogies: Centering the Healing Experiences of U.S. Centroamericana Student Survivors in Higher EducationAguilar Marquez, Karla LilibethHarris, Jessica C.2026-09-01The doctoral dissertation study explored the healing experiences of U.S Centroamericana student survivors impacted by sexual and relationship violence in higher education. Emerging literature has focused on reimagining healing through identity and race-conscious lenses that position individual, wholistic, and communal healing at the center of possible institutional interventions and implications for higher education (Harris et al., 2021; Karunaratne, 2026). Exploration of the healing of U.S. Centroamericana student survivors was guided through a theoretical framework that heavily centered Centroamericana Feminist epistemological perspectives and Grounded Theory. The research questions included (1) How does a U.S. Centroamericana identity shape experiences with campus sexual and relationship violence? And (2) How do U.S. Centroamericana college students engage healing from their experiences of campus sexual and relationship violence?
Centroamericana Feminist Theory is rooted, experienced, and grounded in the lives of various Central American Women writers, creatives, scholars, and theorists connected to a lineage of Black and Indigenous Women and Women of Color feminisms in a praxis of ancestral and embodied knowledge, resistance, anti-oppressive, and decolonial futures, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions (Abrego, 2020; Alma, 2024; Alma & Hernández, 2026; Alvarado et al., 2017; Boj Lopez, 2017; Cáceres Flores, 2007; Hernández-Linares, 2015; Hoppe, 2024; Mena, 2023; Menchú, 2010; Padilla, 2012, 2018; Portillo, 2015; Ramsey, 2024; Rodríguez, 2008). In line with Centroamericana epistemologies and theoretical framework, I used plática, walking plática, collective healing plática, testimonio, field site visits, photo/artifact elicitation, a research journal, and analytical memo to explore embodied experiences of healing.
U.S. Centroamericana students are often not centered in higher education research due to the homogenization of the Latine identity and contextual dominance of Mexican-American identity in current research (Maldonado Dominguez, 2019). Emerging research that centers U.S. Centroamericana students must not fracture and remove histories of migration and genealogies that impact the identity formation and wholistic healing of U.S. Centroamericana students on college campuses. The healing of sexual and relationship violence for U.S Centroamericana student survivors is connected to ancestral medicines, systems of spirituality, and ancestral lands that bring tools of resistance and persistence in community with other Women of Color students in higher education. The findings from this dissertation study, Centroamericana Healing Genealogies, can inform the development of healing centered practices (e.g., strategies for advocates, preventionist, campus administrators, educators), inform policy response and prevention efforts on university campuses that restore community relationships, and reimagine how we research sexual violence in higher education that supports the persistence of Indigenous and Black Students and Students of Color.EducationEthnic studiesWomens studiesHigher educationCriminologyCampus Sexual ViolenceCentral American StudiesHealingSexual AssaultSexual Violenceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zm9d7m3https://escholarship.org/content/qt3zm9d7m3/qt3zm9d7m3.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6nm735sr2026-09-04T06:37:48Zqt6nm735srWearable-activated Multimodal Biotransducer Implant for Deep-Tissue Molecular MonitoringHojaiji, HannanehEmaminejad, SamMadni, Asad2026-08-31Continuous monitoring of deep-tissue biochemical processes is constrained by a persistent tradeoff in implantable biotelemetry: achieving multiplexed, electrochemically faithful sensing has generally required active, integrated-circuit-based architectures whose power demands limit subjects to tethered, benchtop-instrumented, or heavily energized settings, precluding genuinely ambulatory, longitudinal measurement. Here we present a wearable-paired, battery-free implant that resolves this tradeoff through a zero-integrated-circuit architecture centered on a single junction field-effect transistor (JFET). Exploiting the intrinsic device physics of the depletion-mode JFET gate junction, this transistor simultaneously performs biochemical-to-electrical signal transduction, self-generated electrochemical biasing, and passive noise suppression and RF-carrier isolation, eliminating the implant-side circuitry conventionally required for each function separately. The implant-reader link is engineered to operate in the overcoupled resonant regime, with the fixed interrogation carrier placed at the impedance trough between the resulting split resonant modes, converting a phenomenon typically treated as a liability in wireless power transfer into a passive sensitivity-amplification mechanism for fixed-carrier amplitude readout. A secondary, low-power calibration channel independently tracks coupling-induced variation from implant-reader distance and alignment, allowing this drift to be separated from genuine biochemical signal during continuous, freely moving measurement. The platform supports amperometric, pseudo-voltammetric, and potentiometric sensing modalities within the same transduction and readout framework, with wearable readouts closely matching benchtop electrochemical reference measurements across analytes. In vivo, a flexible, PDMS-encapsulated implant preserved locomotor activity comparable to non-implanted controls over a four-week period, in contrast to a significant, progressive activity reduction observed with a rigid implant of matched encapsulation, while wireless readout remained stable across the same period. Finally, the platform resolved dynamic, internal potassium fluctuations during an induced tissue-injury model, demonstrating its capacity to capture local biochemical dynamics that intermittent, systemically buffered blood sampling would not readily reveal. Together, these results establish a battery-free, multimodal telemetry architecture for continuous internal biochemical monitoring in freely moving subjects.Biomedical engineeringElectrical engineeringpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6nm735sretdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt65x8k72w2026-09-04T06:37:43Zqt65x8k72wApplication of the Material Point Method to the Stability and Runout Analysis of Vegetated SlopesAldakhil, SultanTaciroglu, Ertugrul2026-09-02Slope failures cause severe human and economic losses worldwide, yet conventional stability methods describe them only up to the onset of failure. Limit equilibrium methods treat the failing mass as rigid and perfectly plastic, and the finite element method is restricted to small deformations, so neither follows the slide once it forms. The Material Point Method (MPM) avoids this limitation by discretizing soil into Lagrangian material points that move through a fixed background mesh, so no mesh distortion develops under large deformation. This dissertation applies MPM to the analysis of slope failures in two parts, the assessment of slope stability and the influence of vegetation on rainfall-induced failures. The one-phase and coupled two-phase formulations are first derived and verified against classical benchmark problems in poromechanics.
Next, MPM is applied to evaluate the stability of slopes using the strength reduction technique. For dry and unsaturated slopes, slip surfaces agree with finite element solutions and factors of safety differ by less than about 10%, reflecting the different criteria by which each method identifies failure. Unlike mesh-based methods, MPM continues past the onset of failure and captures the post-failure runout.
The effect of root reinforcement is then investigated. A multiple-hardening constitutive model for root-reinforced soil is implemented within the coupled formulation and validated against triaxial tests. Comparative analyses of bare and vegetated slopes under rainfall show that roots delay the initiation of failure, roughly halve the displacement, and change a retrogressive slide into the movement of a single block, although they do not prevent failure under continued rainfall.
Finally, the method is validated against a documented centrifuge slope test. The simulation reproduces the observed retrogressive block failure and the measured pore pressures at failure, and a rooted counterpart delays failure and reduces movement, consistent with reinforced tests. These results establish MPM as a practical tool for assessing both the stability of vegetated slopes and the consequences of their failure.Civil engineeringGeotechnologyLandslideMPMRoot ReinforcementSlope Stabilityapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/65x8k72whttps://escholarship.org/content/qt65x8k72w/qt65x8k72w.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1cq824722026-09-04T06:37:37Zqt1cq82472Advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Thermometry Techniques for Guiding Thermal TherapiesDai, QingWu, Holden H2026-09-01Image-guided thermal therapies, including radiofrequency ablation (RFA), microwave ablation (MWA), and high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), offer a curative option for patients with early-stage liver cancer who are not candidates for surgical resection or transplantation. These therapies deposit thermal energy through an interstitial applicator or an external transducer under image guidance to induce coagulative necrosis within the tumor. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is uniquely suited to guide these procedures, providing superior soft-tissue contrast for treatment planning and targeting, continuous device guidance without ionizing radiation, non-invasive temperature mapping by proton resonance frequency (PRF) shift thermometry, and immediate post-procedural assessment of the ablation zone. An MRI-based workflow of planning, monitoring, and evaluation has been established and has demonstrated early feasibility. However, wider adoption is limited by critical challenges at each stage of this workflow. For planning, computational models have been explored to simulate and predict the ablation zone, but they lack sufficient experimental validation. For monitoring, PRF thermometry of abdominal organs during energy delivery is compromised by respiratory motion and electromagnetic interference (EMI) from energy-delivery systems, both of which corrupt image quality and temperature measurements. For evaluation and targeting in therapies demanding high precision, such as MRI-guided HIFU, image contrast and sensitivity remain suboptimal for small features such as small tumors and tumor margins, and a contrast-enhancement technique operating in the clinically relevant therapeutic temperature range is lacking. As a result, the success of MRI-guided thermal therapy remains largely empirical and operator-dependent, restricting reproducibility and confining these procedures to a small number of specialized centers.
This dissertation addresses these technical challenges by developing and evaluating computational modeling, MR thermometry, and contrast-enhancement techniques for guiding thermal therapies. First, a joint computational–experimental framework was developed to characterize MWA energy-delivery strategies, validating the computational model against experimental measurements and supporting protocol optimization. Second, a volumetric PRF MR thermometry framework was developed that combines stack-of-radial MRI, image-based motion tracking, and image-navigated multi-baseline correction, extending temperature monitoring to near-full-liver coverage at high spatiotemporal resolution during breathing. Third, a software-driven active EMI suppression technique was developed that removes microwave-generator interference in the k-space domain, restoring image quality and reliable in vivo thermometry without hardware modification or interrupted heating. Fourth, a contrast-enhancement technique was developed using thermoresponsive polymer-modified nanoparticles that reversibly modulate MRI contrast under HIFU stimulation, improving lesion detection at body temperature. Together, these advances could help move planning, monitoring, and evaluation from empirical practice toward a more quantitative, precise, and repeatable workflow, potentially supporting safer and more predictable MRI-guided thermal therapies and their broader clinical translation.BioengineeringOncologyHealth sciencesLiver cancerMicrowave ablationMR thermometryMRI-guided interventionsNanotheranosticsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1cq82472https://escholarship.org/content/qt1cq82472/qt1cq82472.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt16t0w1nv2026-09-03T06:38:05Zqt16t0w1nvRepresentation Learning from Human Neural Activity: From Clinical Events to Memories Across Wake and SleepDing, YuanyiRoychowdhury, Vwani2026-08-28Learning representations from human neural activity is constrained by limited supervision, participant-specific sampling, heterogeneous recordings, and distribution shifts across institutions, tasks, and brain states. This dissertation develops representation-learning strategies under these constraints as targets progress from clinical events to episodic content during recall and sleep. Meaningfulness is operational: a representation must relate to its target, remain informative under variation, and be evaluated with evidence distinct from training. The first setting begins with high-frequency oscillation candidates proposed by legacy detectors but lacks exhaustive and consistently defined pathological labels. A self-supervised variational model learns event morphology, clustering discovers weak labels, and a classifier refines the decision boundary using real and generated latent examples. This approach improves patient-level evaluation across multi-institutional datasets while preserving candidate generation and expert review as separate parts of the workflow. Omni-iEEG provides a harmonized benchmark spanning 302 patients, 178 hours, and more than 36,000 expert-validated annotations, enabling representation choices to be compared under common targets, splits, metadata, and clinical evidence. The second setting asks whether supervision available during one naturalistic experience can support inference during later internally generated cognition. Participant-specific multi-region attention models trained only on densely annotated movie viewing produce concept activations that preferentially precede matching verbal reports without recall labels for training. Models trained using only medial temporal lobe (MTL) spikes significantly decode concepts before but not after sleep, while models trained using only frontal cortex (FC) spikes decode concepts after but not before sleep. These combined issues create a single-exposure transfer-and-evaluation problem, where representations learned from sparse neuronal recordings during initial experience poorly generalize for evaluation in states with substantially different distributions. The final study addresses this problem using a dual-head objective that combines multi-label classification with contrastive concept alignment, followed by Recall-Adapted Sleep Alignment, which couples unlabeled sleep-domain adaptation with recall-based semantic regularization. Across 62 held-out concept-selective neurons, the adapted representation shows stronger concept-specific temporal coupling than un adapted and comparison models. Together, these studies show that progress in neural representation learning depends not only on model architecture, but also on how candidate spaces, supervision, distribution shifts, and independent evaluation evidence are jointly designed.EngineeringArtificial intelligenceNeurosciencesepisodic memoryhuman neural activityintracranial electroencephalography neural decodingneural decodingrepresentation learningsleepapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/16t0w1nvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt16t0w1nv/qt16t0w1nv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8ft1m6wx2026-09-02T07:10:50Zqt8ft1m6wxImpact of Finite Swept Wings on Leading-Edge Vortex Structure and Stability under Impulsive ConditionsJones, HenryJones, Anya2026-08-21Wings encountering rapid changes in flow conditions, such as gusts, or those operating on small unmanned and rotary-wing aircraft, routinely experience unsteady separated flow in
which the loads bear little resemblance to steady predictions. Much of the lift produced
under these conditions comes from the leading-edge vortex, whose growth and eventual
departure govern the transient force history. Leading-edge sweep is known to introduce
spanwise flow along the vortex axis, but its influence on the transient loads and leading-edge
vortex structure of a translating wing remains unsettled.
This work presents force measurements and dye flow visualization for a finite wing surging from rest, with sweep as the only geometric variable. A rectangular, untapered NACA 0012
planform of aspect ratio 4 was accelerated over one chord of travel and towed at constant
velocity at a fixed angle of attack of 20 degrees, for leading-edge sweep angles of 0, 30
and 45 degrees. Lift, drag and pitching moment were measured at a Reynolds number of
100,000, and the flow was visualized at 5,000 in both chordwise and spanwise views. The
measurements are interpreted alongside a low-order model in which the lift is decomposed
into added mass, vortex growth and vortex motion contributions.
Lift peaks at approximately one chord of travel regardless of sweep, while its magnitude falls by nearly half between the unswept and most highly swept planforms. The peak is shown
to exceed what added mass and attached-flow circulation together can supply, and is there
fore attributed to circulation held in the leading-edge vortex. Normalizing by the velocity
component perpendicular to the leading edge collapses the three peaks, consistent with the
rate of convective vorticity flux normal to the freestream. The visualization indicates that
sweep neither delays separation nor alters when three-dimensional structures first appear,
but instead redirects the separated flow outboard towards the wing-tips rather than inboard,
allowing the vortex to remain coherent near the surface for longer. This is reflected in the
force histories, where the unswept wing retains roughly half of its peak lift after the vortex
departs while the 45 degrees swept wing retains close to ninety percent.Aerospace engineeringFluid mechanicsMechanical engineeringimpulsive conditionsleading-edge vortexlow Reynolds numberseparated flowswept wingsunsteady aerodynamicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ft1m6wxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8ft1m6wx/qt8ft1m6wx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt72k385w52026-08-31T06:31:11Zqt72k385w5Asteroid Discovery and Characterization at Long WavelengthsWhittaker, EmersonMargot, Jean-Luc2026-08-25The discovery and characterization of asteroids is necessary for understanding their demographics and their evolution within the Solar System. Diameter is an important asteroid property for assessing impact probabilities and uncovering clues about solar system origins. I assess how the accuracy of diameter estimates of asteroids based on infrared thermal modeling of imaging from the four-band Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is dependent on the number of infrared bands used, as the NEO Surveyor mission will have only two infrared bands corresponding roughly to WISE bands W2 and W3. With a reparameterization of the near-Earth asteroid thermal model (NEATM), we found diameters modeled using observations from W2 and W3 bands to be systematically 10% smaller than their more accurate counterparts obtained with all four WISE bands. Obtaining high-quality orbits for faint main belt asteroids is foundational for many studies, particularly for projects related to solar system origins and asteroid families. I utilize the WISE mission dataset to detect and report new asteroid candidates using synthetic tracking, an algorithm which shifts and stacks pixels along a predicted on-sky motion template for an asteroid. We report astrometry to the Minor Planet Center for 8,223 discovery candidates and 13,575 known objects. We anticipate hundreds of discovery candidates will be linkable to asteroids discovered by the Vera Rubin Telescope, giving them excellent orbits arising from a > 15-year orbital arc. Assessing the lifetime of a typical near-Earth asteroid binary system as its orbit evolves is useful for understanding impact hazards. I use planetary radar delay-Doppler imaging taken of the 1999 KW4 near-Earth asteroid binary system with the Arecibo observatory and the Goldstone radar system between 2001 and 2019 to confirm the presence of libration for the secondary and measure the system’s orbital expansion rate. I find a best fitting outward orbital expansion rate for the semimajor axis of da/dt < 0.58 cm/yr, suggesting that the BYORP effect could play a role in evolving this system in combination with tidal evolution.PlanetologyAstronomyAstrophysicsPhysicsasteroidsinfraredradarsynthetic trackingthermal modelingWISEapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/72k385w5https://escholarship.org/content/qt72k385w5/qt72k385w5.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9zv6k0q92026-08-31T06:31:06Zqt9zv6k0q9Natural Alliances: Greening, Growth, and the Private Production of the Public RealmNelischer, Claire SophiaLoukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia2026-08-25As green space becomes more central to both urban growth and sustainability agendas, new parks are emerging from disused infrastructure, funded, designed, and managed by philanthropic donors. These collaborative park governance strategies promise to deliver ecologically responsive and culturally vital green spaces, but raise critical questions about the spatial justice implications of private power in the production of public space.This dissertation explores the drivers, modes, and implications of philanthropic participation in the material and discursive production of urban parks and green spaces. Centering on three embedded cases of donor-led parks in Toronto, Canada – The Bentway, The Meadoway, and The Art Trail – I investigate, first, how philanthropy reshapes the production, design, and governance of urban green spaces, and second, how these politics, processes, and outcomes implicate park justice. I use interviews, policy and media discourse analysis, and urban design analysis to investigate the three parks as material sites through which design and programming strategies are deployed and as processes through which power is wielded and resisted.Drawing from theories of the production of space, urban political ecology, and urban justice, I probe the interrelations between urban environmental imaginaries and actual urban landscapes. I find that local environmental governance discourses and global policy mobilities naturalize the value of philanthropy-led park production, and in doing so, shift expectations amongst policymakers and the public regarding how parks ought to be made. With donor participation framed as a broadly shared social and environmental good, counter-narratives are constrained; donor power neutralizes dissent and diminishes alternative visions of urban environmental development. As philanthropy infuses the park-making process with new power relations, I argue this may divert public resources away from equity-informed park needs and exacerbate distributive and recognitional injustices across park systems. I offer policy and planning recommendations to address these risks.The findings contribute to theoretical understandings of how private power operates through multi-scalar processes of urban environmental change. Critical attention to how discursive representations of greening, growth, and giving produce material changes in urban environments can reveal spatially uneven effects and uncover more just alternatives.Urban planningGeographyEnvironmental managementSustainabilityenvironmental governancephilanthropypublic spaceurban designurban green spaceurban justiceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zv6k0q9https://escholarship.org/content/qt9zv6k0q9/qt9zv6k0q9.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8s33f6tr2026-08-31T06:31:01Zqt8s33f6trLow-Carbon Belitic Calcium Sulfoaluminate Concrete Using Industrial Waste Products as Supplementary Cementitious MaterialsCarver Miller, Renee ElizabethMarian, Jaime2026-08-27Belitic calcium sulfoaluminate cement (BCSA) can mitigate the environmental impact of cement manufacture. It has less embodied CO2 than Portland cement, significant strength within four hours of mixing, and better durability versus calcium sulfoaluminate cement (CSA), functioning as a standalone binder. This study examined class C fly ash, unclassified lignite fly ash, flue gas desulfurization (FGD) waste ash, and paper recycling waste as alternative supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) in BCSA to reduce embodied CO2 while maintaining mechanical performance by utilizing the unique chemistry of BCSA. Set time, flow, shrinkage, and compressive strength characterized SCMs in mortars, while pastes’ hydration and microstructure were evaluated via Rietveld refinement, thermogravimetry, isothermal calorimetry, and electron microscopy. The compressive strength of concrete containing FGD waste ash, the best-performing SCM, was measured. Carbon intensity quantifies embodied CO2 per unit strength: FGD waste ash consistently reduced carbon intensity versus control specimens.SustainabilityMineralogyMaterials sciencebelitic calcium sulfoaluminate cementcoal ashflue gas desulfurizationglobal warming potentialpaper recycling wastesustainable materialsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8s33f6trhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8s33f6tr/qt8s33f6tr.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3s4465rj2026-08-31T06:30:57Zqt3s4465rjAristotelian Practical and Theoretical Dispositions: The Path to VirtueShirvanian, VahehNormore, Calvin2026-08-27This dissertation investigates two forms of bad dispositions (hexeis), namely incontinence and vice, and two forms of the highest dispositions, namely magnanimity and contemplative excellence.The first chapter argues the ‘unqualifiedly’ incontinent agent is one whose acquired rational dispositions for psychic pleasures match those of the virtuous, but who nevertheless acts badly due to the presence of non-rational innate dispositions for inappropriate bodily pleasures. Such an agent is supposed to threaten the Socratic thesis that a possessor of ethical knowledge ii ought not to be able to behave badly. To defend his thesis, Socrates denied the existence of incontinence altogether. But Aristotle thinks this flies in the face of common sense. So, his proposal is that an incontinent agent lacks the ability to resist inappropriate non-rational bodily pleasures whereas the virtuous agent is disposed to resist such pleasures and so cannot act incontinently.The second chapter proposes some vices are less bad than opposing vices because they resemble the manifestation of the virtue, i.e. the part of virtuous activity that is essential to virtue, more so than the opposing vice. Moreover, manifestations of virtue give rise to rational ethical pleasures whereas the non-manifestations of virtue give rise to no such pleasure. Further, the pleasures of the lesser vice are of the same species as the pleasures of the manifestation of virtue.The third chapter argues honor has a special conceptual connection to excellence which is reflected in the special kind of self-knowledge the magnanimous agent must have to be able to appropriately accept honors. And since Aristotle has two mutually exclusive honor-relating virtues, there must be two levels of virtue in the Aristotelian framework, one for the statesman and the other for the philosopher.The fourth chapter elucidates type-identical theories of human and divine contemplation. After making room for type-identical views, it canvasses three such views based on sameness of act, of actuality, and of form. It concludes that, though not without its difficulties, the view based on sameness of actuality is the most plausible.PhilosophyEpistemologyEthicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3s4465rjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3s4465rj/qt3s4465rj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4kv888xg2026-08-27T06:30:46Zqt4kv888xgResource Allocation and Institutional Effectiveness: Exploring Financial Decision-Making in Public Research UniversitiesBreen, Karla LeticiaChristie, Christina2026-08-25This qualitative case study investigates the effects of governance configuration and organizational design on financial decision-making at a leading public research university on the west coast of the United States. Rather than conceptualizing financial management as a neutral administrative function, the study frames financial authority as constructed through sequence, thresholds, and exposure. Interviewing academic and financial leaders and analyzing institutional documents, the research investigates how reporting hierarchies, revenue structures, and escalation pathways shape the timing, allocation, and compression of decision authority under fiscal constraints. Results reveal that financial expertise enters strategy at structurally determined points, that autonomy expands and contracts within institutional risk thresholds, and that decentralization creates uneven fiscal capacities across units.Governance configuration emerges as the moderating structure of institutional resilience: when the sequence of authority shifts under fiscal pressure, it does not happen randomly, but follows a pattern. By identifying structural sequencing as the primary mechanism of financial authority, this case study contributes to the literature on governance and argues that resilience in public higher education is determined less by sources and volumes of revenue and more by the design of authority through which decisions are made, escalated, and absorbed.Educational administrationEducation policyHigher education administrationFinanceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4kv888xghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4kv888xg/qt4kv888xg.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt87v9014w2026-08-26T07:04:00Zqt87v9014wProbing Quark Dynamics in Hadronization of Quark–Gluon Plasma Droplets with Anisotropic Flow and Omega–hadron CorrelationsWu, XiatongHuang, Huan Z2026-08-21At lower RHIC energies, hadronization in the quark–gluon-plasma (QGP) fireball is significantly influenced by transported quarks carried in from the colliding nuclei. Within the quark coalescence picture, these transported quarks, which experience the full evolution of the system’s pressure gradients, imprint distinct flavor and dynamical signatures on final-state hadrons. This thesis presents three complementary measurements from the STAR Beam Energy Scan Phase II (BES-II) program in Au+Au collisions.The influence of transported quarks is directly reflected in the elliptic flow (v2) of charged pions. In Au+Au collisions at √ sNN = 7.7–27 GeV, π − carries systematically larger v2 than π + across centralities and energies, consistent with the higher availability of transported d quarks relative to u quarks in the neutron-rich Au nucleus. Using a coalescence sum rule with the antiproton as a proxy for the produced-quark flow, the transported quark ratio Ntr d /Ntr u is extracted and found to be consistent with the Au stoichiometric value 315/276 ≈ 1.14, providing a direct link between the quark content of the colliding nuclei, via nuclear geometry, and the final collective expansion of the QGP drop.Electromagnetic fields generated by the spectator protons in peripheral collisions offer a complementary window into the quark-level response at hadronization. The directed flow (v1) splitting between Λ 0 and Λ¯ 0 is measured over the same BES-II energy range; the slope difference ∆(dv1/dy) becomes negative in peripheral collisions, mirroring the behavior previously observed for charged hadrons and attributed to the combined Faraday and Coulomb effects. A first-order coalescence test using p–p¯, supplemented by a second-order correction based on K+–K−, supports the coalescence picture and indicates that the electromagnetic response acts at the level of the constituent quarks and is not set by electric charge alone.These flow-based analyses probe the transported-quark coalescence picture through anisotropic momentum signatures. A more direct handle on the transported-baryon population is provided by the Ω − hyperon: at √ sNN = 7.7–27 GeV, the Ω − yield carries a substantial excess over Ω¯ + from baryon transport. We establish the Combinatorial Background Subtraction (CBS) correlation method, which uses associated kaons to decompose the Ω − population into its transported and pair-produced components and to probe whether their hadronization signatures differ. At √ sNN = 19.6 GeV, the transported Ω − shows a modest excess of associated kaons over a pair-produced Ω, 1.10±0.74 per Ω, in the direction expected if its strangeness is balanced by kaons rather than by co-produced anti-baryons.PhysicsQuantum physicsPlasma physicsParticle physicsanisotropic flowbaryon number transporthadronizationOmega hyperonquark coalescencequark-gluon plasmaapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/87v9014whttps://escholarship.org/content/qt87v9014w/qt87v9014w.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt74x4m9342026-08-26T07:03:55Zqt74x4m934What Stories are Being Told? A Thematic Exploration into the Narratives of Black and Latinx College ApplicantsFoster, ShaniPatton Davis, Lori2026-08-21In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions (SFF A) v. Harvard, the college admissions essay has been transformed from a standard application component into a primary legal and sociopolitical battlefield for racial identity. This qualitative study investigates how eight Black and Latinx high school seniors navigate this heightened systemic pressure while completing the University of California’s Personal Insight Questions (PIQs). Grounded in Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework, this research challenges dominant deficit-centered educational narratives by examining how marginalized youth treat their lived experiences not as structural burdens, but as legitimate sites of institutional expertise and asset cultivation.Data collection involved utilizing textual analysis of 16 personal admissions essays alongside semi-structured interviews. The cross-case synthesis revealed that participants actively reject the institutional expectation to perform or trauma dump for admissions gatekeepers. Instead, students practice sophisticated narrative gatekeeping and strategic silence to preserve their personal dignity and maintain ownership over their family histories.The analysis identified four distinct archetypal modes of narrative self-authorship: The Reformers, The Sustainers, The Alchemists, and The Visionaries. Together, these archetypes illustrate a vibrant spectrum of how Black and Latinx youth leverage linguistic, navigational, familial, and resistant capital to claim space within higher education. Ultimately, this study argues that the college essay functions as a critical site of Resistant Capital. Rather than hyper-focusing on the mere mechanics of application access, this research offers concrete structural frameworks including a Class Asset Dashboard and a Bridge Dialogue series to shift institutional accountability. The findings demand that post-secondary institutions transition from evaluating student deficits to actively preparing classrooms to receive the sophisticated, pre-existing brilliance of incoming minority students.Educational leadershipHigher educationCommunity college educationLatin American studiesBlack studiesSocial researchCommunity Cultural Wealth (CCW)Narrative gatekeepingPersonal Insight Questions (PIQs)Post-SFFA AdmissionsQualitative counter-storytellingResistant Capitalapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/74x4m934https://escholarship.org/content/qt74x4m934/qt74x4m934.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2tr4g2672026-08-25T06:47:24Zqt2tr4g267Agency, Ability, and the Scope of ObligationZeytinoglu, Nasir EkinHieronymi, Pamela2026-08-21Facts about us—what we are motivated by and what we are able to do—can change our responsibilities and obligations. But how and why? This dissertation takes up these questions.In Chapter I, I consider the suggestion that, because we cannot simply choose what to see as reason-giving, the reasons for which an agent acts cannot be relevant to the permissibility of the agent’s conduct. I argue this is false. I reach this conclusion by first considering the agency we have over acting-for-certain-reasons. I argue that, even if we cannot simply choose what to see as reasons, we can often simply choose whether to act-for-certain-reasons. That is to say, we can often choose to act-for-certain-reasons just as readily as we can choose to act in a way that can be identified independently of the reasons for which it is done. It follows from this acknowledgement that facts about the reasons for which an agent acts can be relevant to the permissibility of her conduct in just the same way other facts about that conduct can be relevant.In Chapter II, I take up the claim that a contractualist in particular should not think that the permissibility of an agent’s conduct can turn on the reasons for which she acts. This is mistaken. The contractualist has a straightforward explanation of why the reasons for which we act can change whether we act permissibly: because we have interests not only in what happens to us, but also, at least at times, in why they happen, we can be constrained not only in how we act but also in the reasons for which we act.In Chapter III, I turn to the relationship between what we can do and what we are obligated to do. According to a familiar proposal, considerations of fairness settle this issue clearly: it would be unfair to require agents to act in ways they cannot. I first show that this proposal has a costly implication: that whether agents facing vicious or demeaning conduct can demand to be treated better depends on the abilities of those who mistreat them. I then offer an alternative way of thinking about how considerations of fairness bear on our obligations—one that avoids this implication while still explaining what seems right about the familiar proposal.EthicsPhilosophypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2tr4g267etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6rp5g03c2026-08-24T06:31:08Zqt6rp5g03cTowards Transformative Professional Learning for In-Service Educators: Developing Teacher-Led and Asset-Oriented Professional Learning CommunitiesBryant, Lily RachelHoward, TyroneRohanna, Kristen2026-08-21Extensive research has documented how culturally responsive or sustaining pedagogies benefit minoritized youth. Yet, critical scholars assert that prevalent professional development models for in-service teachers overemphasize generic best practices or data-driven school improvement and subsequently proliferate problematic deficit paradigms, rather than asset-oriented pedagogies. While understudied, existing research on equity-driven and asset-oriented professional learning suggests critical reflection, collaborative inquiry, and relational trust are key components. Building on such literature, this qualitative case study explored how a public secondary school’s Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) piloted teacher-led and asset-oriented Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). As the study’s lead researcher and the school site’s instructional coach, I utilized Reciprocal Learning Partnerships (RLP) as an equity-focused framework for designing the study’s activities, developing its research questions, and analyzing the resultant data. Through observations, interviews, and document analysis, this study detailed the process for piloting a bottom-up model of context-specific and asset-oriented professional learning. It further uncovered that critical reflection, collaborative inquiry, and relational trust developed as a result of facilitators cultivating a sense of authentic, purposeful work and modeling dispositions of vulnerability and care. To more deeply understand the intricacies of relational trust, this case study also explored the extent to which its multiracial participants expressed vulnerable reflections on lived experiences and surfaced their personal identities and positionalities in professional learning spaces. The resultant findings suggest that the emergence of identities and positionalities often remained internal and that relational trust may not have been cultivated evenly amongst educators encompassing a broad array of racial, ethnic, gender and other identities. Taken together, the insights of this case study stress the importance of adult-facing equity work in diverse public schools—teachers must first experience their own learning spaces as asset-oriented and culturally sustaining to reproduce the same humanizing conditions in classrooms with their students.Educational leadershipEducationPedagogyEducational sociologyInstructional designCultural ResponsivenessEquityIn-Service TeachersInstructional Leadership TeamProfessional LearningProfessional Learning Communitiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rp5g03chttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6rp5g03c/qt6rp5g03c.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6m92j3s72026-08-21T06:40:17Zqt6m92j3s7Dust Storms and Public Health: Integrating Dust Exposure Modeling, Epidemiological Analysis, and Early Warning Systems in a Changing ClimateAlomair, Saud AbdulazizJerrett, Michael2026-08-18Dust storms and chronic dust loadings are a growing but heterogeneously characterized publichealth concern in California, where a warming climate, more frequent heat and drought, and expanding disturbed land surfaces are increasing dust activity. This dissertation builds, in sequence, the evidence a dust warning system requires, organized around the four components of a people-centered early warning system: risk knowledge, monitoring and forecasting, communication, and response. Aim 1 systematically reviews global dust storm early warning systems. Of 22 included studies, 19 addressed monitoring and forecasting while only three addressed risk knowledge, communication, or response, a gap that has persisted for more than two decades and that frames the dissertation. Aim 2 develops and externally validates a daily, statewide surface of the dust-attributable fraction of PM (DAF-PM ) at population-weighted ZIP-code centroids for 2006 through ₁₀ ₁₀ 2019, combining a machine-learning ensemble with a transparent rule-based comparator. Evaluated against independent composition-based dust, the ensemble preserved strong rank- order agreement (pooled Spearman rho 0.65) and discriminated high-dust days well (AUC up to 0.90), localizing chronic burden to the southern San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys.Aim 3 links this exposure surface to roughly 24 million case-crossover strata of cardiovascular and respiratory encounters, 2006 through 2018. A one-interquartile-range increase in DAF-PM₁₀ raised the odds of a respiratory encounter by about 1% on the same day, peaking one day later and accumulating to roughly 1.4% over a week, and raised cardiovascular odds by about 0.2%. The respiratory response was nonlinear, concentrated in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, amplified specifically by peak daytime heat, and positive across most populated air basins, with the notable exception of the chronically dust-saturated Salton Sea basin, where the case-crossover design returned a null estimate; cardiovascular effects concentrated in hypertensive disease and coastal basins. Aim 4 translates this evidence into a risk communication and community engagement plan, an evidence-based infographic, and a short educational video, and shows how the exposure metric and the dust-by-heat findings can inform alert thresholds and timing. Together, the four aims form an exposure-to-action pathway that makes a climate-sensitive hazard more measurable, more clearly linked to health, and more actionable.Environmental healthPublic healthAtmospheric sciencesair pollutiondust stormsearly warning systemenvironmental healthparticulate matterPM10application/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m92j3s7https://escholarship.org/content/qt6m92j3s7/qt6m92j3s7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2gz1m8c62026-08-21T06:40:09Zqt2gz1m8c6Scalable Bayesian Inference for Phylodynamic Models of Infectious Disease DynamicsShao, YucaiSuchard, Marc A.2026-08-18Phylodynamic inference exploits pathogen genomic data to estimate epidemiological quantities of direct public-health relevance, including time-varying transmission and recovery rates, effective population size trajectories, and migration rates between regions. Bayesian implementations on coalescent and birth–death tree priors are standard in outbreak surveillance, but the underlying inference machinery scales poorly with the size of contemporary genomic datasets and with the parameter dimensionality of modern episodic and structured models. This dissertation develops scalable algorithms, both gradient-based and parallel, that remove these bottlenecks for two model families central to applied phylodynamics.
The first contribution targets the episodic birth–death–sampling model. The likelihood is reformulated to admit a closed-form, linear-time analytic gradient with respect to all epoch-specific birth, death, and sampling parameters, enabling Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling of the full epoch-rate vector. Combined with regularized shrinkage priors over the high-dimensional rate vectors, the resulting sampler increases the minimum effective sample size per unit time 10- to 200-fold over univariate Metropolis–Hastings, while recovering smooth effective-reproductive-number trajectories. The methodology is demonstrated on HIV-1 subtype A sequences from Odesa, Ukraine, a New York State seasonal influenza A/H3N2 hemagglutinin alignment, and the 2014–2016 West African Ebola virus epidemic.
The second contribution addresses the structured coalescent approximation that underlies modern phylogeographic inference. Reformulating its peeling recursion to expose fine-grained parallelism across both lineages and demes accelerates the likelihood by 10–26-fold on multi-core central processing units and up to 60-fold on graphics processing units, placing previously intractable analyses within practical wall-clock budgets. Reverse-mode differentiation of the same recursion then returns the exact gradient for all migration and population-size parameters at the cost of a few likelihood evaluations rather than one per parameter, making Hamiltonian Monte Carlo practical for high-dimensional phylogeographic posteriors. The methods are validated on a dengue virus phylogeographic analysis and applied to a continental-scale reconstruction of highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1).
A concluding chapter sketches extensions: a log-linear parameterization of migration rates for hypothesis-driven analysis of pathogen spread, and both parametric and non-parametric models for time-varying effective population sizes. All methods are released as open-source extensions to the BEAST X phylogenetic inference platform and the BEAGLE library.BiostatisticsPublic healthPathologyEpidemiologypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gz1m8c6etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt73s5z26m2026-08-21T06:40:03Zqt73s5z26mAdapting Multimodal Systems to Inference Time VariationsWu, JasonSrivastava, Mani B2026-08-18Multimodality has elevated the utility of modern machine learning models. Through data-driven deep learning, multimodal neural networks learn generalizable and robust features, providing increased performance and capabilities while promising greater resilience to changing environments. Despite such capabilities, the increased complexity of these networks renders them susceptible to other variations that can manifest at inference time - ranging from dynamics during a system's deployment to its active runtime. These weaknesses of multimodal networks have not been adequately addressed in existing work, resulting in severe inefficiencies or subpar performance when subject to inference-time variations in real-world environments. This dissertation examines the weaknesses of multimodal networks across a variety of inference-time variations and diverse datasets, demonstrating that the efficient adaptation of internal weights constitutes a powerful and highly generalizable solution.
First, we examine the challenge of deployment-time sensor perspective shift in distributed multimodal localization systems. Existing multimodal deep neural networks do not tolerate novel sensor perspectives arising during deployment, suffering from large accuracy degradations. We introduce FlexLoc, which combats sensor perspective shift by conditioning a portion of network weights on the sensors' pose information. FlexLoc improves zero-shot localization under unseen configurations of sensor pose by almost 50% in comparison to baselines. Second, we propose ADMN, which further explores inference-time adaptation by addressing variations that manifest during runtime in real-world multimodal systems, which may necessitate per-sample adaptation. Across a wide range of downstream tasks (e.g., audio-visual classification, gesture detection), we showcase how intelligent allocation of resources across modalities is critical for addressing runtime variations, ensuring optimal usage of limited computational resources. Third, we introduce SWAN, which extends the innovations of ADMN into the complex realm of multi-object detection in autonomous driving. We jointly explore adaptation to three forms of runtime variations -- changes in modality quality, platform resources, and complexity of the input sample itself. Moreover, we demonstrate how such a system can be practically realized on a real-world edge device. Finally, moving away from dedicated, task-specific models, we introduce CRAFT, an efficient method of adapting a general purpose multimodal foundation model at deployment time to an arbitrary downstream task. During this, we highlight the unique challenges associated with this class of neural networks. Ultimately, by leveraging the shared paradigm of context-aware model adaptation, these works collectively demonstrate that adjusting neural network parameters according to the state of the world is a highly effective strategy for mitigating inference-time variations.Artificial intelligenceComputer engineeringComputer scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/73s5z26mhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt73s5z26m/qt73s5z26m.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8d5523742026-08-20T06:30:57Zqt8d552374Data-Driven Dimensionality Reduction for Aerodynamic ApplicationsTran, JonathanTaira, KunihikoEldredge, Jeff D2026-08-17Fluid flows are high-dimensional, nonlinear dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations, making their direct simulation computationally expensive for many practical applications. Nevertheless, many flows evolve on low-dimensional manifolds, motivating reduced-order models that capture the essential dynamics while significantly reducing computational complexity. Recent advances in machine learning provide powerful nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques capable of learning such representations directly from data. This thesis investigates data-driven latent representations for reduced-order modeling in fluid mechanics, with an emphasis on aerodynamic applications. Rather than treating latent spaces solely as compact embeddings optimized for reconstruction, this work explores representations that incorporate physical and mathematical structure to improve interpretability, robustness, and predictive capability. First, an autoencoder-based framework is developed for aerodynamic design optimization of industrial automobile geometries. The learned latent representation efficiently captures geometric variations, enabling accelerated design exploration while achieving an 11% reduction in drag coefficient. The framework predicts aerodynamic performance within 2% of experimentally validated large-eddy simulations, demonstrating sufficient fidelity for practical design optimization.Second, a physically structured latent space based on optimal transport distances is introduced for flow control analysis. Applied to separated flow over a NACA 0012 airfoil with leading-edge thermal actuation, the approach identifies distinct control regimes associated with changes in separation bubble size and the onset of partial and global laminarization, providing an interpretable representation of the underlying flow dynamics.Finally, a probabilistic state estimation framework combining latent diffusion models with particle filtering is developed for reconstructing and predicting transient aerodynamic states from limited observations. Applied to a high-incidence airfoil subjected to gust disturbances, the framework enables uncertainty-aware estimation of complex unsteady flows.Collectively, these studies demonstrate that physically informed latent representations provide efficient and interpretable reduced-order models for aerodynamic design optimization, flow control assessment, and probabilistic state estimation. The results highlight the importance of incorporating physical structure into representation learning, illustrating the potential of hybrid machine learning and physics-based approaches for reliable modeling and analysis of complex fluid systems.Fluid mechanicsMathematicsComputational physicsAerospace engineeringDimensionality reductionFluid mechanicsMachine learningOptimal transportShape optimizationState estimationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d552374https://escholarship.org/content/qt8d552374/qt8d552374.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5092r6zr2026-08-20T05:02:53Zqt5092r6zrPersons, personation, and the personality of the populus: Cicero and the language of representation in scholastic political thought from St. Thomas Aquinas to Francisco de VitoriaMessarra, Sean NikosStacey, Peter2024-01-01This dissertation challenges several orthodoxies prevailing around the historical development of the concept of representation from Roman antiquity into early modern political thought. My aim is not just to revise our understanding of the known intellectual pathways of the concept’s transmission, but to firmly demonstrate that the principal language used to talk about political representation through to the seventeenth century was not repraesentatio or its cognates, but rather a distinctly Ciceronian set of terms, which were closely associated with the idea of “bearing persons” in different spheres of public life. The classical expression of those ideas are found in their most influential form in Cicero’s De officiis, where he argued that the particular duty of a magistrate was “to bear the person of the city [se gerere personam civitatis].” Cicero’s language of representation reappeared most conspicuously in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), but, as I show, Augustine and Aquinas first appropriated this vocabulary for their own theories of political representation. I substantiate my argument about the perpetuity of Ciceronian representation by illustrating how, in their apologetics against the conciliarists, the Dominican theologians Juan de Torquemada and Cardinal Cajetan exploited numerous Augustinian locutions about St. Peter bearing the persona ecclesiae, enshrining a device of classical republican ideology in a monarchical theory of papal absolutism. I then map out a new understanding of the place of representation in second-scholastic sources, principally with reference to the work of the Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria, for whom, representation works within a wider set of theoretical preoccupations about human sociability, the origins of civil association, and the government of empire. Vitoria justifies the use of representation in the international sphere on account of the “possible insanity” of the American Indians, taking them collectively as a single juridical person in need of tutela. I illuminate this pattern of use established by Vitoria and continued by his Jesuit successors Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina through to the Política Indiana (1648) of the Salamantine jurist Juan de Solórzano y Pereira, considering the very practical dimensions of Spanish imperial rule which formed the context of these questions about representation.European historyReligious historyPolitical scienceCiceroFrancisco de Vitoriapolitical representationscholasticismThomas Aquinasenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5092r6zrhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5092r6zr/qt5092r6zr.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4p80r4hk2026-08-20T05:02:49Zqt4p80r4hkBoys Will Be Boys, Except for Those Boys: Latino Youth Interrogating Discourses of Race, Gender, and SexualityLugo, Juan CarlosFranke, Megan LHoward, Tyrone C2024-01-01As notions of gender and sexuality become more expansive, the narrow boundaries of what it means to be a boy or man are also being stretched, resulting in a fabricated “masculinity crisis.” Coupled with dire statistics on Latino high school students and the ways that they are vanishing from the educational pipeline, this dissertation expands theoretical and sociocultural understandings of Latino boys by centering the disruptive potential that queerness has in challenging prescriptive understandings of identity categories and the effects they have on the schooling experiences of boys and men of color. I draw from literature in the fields of masculinity studies, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, and education to contextualize the experiences of these boys.Guided by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and queer of color critique (QOCC), pláticas as a methodology was employed to learn from the lives and schooling experiences of seven queer Latino boys at a high school in southeast Los Angeles. This study builds on the scholarship of men and boys of color in schools by pointing to the ways heteronormative schooling conditions affect their sense of self and their academic engagement. I conclude by suggesting that a critical Latinx/Chicanx pedagogy is necessary to center intersectional perspectives that can interrogate the intersection of patriarchy and other forms of oppression, ultimately working toward self- determination beyond heteropatriarchal imaginations for Latinx youth.EducationGender studiesEthnic studiesboys and men of colorheteronormativityLatinx studentssocial context of schoolsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4p80r4hkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4p80r4hk/qt4p80r4hk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3x00m0xd2026-08-20T05:02:09Zqt3x00m0xdNovel Approaches for the Application of Mitochondrial Respirometry in Human StudiesOsto, Corey AfsheenShirihai, OrianStiles, Linsey2024-01-01Though mitochondrial research has become more prominent in the last forty years, most methodologies to study mitochondria have been focused on cell and animal models. Respirometry, the assessment of mitochondrial function measured as oxygen consumption by Complex IV of the electron transport chain, is the “gold standard” for mitochondrial assessment, yet it is rarely utilized in human samples. This is due to two fundamental methodological challenges: (1) samples for respirometry must be processed and ran within hours of acquisition on specialized and complex equipment, and (2) human sampling for respirometry must be acquired using invasive tissue biopsies. While we as a field realize the importance of oxygen consumption as a measurement of mitochondrial function, the current methodologies are now limiting the types of biological and clinical questions we can ask and answer. Addressing the first challenge preventing widespread adoption of respirometry, the recently developed RIFS (Respirometry In previously-Frozen Specimen) assay allows for the measurement of maximal respiratory capacity from cells or tissues which have been previously frozen. This allows samples to be processed and then stored or biobanked for later respirometry assessment, ultimately making respirometry methodologies significantly easier, cheaper, and more accessible. To the second challenge though, there has been minimal breakthrough.In this thesis we will cover novel methodologies overcoming challenges which are paramount to the expansion of respirometry methodologies for clinical applications. We will discuss the RIFS protocol in detail, describe the methodologies developed to perform a first-of-its-kind high-throughput and high-resolution respirometry study of the human brain, and will detail the development of a technique to measure mitochondrial respiration in cells human salivary leukocytes. Together, these chapters present novel methodologies designed to overcome the primary limitations of performing respirometry in human studies.BiologyElectron Transport ChainMitochondriaOxygen ConsumptionRespirometryRIFSSalivary Leukocytesenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3x00m0xdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3x00m0xd/qt3x00m0xd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1g82v8qm2026-08-19T06:30:36Zqt1g82v8qmCharacterizing streams-of-consciousness as a lens into intrapersonal communicationBainbridge, ConstanceBryant, GregDale, Rick2026-08-14Intrapersonal communication examines how individuals interact with themselves from a communication perspective. We engage in self-talk, imagine interactions, generate internalized media such as visualizations, and so on, yet a unified study of these phenomena is missing. This dissertation aims to revive the study of intrapersonal communication by describing what it is through a literature review of related subjects and presenting frameworks for how it can be studied. Empirical work is then presented demonstrating a multidimensional approach to studying one example of intrapersonal communication – overt linguistic streams-of-consciousness. In a series of three studies, participants provide their typed or spoken streams-of-consciousness, aiming to report their thoughts continuously and spontaneously. The first study prompts participants to think about life before or during the COVID-19 pandemic to see how their thoughts about the future may shift through psychological momentum. From analyzing the language in the future-directed thoughts alone, it is possible to predict the temporal priming of prior thoughts. The second study then explores how typing versus speaking thoughts may impact how thoughts unfold. Typing enhanced lexical diversity as well as proportions of emotional language usage. When Large Language Models generated comparable thoughts, emotion language was reduced relative to humans. Finally, the third study manipulates the environment under which spoken thoughts are generated to see how darkness or the presence of a mirror may shift language and the delivery of our voices. Darkness and a mirror led to exploration of different language spaces, and speaking in the dark attenuated vocal intensity while boosting roughness. Together these studies show that the conditions under which we deliver our thoughts to ourselves can shape what we think about and how.PsychologyLinguisticsCommunicationBehavioral psychologyCognitive psychologyIntrapersonal communicationSelf-talkStreams-of-consciousnessapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1g82v8qmhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1g82v8qm/qt1g82v8qm.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4q54s2bs2026-08-17T06:30:23Zqt4q54s2bsUnder Various Aspects: The Poetic Organization of Descriptive Practice on Pantelleria, a Sicilian IslandLa Mattina, Nicco AmedeoDuranti, Alessandro2026-08-13This dissertation is an ethnographic study of description as an everyday and formally organized practice on Pantelleria, a volcanic island in the Tunisia–Sicily Channel. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2016, 2019, and 2023–24, together with circulating and archival texts and images, it examines how Pantelleria islanders coordinate grammar and poetic form with memory, gesture, material objects, and documentary histories to formulate things under particular aspects. I call the contribution of the formal qualities of description to what becomes noticeable, relevant, and salient its poetic upshot. The analyses begin from changing and unequally distributed conditions of access to what matters in island life. Time-contrastive complaints poetically organize cessative expressions and contrasts between past and present into deictic couplets, formulating present conditions under the aspect of what they no longer or not yet are and making absences and unrealized outcomes complainable. Metalingual clarifications of out-of-use words instead transpose discourse into erstwhile activity frameworks in which words and their denotata were serviceable, recuperating the attentional circumstances through which objects such as the catu and vaçili became familiar and co-relevant. Etymological speech acts place Arabic etyma between semantically opaque toponyms and Italian glosses whose apparent descriptive fit organizes attention to landscape features and settlements as traces of Arab perception and nomination; following their circulation across scholarly, literary, journalistic, tourist, and everyday descriptions, I call archival interdiscursivity as the relations of formulation, citation, omission, reformulation, and uptake that constitute particular objects of description and warrant describing them under particular aspects. In a series of events involving the manner deictic così, ways of looking, ways things are, and ways of moving coordinate talk, bodies, places, routes, and photographs, while printed photographs make dispersed niche compositions portable, arrayable, tactile, and available for encounter and discussion. Descriptive practices are constitutive insofar as, taken together or in the structure of particular descriptions, they organize conditions of subsequent describability. More centrally, they are poetic insofar as their formal organization formulates things in ways that matter: under one aspect rather than another, different relations become noticeable, salient, and relevant, while what this mattering brings off is the ethnographic question I pursue in this dissertation.LanguageCultural anthropologyLinguisticsanthropologydescriptionItalyPantellerasemioticsSicilypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4q54s2bsetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8wv2x5552026-08-17T06:30:18Zqt8wv2x555Chemoproteomic approaches to delineate protein state changesVillanueva, MirandaBackus, Keriann M2026-08-12A single protein can exist as several different variants, or proteoforms, because of alternative splicing, missense mutations, post translational modifications (PTMs), and proteolysis events. Additionally, a protein can inhabit different conformers, for example an altered binding state, conformational or oligomerization state. Together, proteoforms and conformers highlight the complexity of proteins and underscore how understanding which protein states exist under what context and how that changes as a function of a stimulus, is critical for unraveling the role a protein plays in health and disease. Mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics has emerged as a fast way to probe protein state with proteome level-depth. More specifically, chemoproteomics, in which chemical modifications or manipulations are introduced to proteins and are subsequently identified by bottom-up mass spectrometry (BU-MS), has advanced the field to be able to answer more specific questions about activity, structure, and function of proteins. In chapter 2, the existing chemoproteomic platform photoaffinity labeling (PAL) was applied to understand a key regulator of immunity, stimulator of interferon (STING) -sterol interactions and how those interactions regulate STING activation and localization. Using genetic models to manipulate cholesterol content, we demonstrated that decreased cholesterol synthesis increased STING activity (increased IFN signaling). We also confirmed that 3 different diazirine alkyne PAL probes enrich STING and, cholesterol was sufficient to outcompete probe-labeling thus confirming STING directly binds cholesterol. Lastly, we found that when cholesterol content is low, STING is not retained in the ER but rather translocates to the Endoplasmic-Reticulum-Golgi intermediate compartment (ERGIC) and is activated initiating type I interferon (IFN) signaling. Meanwhile, when cholesterol is high, STING is retained in the ER. In this work we additionally developed a novel, enrichable footprinting method: fast photochemical iodination and capture by Suzuki (FPICS) and apply it to understand hydrogen peroxide-induced changes in protein aggregation. In chapter 3, we establish that FPICS selectively iodinates mainly tyrosine, and minimally histidine residues, after excimer laser irradiation in the presence of an iodo reactive species, iodobenzoic acid (IBA). We also established that FPICS is compatible with diverse iodo reactive species from salt to aryl- and alkyl-halides. The iodinated residues can then be biotinylated through Suzuki Miyaura cross-coupling to light or heavy biotin boronic acid (BBA) to enable quantitative experiments. Using FPICS we uncovered peroxiredoxin 3(PRDX3) and protein disulfide isomerase family A member 4 (PDIA4) have hydrogen peroxide-sensitive sites and we are in the process of further translating the functional implications. We were also able to apply FPICS to identify that the small molecule iodomethylbenzoimidazole (IMBI), binds to HMOX2 by changing the reactive species to IMBI and benchmarking that against IBA. In chapter 4, we begin to unpack how protein abundance, bilirubin interactions, and cysteine oxidation state change in response to a genetic model of biliverdin reductase A (BLVRA) knockout to mimic no bilirubin in the mitochondria. In this manner, we use a multi-proteomics approach to delineate protein state and how it changes as a function of biological context and stress.BiologyChemistryMolecular biologyChemoproteomicsProteomicspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wv2x555multimediaoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7cg111kc2026-08-16T05:02:58Zqt7cg111kcHafnium-Zirconium Oxide-Based Synaptic Resistor Circuit for Neuromorphic ComputingLee, JungminChen, Yong2024-01-01Within its tight power budget of 20 W, the human brain effortlessly processes a huge volume ofinformation, including high-definition images with ~60 frames per second, an acoustic signal
ranging from 20 Hz to 15 kHz, pressure sensing information over the skin, and chemical
compositions through the receptor cells in the taste bud. The empirical observations on the brain
revealed its massively parallel synaptic connection among neurons and their local interactions,
which is believed to be one of the origins of its exceptional ability to infer and learn. Inspired by
the brain’s unparalleled efficiency and adaptability, neuromorphic computing has been
introduced to emulate the neurobiological circuits of the brain to develop advanced artificialiii
intelligence systems. To achieve this, it is crucial to develop novel electronic devices,
particularly those capable of implementing synaptic plasticity with minimal power consumption.
This dissertation introduces a synaptic resistor based on HfZrO ferroelectric material, offering
stable multi-level, non-volatile memory. Utilizing its inherent learning rules, a circuit of HfZrObased synaptic resistors demonstrated real-time learning capabilities by navigating a drone
through tree obstacles and erratic wind conditions in a simulated environment. Furthermore, an
associative memory circuit based on synaptic resistors was proposed and employed to classify
the MNIST handwritten dataset, illustrating its general applicability to AI and machine learning
tasks. These advancements highlight the potential of HfZrO-based synaptic resistors in creating
efficient and adaptive neuromorphic computing systems.Mechanical engineeringElectrical engineeringMaterials Scienceenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cg111kchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7cg111kc/qt7cg111kc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7d62d0nd2026-08-14T06:31:07Zqt7d62d0ndMolecular Control of Crystallization Pathways in Perovskite Solar CellsDuan, HaoxiangYang, Yang2026-08-11Metal-halide perovskite solar cells have emerged as promising photovoltaic technologies because of their high absorption coefficients, long carrier diffusion lengths, defect tolerance, and compatibility with low-temperature processing. Despite rapid improvements in power conversion efficiency, their commercialization remains limited by insufficient operational stability. Many degradation pathways originate from the nonequilibrium crystallization of solution-processed perovskite films, which can introduce unfavorable crystal orientations, residual phases, compositional heterogeneity, lattice disorder, and defects that promote nonradiative recombination and ion migration. This dissertation investigates how molecular interactions can be used to control perovskite crystallization across different stages of film formation, from facet-selective crystal growth to post-nucleation lattice reconstruction, thereby improving both photovoltaic performance and operational stability. Chapter One introduces the fundamental properties, crystallization behavior, and stability challenges of metal-halide perovskites. Particular emphasis is placed on the multistep and nonequilibrium nature of solution-based crystallization and on how precursor coordination, intermediate-phase formation, nucleation, crystal growth, and molecular additives determine the final film structure. In Chapter Two, a highly (111)-oriented FAPbI₃ film is developed using 3-aminopentane and propylammonium chloride as co-additives. Their cooperative effects regulate facet-selective growth and phase conversion, producing highly crystalline films with improved carrier transport and suppressed ion migration. The resulting devices exhibit enhanced photovoltaic performance and substantially improved stability under continuous illumination and elevated temperature. These results demonstrate that crystallographic orientation is a key design parameter linking film formation with electronic quality and long-term device reliability. Chapter Three establishes a molecular framework for understanding amine-directed facet growth. Systematic screening of structurally diverse amines reveals that facet preference cannot be predicted solely from their classification as primary, secondary, or tertiary amines. Instead, it is governed by facet-specific adsorption configurations and cooperative interactions. In addition to N–Pb coordination, secondary N–H···I hydrogen bonding can stabilize molecular anchoring on the (100) surface. Strong, persistent adsorption blocks the incorporation of new growth units and redirects crystallization toward the (111) orientation, whereas weaker or less uniform adsorption allows continued (100)-oriented growth. In Chapter Four, crystallization control is extended beyond early-stage nucleation through a thermally activated re-alloying pathway. The 3-APCl additive becomes active only after formation of the initial three-dimensional lattice, inducing a transient secondary intermediate and post-nucleation lattice reconstruction during annealing. This top-down reorganization heals persistent shallow defects, improves structural and optoelectronic homogeneity, suppresses ion migration, and enhances device efficiency and thermal stability. Together, these studies demonstrate that molecular structure, adsorption geometry, and activation timing can be rationally designed to control distinct stages of perovskite crystallization. The resulting framework connects molecular-scale interactions with facet selection, lattice reconstruction, defect evolution, and device stability, providing new strategies for the development of efficient and durable perovskite solar cells.Materials scienceMolecular physicsEnergyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7d62d0ndhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7d62d0nd/qt7d62d0nd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5r93q78v2026-08-14T06:31:02Zqt5r93q78vMulti-Scale Functional Recovery-Based Seismic Design and Evaluation of BridgesWu, ChenhaoBurton, Henry2026-08-11Post-earthquake disruption of bridges poses a critical risk to urban mobility, emergency response, and economic recovery. While significant advances have been made in performance-based seismic design and evaluation of bridges, the development of recovery-based methodologies remains limited in both research and practice. This limitation is driven by gaps in high-resolution bridge exposure data, component-level fragility and consequence models, and scalable computational frameworks capable of simulating post-event recovery at regional scales.
This dissertation addresses these challenges by developing a comprehensive, probabilistic framework for assessing post-earthquake functional recovery at the individual bridge and the network scales. The methodological advancements in this dissertation are organized around these two scales. First, a bridge-specific post-earthquake functional recovery assessment methodology is development. The framework explicitly links component damage to post-earthquake functionality states, impeding factors, repair and replacement actions, and recovery timelines. Empirical data and expert elicitation from California bridge engineers and contractors are used to inform component repair and impeding delay sequencing and durations, allowing recovery trajectories to reflect realistic post-event constraints.
Based on the proposed functional recovery assessment framework, a recovery-based seismic design methodology is introduced that directly targets repairability and functional restoration timelines at the outset of the design process. This design methodology consists of three main steps: defining explicit recovery time objectives, establishing component-specific deformation limits that are linked to repair limit states, and ensuring through nonlinear response history analysis that the component demands and system-level recovery times meet the specified targets. Unlike traditional force- or displacement-based approaches, this methodology provides a direct quantitative relationship between the proposed recovery time objective, functional impairment, and component damage.
At the bridge-specific scale, the dissertation also focuses on quantifying uncertainty due to limited sample size used in fragility model development. Seismic fragility functions for bridges are developed that relate damage probability to ground shaking intensity measure (IM) and can be used in city-scale risk assessments to surrogate explicit nonlinear structural analyses. Fragility functions are typically derived considering multiple sources of uncertainties such as those arising from ground motion, bridge material and geometric properties. The number of ground motions used determines the precision of the parameter estimates and controls the epistemic uncertainty in the damage-IM relationship. Probability model misspecification has the potential to increase parametric estimation uncertainty and hence requires a greater number of ground motions to achieve a target precision. To explicitly consider the potential misspecification in fragility functions, a statistical framework is established to quantify the relationship between the epistemic uncertainty and the number of ground motions. Based on the findings from this assessment, recommendations are provided to guide the determination of the number of ground motions, considering the presence or absence of probability model misspecification.
The second part of this dissertation addresses regional-level recovery assessment, which introduces challenges beyond those encountered at the individual bridge scale. One such challenge is the limited availability of resources after a major earthquake where demand surge can restrict contractor mobilization and worker deployment. Additionally, the significant computational demands and manual effort required in the risk workflow highlight the importance of developing machine learning models to surrogate computationally and/or manually demanding components, as well as the need for high-performance and distributed computing.
Within the regional functional recovery assessment framework, a stochastic, event-based seismic hazard characterization is coupled with refined exposure modeling to simulate spatially correlated ground motions, component damage, and repair durations across the network. The bridge-specific recovery processes are integrated under network-level constraints such as limited repair crews and workforce availability. A suite of performance metrics is proposed to quantify recovery trajectories at the individual components, bridge, sub-network, and the complete network scales.
Regional-scale seismic risk and recovery assessments are inherently uncertain due to variability in the hazard, structural response, damage progression, and impact assessments. While these sources of uncertainty are routinely considered, uncertainty associated with exposure characterization has received comparatively limited attention. In the exposure characterization, assessments often rely on incomplete or coarse public data and require assumptions and simplifications to define bridge inventories. These assumptions introduce additional epistemic uncertainty beyond the hazard, damage, and impact, that can propagate and amplify through complex computational chains. To identify sub-regions that disproportionately affect global risk outcomes, a framework is proposed to quantify how uncertainty and bias are introduced through machine learning-based exposure misrepresentation propagate throughout the risk assessment pipeline, thereby guiding targeted resource deployment where it is most needed.
Overall, this dissertation advances the state of the art in seismic design and evaluation of individual bridges and networks by providing an end-to-end, high-resolution framework that links hazard, damage, loss, and functional recovery in a probabilistic setting. The methodologies and applications provide actionable insights for transportation agencies seeking to transition from damage- and loss-based assessments to recovery-based resilience objectives.Civil engineeringComputer scienceEnvironmental engineeringearthquake engineeringfunctional recoverymachine learningperformance-basedseismic resiliencepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r93q78vetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4m19k20z2026-08-14T06:30:56Zqt4m19k20zThe Dynamical Origins and mHz Gravitational Wave Signatures of Eccentric Compact Object BinariesXuan, ZeyuanNaoz, Smadar2026-08-11The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) has opened a new window beyond traditional electromagnetic (EM) observations, vastly expanding the observable compact-object population and revealing some of the Universe's most energetic and exotic processes. In this thesis, I focus on one defining property of GW sources: eccentricity. Specifically, I investigate the population and GW signatures of eccentric compact object binaries across a variety of astrophysical environments. Combining dynamical simulations and waveform analysis, I demonstrate that highly eccentric binaries can dominate the mHz GW source population in the local Universe and produce distinctive "repeated-burst" GW signals. These signatures can significantly improve binary parameter measurements and provide direct probes of their host environments. Furthermore, I show that eccentric systems can generate a substantial stochastic GW background and produce multimessenger counterparts such as ultracompact X-ray binaries (UCXBs). I also develop a public software package (LEAP) for the population and waveform analysis of eccentric sources. These results establish eccentric compact binaries as a prevalent and promising population for multimessenger observations, enabling them to be accurately modeled and fully utilized in the era of GW astronomy.PhysicsAstrophysicsAstronomycompact object binariesgravitational wavesmultimessenger astronomyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4m19k20zhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4m19k20z/qt4m19k20z.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8x48z4c02026-08-14T06:30:51Zqt8x48z4c0Historic Preservation Overlay Zones and Where Housing Gets Built in Los AngelesAvery, Larson S.Loya, José2026-08-11The City of Los Angeles’s Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ) program adds discretionary review, additional design requirements, and up to 79 days to the entitlement process of new residential projects. Discretion and process-based regulation generally discourages housing construction. Does HPOZ designation meaningfully affect where and how much new housing construction occurs? Permit data from the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety from 1996 to 2025, suggests little construction occurred in HPOZs neighborhoods before designation. This trend continued following designation. HPOZ designation does not affect residential construction within or in surrounding zones in a statistically meaningful way. Policies such as Community Planning, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and corridor-based zoning likely disincentivized housing construction in historic neighborhoods more than HPOZ designation.Urban planningPublic policyRegional studiesLand use planningdiscretionary processhistoric preservationhousing policyland useland use regulationlocal historic districtsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x48z4c0https://escholarship.org/content/qt8x48z4c0/qt8x48z4c0.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt35q9142r2026-08-13T06:31:03Zqt35q9142rClosed-Loop Multimodal Generative Artificial Intelligence under Real-World ConstraintsZhang, YasiWu, YingnianLeong, Oscar2026-08-11Multimodal generative models are increasingly used in interactive and scientific settings where success requires more than perceptual sample quality. A deployable system must evaluate structured behavior, align model optimization with graded objectives, and generate reliable outputs when training data or measurements are imperfect. This dissertation develops these three capabilities as a closed loop of evaluation, alignment, and generation.The first part studies evaluation for instruction-based image editing. EdiVal-Agent decomposes scenes into objects and evaluates instruction following, content consistency, and visual quality across multiple editing turns. MT-EditFlow then uses these multi-axis signals to optimize sequential editing trajectories and reduce exposure bias and error propagation.The second part studies alignment. REAL formulates regression-aware reinforcement learning for language models used as numeric judges, preserving the ordinal information discarded by binary rewards. EBAMA instead aligns text-to-image diffusion through object-conditioned energy-based attention-map objectives that improve attribute binding and reduce object neglect. The third part studies generation under corrupted information. Restoration Score Distillation learns one-step generators using only degraded observations, while Flow Priors uses flow-matching likelihood structure to solve linear inverse problems through iterative corrupted trajectory matching. Together, these methods show how evaluation signals, alignment objectives, and generative priors can be designed around real-world constraints rather than idealized clean supervision.StatisticsComputer scienceArtificial intelligenceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/35q9142rhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt35q9142r/qt35q9142r.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8wv9z0d32026-08-13T06:30:57Zqt8wv9z0d3Cognitive AI to Improve Deep Learning Segmentation and Quantitative Analysis of Renal CTMelendez-Corres, GabrielBrown, Matthew S.2026-08-11Segmentation in medical imaging is an important step to identify and describe organs and diseases such as tumors. Segmentation allows for the quantitative analysis of these anatomical structures to develop biomarkers that can be utilized in the diagnosis, progression, and prognosis of diseases and conditions. In volumetric imaging data, such as those acquired through the use of Computed Tomography (CT) scanners, the process of segmentation involves the manual delineation of voxels composing the structures of interest through the series of images that form the volume. This manual process is time-consuming, limiting high-throughput production of segmentations for clinical usage. To solve this issue, Deep Learning (DL) segmentation algorithms have been developed, leveraging Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to learn voxel-level features for the automated segmentation of medical images. While DL tools have seen advancements and success in recent years, clinical usage of these tools has been limited. DL tools like CNNs operate as a "black box", containing hidden layers where learned features are not readily visible to the end user. The CNN can provide an output, but not an explanation for said output. Additionally, these models are prone to mistakes that defy basic anatomical knowledge and reasoning. These issues limit models’ trustworthiness which in turn limit their implementation into clinical settings.In this dissertation we propose the use of Cognitive AI tools in the form of Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) AI to enable anatomical reasoning and ensure anatomically consistent outputs. NeSy methods allow for the combination of DL, neural network methods which are capable of learning and updating from data, with symbolic methods that allow for the establishment of logic-based rules and relationships to provide anatomical constraints and model explainability. We developed these tools in the SimpleMind (SM) software environment, an agent-based framework where we developed agents to enable an end-to-end segmentation and quantitative analysis pipeline within an anatomical Knowledge Graph (KG). This includes image processing tools, reasoning agents, feature extraction, predictive modelling and hyperparameter optimization. Developed tools are general and task-agnostic; however, in this dissertation we present the use case of kidney and lesion segmentation in renal CT, nephrometry feature extraction and feature-based predictive modelling and optimization.To demonstrate the effectiveness of NeSy reasoning methods, a CNN model, nnUNet, trained for kidney segmentation on the KiTS23 dataset was integrated into the SM reasoning framework. Kidney segmentation candidates were evaluated and selected using SM reasoning methods Fuzzy Membership Reasoning (FMR), Adaptive Reasoning (AR), and Largest Connected Component Analysis Per Side (LCCAPS), and performance was compared to the commonly used Largest Connected Component Analysis (LCCA). Performance was assessed via False Positive Rate (FPR) and False Negative Rate (FNR) across 5 validation folds. Candidate-level acceptance and rejection metrics were also introduced to evaluate selective performance. Robustness was further examined under added noise and added synthetic candidates. Reasoning-based approaches (FMR, AR, and LCCAPS) reduced false positives and anatomically invalid outputs more effectively than LCCA, while preserving acceptance of valid segmentation candidates. Results persisted under noise and added synthetic candidates, avoiding acceptance of implausible results. Incorporating reasoning into DL segmentation supports selective acceptance of anatomically valid outputs and rejection of invalid ones, increasing reliability and autonomy in medical imaging workflows. This selective segmentation framework provides a practical path toward trusted, semi-autonomous clinical deployment.We extended the segmentation KG to automatically extract features used in nephrometry scoring for the assessment of renal lesion complexity. On a test set of 61 scans, we compared the automated features to human features obtained through manual visual assessments. Agreement among humans and automated methods was within the level of agreement reported in the literature while a variability analysis demonstrated automated features are within the human variability, with lesion radius and endophycity being significantly different than random nephrometry scoring.Lastly, within the SM environment, we incorporated a Machine Learning (ML)-based predictive modelling agent encompassing feature selection, pre-processing, resampling, model selection and training. The agent was utilized to construct prediction pipelines for renal lesion malignancy, necrosis, surgical procedure, and subtype using the extracted nephrometry and radiomic features as inputs, with clinical outcomes data from KiTS23. Optimization of the pipeline was done using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) within SM’s Knowledge Graph Learning and Optimization (KNoLO) module to enable end-to-end optimization of the predictive modelling pipeline. The GA demonstrated optimization of the custom fitness function for each clinical outcome. However, generalization outside of training and validation remains to be seen. Additionally, we provide a diversity analysis which evaluates the search space of the GA and limitations to be addressed for future improvements.Applied physicsHealth sciencesArtificial intelligenceMedical imagingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wv9z0d3https://escholarship.org/content/qt8wv9z0d3/qt8wv9z0d3.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2825m2mx2026-08-12T06:35:06Zqt2825m2mxGeneralizable Deep Neural Networks for Microscopic Image ReconstructionChen, HanlongOzcan, Aydogan2026-08-10Holographic microscopy records intensity alone, and the complex field carrying a specimen's structure must be recovered by computation. Deep neural networks perform that recovery in one rapid pass, and yet the accuracy a model reaches on the specimens and conditions of its training set can fade once either changes. This dissertation makes generalization a matter of design, tying the learned model to an explicit account of wave propagation at four successively deeper levels of the imaging system.The Fourier Imager Network recovers complex fields from raw holograms through spatial Fourier transform modules whose learned frequency-domain weights act globally across the input. Trained on human lung tissue and blindly tested on prostate and salivary gland sections together with Pap smears, it preserved reconstruction quality on specimen types absent from training. It ran about 27 times faster than multi-height phase retrieval, with roughly 1 mm2 taking 0.04 s under parallelized inference.An enhanced version conditions those weights on the input and draws autofocusing, axial distance estimation and pixel super-resolution into a single model. Axial distances follow from a physics-informed objective that needs no ground-truth labels, while threefold pixel super-resolution enlarges the reconstructed space-bandwidth product ninefold across an autofocusing range near 350 micrometers.GedankenNet relocates supervision itself. Its training holograms come from artificial random fields, and the learning signal arises from agreement between the input intensities and those predicted by propagating its output forward. Models trained this way transferred directly to experimental holograms of tissue sections and Pap smears, and stayed resilient to unknown shifts in axial position, pixel pitch and illumination wavelength.The closing study carries the same principle into image formation. A convolutional encoder folds a target image into one compact phase pattern, and a passive diffractive decoder optimized alongside it projects that pattern as a pixel super-resolved intensity distribution held over a depth of at least 250 illumination wavelengths.Every finding holds within the system, parameter ranges and specimen classes examined. The four studies share a suggestion that the reach of a learned imaging model grows when architecture, measurements, supervision and optics are designed with one another in view.Electrical engineeringOpticsArtificial intelligenceComputer engineeringComputational imagingDeep learningDiffractive optical networksHolographic microscopyPhase retrievalpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2825m2mxetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5dd1n53s2026-08-12T06:35:01Zqt5dd1n53sLooking Beyond Culture: Ecological Correlates, Reinforcement Processes, and Mental Health Consequences of Self-Criticism in Asian AmericansChen, Belinda C(Lau) Chung, Anna S2026-08-10Asian Americans (AAs) face growing mental health risks, including rising rates of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and suicide (Lee et al., 2022; Karaye, 2022; Hahm et al., 2021; Twenge et al., 2021). Longitudinal data show that while mental health problems improved for White, Black, and Latine groups following the COVID-19 pandemic, it worsened among AAs, likely reflecting persistent discrimination experiences that were exacerbated by scapegoating of AAs during the pandemic (Cheslack-Postava et al., 2024; Dougan et al., 2024; Wu et al., 2021). Despite these growing mental health disparities, AAs remain persistently underserved due to stigma and a lack of culturally appropriate interventions. Thus, AAs face an increasing mental health care gap (Chu & Sue, 2011; Zhou et al., 2021). Self-criticism, a transdiagnostic trait associated with depression, anxiety, psychosis, and personality disorders (Werner et al., 2019a), has been identified as more prevalent among AAs relative to other racial/ethnic groups (Castro & Rice, 2003; Chang & Asakawa, 2003; Pourmand et al., 2024) and may be one factor associated with rising mental health problems among AAs. Research on self-criticism has narrowly attributed elevated self-criticism in AAs to cultural heritage and family processes while minimizing the role of race-related stress, and few studies to date have examined the psychological processes that may sustain self-criticism in AAs over time.The present dissertation employed a convergent parallel mixed methods approach with two aims: (1) Study 1 examined ecological correlates of self-criticism in AAs, integrating family processes, heritage cultural values, and race-related stress; and (2) Study 2 assessed positive and negative reinforcement processes that may maintain self-criticism in this population, specifically testing whether self-criticism is positively reinforced in the short-term through increased task motivation and persistence, and subsequently through increased self-efficacy; as well as whether self-criticism is negatively reinforced subsequently through reductions in negative affect. A sample of 258 Asian American undergraduate students (M¬age = 20.32; 74.4% cisgender female; 46.12% East Asian, 23.26% Multiracial Asian, 18.22% Southeast Asian, 10.85% South Asian, 1.55% Other) completed a baseline survey and 10-day daily diary study. Additionally, a subsample of 20 participants with elevated self-criticism completed a 60-minute semi-structured qualitative interview. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed simultaneously, weighted equally, and integrated to identify areas of convergence and divergence. Study 1 used two-step structural equation modeling (SEM) of cross-sectional survey data and reflexive thematic analysis (RFA; Braun & Clarke, 2006) of interview narratives to examine ecological correlates of self-criticism. Study 2 used random-intercept cross-lagged panel models of 10-day daily diary data and RFA of interview narratives to examine task motivation and persistence as short-term positive reinforcers of self-criticism, and subsequent improvements in self-efficacy and reductions in negative affect as more distal positive and negative reinforcers of self-criticism, respectively.Study 1 results revealed that heritage cultural values and family processes were significantly associated with self-criticism (β = .24), with relational induction as the strongest correlate. Although the quantitative SEM indicated that race-related stress was not a significant independent correlate of self-criticism, qualitative findings revealed that experiences of interpersonal racism shaped internalized achievement standards that interact with family processes and cultural values to fuel self-criticism — a complex pathway that the study’s quantitative data did not capture. Additionally, five qualitative themes about ecological correlates of self-criticism were identified: (1) Internalization of racialized achievement expectations, in which experiences of interpersonal racism plant the seed for what AAs "should be" and position achievement as the singular pathway to security and worth; (2) familial transmission of self-criticism through direct parental pressure, modeling and emotional restraint, and the intergenerational legacy of immigration; (3) relational self-scrutiny organized around fulfilling role obligations in key relationships; (4) social comparison within the AA community and imposter syndrome in high-achieving environments; and (5) identity confusion in young adulthood following the disruption of an early, achievement-centered identity.Study 2 results found modest evidence to support that self-criticism is positively reinforced in the short-term through increases in task motivation and persistence; little to no evidence to support that self-criticism is more distally reinforced through increases to self-efficacy, and no evidence to support that self-criticism is more distally negatively reinforced through decreases in negative affect. Furthermore, quantitative and qualitative data sources converged to show that while self-criticism temporarily and modestly boosts motivation and persistence in the short-term, over time, chronic self-criticism drives notably larger and more sustained levels of high negative affect, low self-efficacy, and low motivation and persistence. Qualitative findings converged with these findings and were organized under the overarching theme of self-criticism as a double-edged sword, capturing how its immediate motivational and behavioral benefits are salient enough to sustain it, while its deeper psychological costs accumulate more insidiously over time. Three subthemes illuminated experiences of self-criticism among AA young adults: (1) perceived benefits of self-criticism as a motivational and behavioral driver, catalyst for self-improvement, and source of valued personal qualities, (2) wide-ranging emotional and behavioral costs of sustained self-criticism, including anxiety, chronic stress, erosion of self-worth, neglect of basic needs, loss of intrinsic motivation, and constriction of joy, and (3) near universal ambivalence about relinquishing self-criticism despite its many costs.Taken together, findings suggest that self-criticism in AA young adults may be best understood not as a fixed personality trait or direct product of ‘Asian culture’, but as an adaptive yet psychologically costly striving mechanism enacted in response to interpersonal racism and family socialization processes that themselves may be understood within broader structures of racial inequity. These findings demonstrate need for development of culturally responsive interventions for AAs that acknowledge the adaptive origins of self-criticism, make the temporal disconnect between proximal benefits and chronic costs explicit, and engage directly with ambivalence to change. Radical healing and self-compassion represent two such interventions, offering alternative pathways through which AAs can pursue the motivational goals served by self-criticism without its associated psychological and emotional costs.Clinical psychologyAsian American studiesPsychologyMental healthAsian AmericanAsian American mental healthreinforcement processesself-criticismyoung adultsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dd1n53shttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5dd1n53s/qt5dd1n53s.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8k20t57c2026-08-12T06:34:55Zqt8k20t57cExamining the Impact of Supervisors on Evidence-Based Clinical Decision-Making in Youth Mental Health SettingsReeder, KendalChorpita, Bruce F.2026-08-10Despite the existence of a large evidence base for youth psychotherapy (Becker & Chorpita, 2023), evidence is inconsistently applied in practice, leading to suboptimal treatment outcomes (Weisz et al., 2013). One approach to bridging the science-to-practice gap is evidence-based practice (EBP), which refers to the integration of psychotherapy evidence, client-specific evidence, and clinical expertise to inform practice (Spring, 2007). EBP is achieved through a process of intentionally using evidence to make decisions about care; decision-making is considered the “lynchpin” of EBP (Spring, 2008). Clinical supervision, or ongoing consultation between a therapist and supervisor to ensure safe and effective practice, has been found to play a key role in determining how care is delivered (e.g., Schoenwald et al., 2009; Bearman et al., 2013); thus, supervision offers a promising avenue for facilitating decision-making that can support EBP—or in other words, EBP-aligned decision-making. However, there has been little research to date on any form of decision-making in supervision. This dissertation aimed to examine how supervisors’ behaviors and characteristics influence the extent that distinct decisions made in supervision (i.e., selection of problems to target, consideration of practices to deliver, and selection of practice to deliver) align with EBP. Results indicated that the proportion of variance in EBP-aligned decision-making was largely attributable to supervisors. Further, results showed that supervisor topic initiation positively predicted the extent that some decisions aligned with EBP (e.g., decisions about which problems to target and which practices to consider), but that supervisor use of questions did not significantly predict the extent that any decisions aligned with EBP. Supervisor knowledge of psychotherapy evidence was found to positively predict the extent that all examined decision types aligned with EBP, whereas supervisor openness to innovative and evidence-based interventions was found only to predict the extent that one type of decision (i.e., selection of a practice to apply in the next treatment session) aligned with EBP. By providing preliminary insight into how supervisors can support EBP-aligned decisions in supervision, this study lays groundwork for future work examining how supervision can support EBP in public settings.Clinical psychologyMental healthBehavioral psychologySocial psychologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k20t57chttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8k20t57c/qt8k20t57c.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6c09f5jz2026-08-12T06:34:50Zqt6c09f5jzNocking Arrows, Stamping Paperwork: The Politics of Indigenous Autonomy in the Bolivian AmazonGuzman Narvaez, NohelyKay, Kelly2026-08-10This dissertation examines the establishment of the first Indigenous autonomous government in the Bolivian Amazon, tracing the intricacies of Indigenous-state relations in the making of the Plurinational State. Emerging from a decade-long engagement with the Multiethnic Indigenous Territory (TIM), this research is premised on knowledge co-production: its subject, protocols, and argumentative structure took shape in response to territorial priorities and were co-designed at every step. Drawing on sixteen months of continuous ethnographic fieldwork following the formation of the territory’s inaugural government, including participant observation, eighty-one interviews, oral histories, and collective territorial mapping, I trace autonomy across legal negotiations with the state, struggles over conservation, and the everyday enactment of self-determination through territorial care. I argue that the hard-won Indigenous autonomy enshrined in Bolivia’s Plurinational Constitution rests on a constitutive tension between self-governance as a project of Indigenous self-determination and the state’s administrative rendering of that political horizon. The TIM’s case demonstrates that rather than recognizing existing Indigenous polities on their own terms, the formalization of autonomy requires the production of state-like institutions, political grammars, and administrative forms that fundamentally reconfigure Indigenous political traditions, spatio-temporal organization, and longstanding relations with territory. Across three empirical chapters, I show that Indigenous autonomy seeks to simultaneously inhabit and exceed the institutional architectures through which the state seeks to contain it, persisting as an interstitial political condition continually enacted through everyday territorial life.GeographyNative American studiesLatin American studiesNative studiesAmazoniaBoliviaCareIndigenous AutonomySelf-determinationSovereigntypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6c09f5jzetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8m13q1rk2026-08-12T05:03:18Zqt8m13q1rkKnowledge from the Inside: Latina talent on audiobooks as a window into how U.S. media’s systems of (mis/dis)information shape Latine conditional inclusionNuñez Villanueva, Ruth LivierRoberts, Sarah T.2024-01-01There is a significant disconnect between Latina/e reality and our representation in U.S. English-language media. While research tends to study this issue from a Cultural Studies lens, I shift our view and argue that addressing this problem also demands a structural analysis and the insider knowledge of these marginalized workers, as only they can describe what oppressive acts feel like at the moment of impact, and when and where they occur within production processes. My work asks what new insights we might gain by centering Latina talent.My challenge was multifold. To manage my scope, I look into one under-studied yet major global growth market arena: commercial audiobooks. As an industry at the convergence of media and tech, audiobooks provide a window into legacy and digital media labor structures. While their history can be traced to Edison’s invention of the phonograph (1877), digital audiobooks, as format, industry, and site of labor, are a relatively new phenomenon that represents a generative site for studying how digital labor platforms and AI are impacting workers and the future of work. I engage with braided theoretical and methodological frameworks that bring Information Studies, Latina Feminism, labor, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Political Economy of Media (CPE) into conversation. This approach reorients our focus to the humans who do the work, brings intersectional concerns into view, and opens new lines of questioning.
I conducted six in-depth Pláticas with Latina audiobook narrators and triangulated my findings with textual analysis, culturally intuitive observation (CIO, a method I am introducing to the Latina/Chicana feminist toolkit), and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA). My findings reveal that U.S.-Latina views are critical because they bring transnational, transcultural, intersectional, and often multilingual perspectives to the conversation, and highlight the power dynamics that have shaped the audiobook industry. Their insider knowledge provides a window into how Latina/e exclusions from U.S. English-language media have been conditional on hegemonic imperatives, operationalized via the industry’s systems of mis/disinformation and data processes, and surfaced the ways that these have historically been complicit in creating barriers to Latina/e representation and excluding us from the historical record.Information scienceMass communicationLabor relationsAudiobookslaborLatina feminismMediamis/dis-informationracial justiceenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8m13q1rkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8m13q1rk/qt8m13q1rk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7ms0x3br2026-08-10T06:31:29Zqt7ms0x3brAspects of Flux TubesGaikwad, AmeyDumitrescu, Thomas2026-08-07This thesis investigates flux tubes as probes of emergent phenomena in strongly coupled quantum field theories. Combining analytical techniques and numerical modeling, we study the structure and dynamics of vortex strings in several variants of the Abelian Higgs model (AHM) in~$3+1$ dimensions. These systems arise in settings ranging from magnetic vortices in Ginzburg-Landau superconductors to confining strings in deformed Seiberg-Witten (SW) theory. A central focus is the large-flux limit in which the rich internal structure of vortex strings becomes analytically tractable. In the AHM that arises in the context of deformed SW theory, we find that giant vortex strings exhibit a nontrivial pattern of phases and transitions. This structure becomes especially transparent in the large vorticity limit and bears a striking resemblance to wall-crossing phenomena for kink solutions in two-dimensional supersymmetric theories. We also investigate the low-energy worldsheet spectra of superconducting strings. In the minimal AHM, we identify a light pseudoscalar mode in the regime, where parallel strings repel. Comparing this spectrum with lattice results for Yang-Mills flux tubes, we conclude that the minimal AHM does not provide a compelling dual description of confining strings in pure Yang-Mills theory. Together, these results reveal the rich internal dynamics of vortex strings in analytically controlled models while clarifying both the potential and the limitations of Abelian Higgs models as effective dual descriptions of pure Yang-Mills flux tubes.PhysicsTheoretical mathematicsApplied physicsParticle physicsComputational MethodsMathematical PhysicsParticle PhysicsTheoretical Physicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ms0x3brhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7ms0x3br/qt7ms0x3br.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0dd1f5p52026-08-10T06:31:24Zqt0dd1f5p5Psychotherapy Engagement Across Phases of Care: Predictors of Disengagement and Preliminary Evaluation of a Pre-Treatment InterventionMoodliar, RddhiNg, Lauren C2026-08-07Despite the availability of effective psychotherapeutic interventions for mental health concerns, many individuals who seek mental health services experience substantial barriers to accessing and remaining engaged in care (Andrade et al., 2014; SAMHSA, 2023). Although psychotherapy engagement has often been examined through discrete indicators such as attendance, missed appointments, or premature termination, engagement can be conceptualized as a dynamic, multi-phase process unfolding across the transition from help-seeking to treatment access, initiation, ongoing participation, and termination (Dixon et al., 2016; Holdsworth et al., 2014). This dissertation examined psychotherapy engagement processes within a university-based training clinic providing evidence-based psychotherapy services to the general community. Study 1 used archival electronic health record data from adult psychotherapy clients to examine associations among client demographic factors, wait times, psychotherapy attendance behaviors, and engagement outcomes. Results indicate that demographics and wait times were not associated with engagement following treatment initiation, while missed appointment rates during active treatment were associated with increased likelihood of premature treatment termination. Building upon these findings, Study 2 employed a mixed-methods quasi-experimental pilot design to develop and conduct a preliminary evaluation of the Pre-treatment Engagement Program adapted from the Unified Protocol (PREP-UP), a brief pre-treatment engagement preparation intervention designed to support psychotherapy engagement during the transition from waitlist to care. Preliminary findings supported the acceptability, appropriateness, and feasibility of PREP-UP. Qualitative findings further suggested that participants perceived PREP-UP as helpful for increasing readiness for therapy and clarifying treatment goals, while exploratory quantitative findings indicated promising trends in psychotherapy attendance outcomes among PREP-UP participants. Collectively, findings from this dissertation highlight the importance of conceptualizing psychotherapy engagement as a multi-phase process and suggest that the pre-treatment period may represent a clinically meaningful opportunity for engagement-focused intervention.Clinical psychologyMental healthStatisticsBehavioral psychologyCognitive psychologyEngagementPremature TerminationPretreatmentPsychotherapyTraining Clinicapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dd1f5p5https://escholarship.org/content/qt0dd1f5p5/qt0dd1f5p5.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7xt1t0292026-08-09T05:03:26Zqt7xt1t029Linked Capital: Infrastructural Mobilities in Financial Markets, from NASDAQ to SESDAQ (1967-1990)Pascal, UlyssesRoberts, Sarah T.2024-01-01In social sciences ranging from economics to history, sociology, and geography there is a widespread consensus that information technology has reshaped global finance. There is little agreement, however, on what the effect of information technology has been. Management literature argues information technology democratizes finance by making it more accessible around the world. Because digitization makes it tractable to copy and paste the software that has come to define exchanges, digitization could allow for a more rapid diffusion of stock exchanges to new regions. Conversely, political economists since the 1980s have argued that digital telecommunications only further concretize the locational advantages of existing centers of finance. In preliminary research, I found evidence for both trends. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of securities exchanges in the world has more than doubled. A substantial portion of new exchanges have been built in countries with no prior financial exchanges. Furthermore, since the 1960s, a growing percentage of global stock exchanges began to utilize computerized trading infrastructures. Of the 255 stock and derivative exchanges built by 2010, 91% used an electronic trading platform. Alongside the proliferation of stock exchanges, the industry has also been consolidated by a duopoly of market infrastructure vendors led by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and NASDAQ-OMX group. What role does information technology play in both the expansion of global financial markets and the consolidation of the stock exchange industry? To understand the relation information technology has to the construction of global finance, I focus on the history of NASDAQ. In 1971, NASDAQ became the first nation-wide electronic stock market. Based in Trumbull, Connecticut and developed by Bunker-Ramo computers, the NASDAQ system was designed to communicate the prices at which brokers across the United States would be willing to buy and sell stocks. Between 1971 and 1990, NASDAQ developed successive layers of financial infrastructure at national and international scales. In the 1980s, NASDAQ partnered with exchanges in London and Singapore to develop one of the first international computerized networks of stock exchanges. Now, NASDAQ is a multinational firm that provides trading platforms and market services to stock exchanges around the world. How NASDAQ developed from a single datacenter in Turnbull, Connecticut into the largest financial information infrastructure vendor remains an understudied yet critically important history.HistoryInformation technologyEconomic historyCapital Market IndustryComputer NetworksMarket InfrastructureNASDAQScience and Technology StudiesSocial Studies of Financeenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7xt1t029https://escholarship.org/content/qt7xt1t029/qt7xt1t029.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt76q4g1f72026-08-08T05:02:55Zqt76q4g1f7Self-programming Neuromorphic Integrated Circuits for Intelligent SystemsDeo, Atharva SunilChen, Yong2024-01-01Neurobiological circuits in the human brain perform computational functions that can be dynamically modified by adjusting their synaptic connections during concurrent learning processes in a non-Turing mode. In contrast, Turing-based computers execute algorithms pre-defined by humans or developed through machine-learning processes, resulting in high energy consumption, long learning latency, and poor adaptability to rapidly changing environments compared to the human brain.We introduce a synaptic resistor circuit capable of simultaneous inference and learning in a non-Turing mode. Without any prior learning, an HfZrO-based synaptic resistor circuit successfully completed multiple objectives, such as controlling a morphing wing to maximize the Lift-to-Drag force ratio and recover from stall conditions, navigating a reusable spacecraft in a simulated environment with strong dynamic winds, and driving a car in a simulated environment, avoiding obstacles and preventing collisions with suddenly reversing cars. This circuit exhibited superior performance, faster learning speed, lower power consumption, and better adaptability to dynamic environmental changes compared to computer-based artificial neural networks.
Synaptic resistor circuits can overcome the fundamental limitations of traditional computers, offering a non-Turing computing platform with concurrent learning and inference, high learning speed, extremely low power consumption, and agile adaptability in rapidly changing environments for artificial intelligence systems.Mechanical engineeringNanotechnologyComputer scienceIntelligent SystemMorphing WingNeuromorphic CircuitNon-turing ModeSelf-driving CarSynaptic Resistorenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/76q4g1f7https://escholarship.org/content/qt76q4g1f7/qt76q4g1f7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4zc9b7s12026-08-06T14:08:23Zqt4zc9b7s1Transcriptomic analysis of healthy skeletal muscle to identify modulators of differential skeletal muscle susceptibility in Duchenne Muscular DystrophyNieves Rodr�guez, ShirleyNelson, Stanley F2023-01-01Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive muscle disease caused by mutations in the DMD gene encoding for the structural muscle protein dystrophin. Absence of dystrophin leads to a fragile muscle membrane, rendering muscle cells susceptible to contraction-induced damage, which leads to myofiber cell death and replacement of the muscle with fibrofatty tissue. Although DMD ultimately affects all except one skeletal muscle, not all muscles are affected at the same pace, allowing us to hypothesize that intrinsic properties of each muscle group dictate how fast the muscle loss occurs for each. To study intrinsic properties of two skeletal muscles that are strikingly differentially affected, vastus lateralis (VL) and tibialis anterior (TA), we first developed a core needle biopsy procedure to sample multiple muscle biopsies from the same individual. This method allowed us to sample adequate amounts of muscle tissue from both the VL and the TA from each of 15 healthy volunteers, which were suitable for both transcriptomic studies and histological assessments. To identify contributors of differential muscle susceptibility, we performed RNA sequencing (RNAseq) on the paired VL and TA samples, and augmented these data with the first single nuclei RNA sequencing (snRNAseq) dataset of paired healthy skeletal muscles to understand the contribution of different cell types to the detected transcriptomic differences. 3,410 (15.2%) genes were differentially expressed between VL and TA, with functional enrichment of “catabolic process”, “extracellular structure organization”, and “regulation of cell death”. Because these categories are disrupted in DMD, and because transcriptomic studies in other differentially affected muscles have found similar differences in these categories, they are potential contributors to the differential susceptibility of VL and TA. Lastly, we examine the contribution of alternative splicing to the transcriptomic diversity between VL and TA. We identify 896 alternative splicing events that are quantitatively different in abundance between the muscles, and these map to 160 genes. We also identify isoforms with substantial expression differences between the muscles, also known as isoform switches. There are 12 isoform switches among 6 genes. Genes encoding muscle contraction proteins were enriched among genes with alternative splicing. The most striking alternative splicing and consequential isoform switch event is in NEB, encoding for nebulin, important for proper sarcomere organization and function. We herein discuss our findings in the context of DMD, and assess their therapeutic potential by examining which genes or protein products can be targeted with existing drugs. Transcriptomic studies of paired muscle samples from the same individual allowed us to properly control for inter-individual differences and to maximize our detection of gene and isoform expression differences. Furthermore, augmenting our VL and TA RNAseq dataset with snRNAseq allowed us to place our findings in context of the heterogeneity that characterizes the skeletal muscles. We also propose potential modes of action of differentially expressed genes and isoforms, including known biomarkers and genetic modifiers of DMD based on their differential expression between VL and TA and their single-cell expression.GeneticsDMDgene expression/splicingmusclemuscle susceptibilitysingle nuclei RNAseqtranscriptomicsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4zc9b7s1https://escholarship.org/content/qt4zc9b7s1/qt4zc9b7s1.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1vg7h8k92026-08-06T06:34:14Zqt1vg7h8k9Exhausting China: Technoculture and the Work of Politics in PostsocialismYang, QianxiongKim, Suk-Young SKMetzger, Sean SM2026-08-04This dissertation examines how emerging computational and biotechnological media reshape subjectivity, agency, and political life in postsocialist China, with an emphasis on the post-2010 era. The title names the stake of the project that to exhaust carries a double valence throughout. On one hand, laboring Chinese subjects are depleted under a technoculture that demands perpetual productivity and regeneration. On the other, the very coordinates by which subjectivity has been traditionally imagined—agency, intention, perception, judgment, and embodiment—are technically worked through and exhausted by the machines that precisely promise to overcome them. Binding the case studies together is a fantasy of inexhaustibility—of trust made automatic, bodies made tireless, life made perpetually self-regenerating—that each technology stages even as it conceals the human labor sustaining it. The dissertation argues that these technologies do not resolve but operationalize the dialectical contradictions specific to postsocialist China: tensions between state regulation and market efficiency, filial collectivism and neoliberal individualism.
Methodologically, the project reads each medium’s technical operations as formations through which political concepts and subjects take shape. Engaging with scholarship in performance studies, media theory, science and technology studies, and Chinese cultural studies, it mobilizes theatricality and/as mediation as method to show how technologies promise seamless self-execution by relocating and hiding human mediation rather than eliminating it. The project thus offers intervention into these scholarly fields by insisting on the constitutive force of technical forms, extending theories of action, agency, and embodiment to technologies operating beneath perception and prior to the subject, and treating China not as a techno-authoritarian foil to the West but as a critical site where global technological imaginaries are transformed.
Chapter One develops the postsocialist dialectic and its impossible subject. Chapter Two shows how blockchain formalizes action and trust as automatic, antihermeneutic protocol. Chapter Three follows that aspiration into the body’s metabolic and molecular becoming, where technologies promise to regenerate exhausted bodies. Chapter Four reads the tangping (lying-flat) memes as a theatrical staging of exhaustion and ambivalence via social media—a politics of “unworking” that inhabits the postsocialist impasse without resolving it. Together, the chapters rethink political criticism comparatively, pressuring both Anglo-American critical thought and Chinese countercultural discourse for seeking salvation in either the individual or the social.East Asian studiesPhilosophy of scienceFilm studiesSociologyTheaterchinaexhaustingmedia theorypostsocialismscience and technology studiestechnoculturepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1vg7h8k9etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt52k0m9562026-08-06T06:31:47Zqt52k0m956Developing Autonomous Electrochemical Experimentation Using Machine LearningSun, JingwenLiu, Chong2026-06-12Electrochemical research has traditionally relied on labor-intensive workflows involving manual sample preparation, iterative testing, and expert-driven data interpretation. Advances in automation, robotics, and machine learning (ML) now enable “self-driving” laboratories that couple adaptive experimental design with ML-based analysis to efficiently traverse vast chemical parameter spaces. Building on this paradigm, we first establish an autonomous, closed-loop platform for mechanistic investigation of molecular electrochemistry (Project 1), which integrates flow handling, “online” analysis, and Bayesian decision-making to iteratively refine experiments. We then deploy this platform to accelerate high-throughput exploration of proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) in osmium complexes (Project 2), uncovering conditions and trends that would be impractical to locate manually. Within this landscape, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) remains a foundational probe of materials, interfaces, and kinetics. Conventional practice relies on visual inspection of Nyquist/Bode plots; as ML increasingly interprets EIS, rigorous data representation and preprocessing become critical to reliable mechanistic inference (Project 3), motivating a rethinking of how EIS data are structured, normalized, and analyzed. Yet, conventional equivalent-circuit-model (ECM) fitting is slow, poorly scalable, with limited generalizability. To overcome these limits, we introduce EIS-GPT (Project 4), a generative, structure-aware, graph-based autoregressive framework that produces valid, interpretable ECMs directly from EIS data, moving beyond rigid classification toward scalable, mechanistically transparent modeling. Together, the four projects presented herein establish a pathway toward autonomous electrochemical experimentation that unites automated high-throughput exploration and advanced ML-driven data interpretation.ChemistryAnalytical chemistryArtificial intelligencePhysical chemistryAnalytical chemistryElectrochemical impedance spectroscopyElectrochemical mechanistic analysisLaboratory automationMachine learningMolecular electrochemistrypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/52k0m956etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9815b2k62026-08-06T05:03:58Zqt9815b2k6Race-Conscious College Access Programs and Critical Consciousness: Exploring the Racialized Experiences of Undergraduate Students of ColorEstrada, CynthiaHarris, JessicaTeranishi, Robert T.2024-01-01The racialized experiences of Students of Color (SOC) on college campuses continues to be a pressing issue in the field of higher education (Stokes, 2021). As a response, some college access programs have sought to prepare high school SOC to navigate these college environments by integrating critical consciousness—or critical awareness of inequity and injustice—as a fundamental component in preparing high school students to be “college ready.” The problem that this dissertation addresses is that very little is known about the experiences of undergraduate SOC who have participated in such programs once enrolled in college. Grounded in Critical Race Theory, this study is designed to better understand how 12 undergraduate SOC navigated higher education after participating in VIPS, a race-conscious college access program. This qualitative research study uses a Critical Race Methodology by drawing on platicas and life story mapping as sources of data. The study found that through VIPS, SOC gain a critical consciousness and set of tools to identify and challenge the deep-seated nature of racism in higher education. Additionally, through VIPS’ race-conscious curriculum, SOC can recognize and effectively respond to microaggressions and systemic barriers within higher education settings, particularly at UCLA. This preparedness helps them to manage and resist racialization processes on campus. Lastly, SOC utilize the insights and skills gained from VIPS to build community and advocacy, pushing for a transformative impact on campus policies and practices toward greater equity and inclusion.
Higher educationenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9815b2k6https://escholarship.org/content/qt9815b2k6/qt9815b2k6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt95s7j7502026-08-05T06:33:34Zqt95s7j750Three Studies Applying Frontier Methods to Problems in Political ScienceRudkin, AaronLewis, Jeffrey B2026-07-21This dissertation comprises three papers that apply frontier methods to open problems in political science. The first chapter develops a data-driven artificial intelligence pipeline for measuring legislative speech. The pipeline features document embeddings, large language model annotations, and model selection. The substantive question addressed is whether the entry of radical-right populist parties into legislatures causes a speech contagion effect on mainstream parties, leveraging the case of the Alternative für Deutschland and Germany’s sixteen state legislatures. I find a positive and moderately large degree of speech contagion. In addition to the pipeline, the chapter offers guidance for solving difficult text extraction and linearization problems common in document-based research. The second, co-authored, chapter uses conjoint survey experiments to examine how voters evaluate national, state, and local policy positions in elections for offices at different levels of government. We avoid a common issue with conjoint analysis of public opinion data by conditioning candidate attributes on respondent baseline positions, allowing us to measure the effects of policy agreement on vote choice. We show that although national issues dominate state and local issues, respondents use policy positions on all three when considering candidates for every office. U.S. politics is nationalized, but not fundamentally broken. The final, co-authored, chapter conducts one of the first-ever meta-analyses of natural experiments in political science in order to estimate the causal effect of commodity price shocks on armed civil conflict. We find that although average effects are null, effects vary by commodity type: negative for agricultural commodity prices and positive for oil and artisanal mineral prices. We overcome challenges related to study comparability and effect size interpretation in the natural experiment setting where included studies have highly variable designs, providing a model for future meta-analyses.Political scienceSociologyPublic administrationAmerican studiesamericancomparativeconjointinstitutionsmethodstext-as-datapubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/95s7j750etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt53t4s5kt2026-08-05T05:02:19Zqt53t4s5ktPPARalpha regulates endoplasmic reticulum-lipid droplet contact protein Calsyntenin- 3beta to promote ketogenesis in hepatocytesUchiyama, LaurenTontonoz, Peter J2024-01-01Ketogenesis requires fatty acid influx from stored lipid droplets or extrahepatic tissues to hepatic mitochondria. However, whether inter-organelle contact sites can regulate this process is unknown. Recent studies have revealed a role for Calsyntenin-3b (Clstn3b), an endoplasmic reticulum-lipid droplet contact site protein, in control of lipid utilization in adipose tissue. Here we show that Clstn3b transcription is induced in liver by PPARa in settings of high lipid utilization, including fasting and ketogenic diet feeding. Hepatocyte-specific loss of Clstn3b in mice inhibits ketogenesis independent of changes in PPARa activation. Conversely, hepatic overexpression of Clstn3b promotes ketogenesis in mice. Furthermore, the absence of Clstn3b alters LD- mitochondrial crosstalk, as revealed by impaired fatty acid oxidation and mitochondrial respiration, and a decreased mitochondrial integrated stress response. These findings define an important function for Clstn3b in ketogenesis and lipid utilization in hepatocytes.PhysiologyGeneticsCellular biologyendoplasmic reticulumketogenesisketogeniclipid dropletliverpparenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/53t4s5kthttps://escholarship.org/content/qt53t4s5kt/qt53t4s5kt.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt62b217n32026-08-04T06:34:41Zqt62b217n3Shoah Shadows: Israeli Migrants’ Aesthetic Interventions in Germanyzelnick, sharon tovaRothberg, Michael PYildiz, Yasemin2026-06-12Shoah Shadows: Israeli Migrants’ Aesthetic Interventions in Germany explores the memory dynamics that emerge when Israelis migrate to the charged space of Germany. I examine how Germany’s guilt-driven Holocaust memorial culture provokes, enables, and sometimes curtails aesthetic engagements with the Shoah. The German state’s perspective on Jews is largely colored by its guilt about the Holocaust resulting in reductive views of them as indelibly victims and tools for Wiedergutmachung. Yet, Israeli migrant artists and authors in Germany find creative ways to subversively counter these narratives of eternal Jewish victimhood. Through poetry, prose, performance, films, photography, and mixed media art, Israeli migrant artists and authors resist the victim label frequently fixed on them by the German state while also urging Germany to see Israel in more complex and critical ways. My analyses of Israeli migrants’ aesthetic interventions demonstrate the multifaceted ways they create agency as they respond to the crisis in Palestine/Israel and to Germany’s recent cancellation culture and ritualized Holocaust memory landscape.The first half of my dissertation analyzes media projects – films, a photography collection, and mixed media installations – and the second half of it analyzes poetry and prose. The conclusion analyzes literature, art, and performances that respond to Israel’s actions in Gaza and Germany’s problematic response after October 7, 2023. I demonstrate that the charged nature of migrating to Germany combined with Berlin’s historic and contemporary context and post-unification culture of freedom has provoked a particular form of a revitalized and revitalizing postmemory. The postmemorial dynamic, which transforms intergenerational pain into purpose, enables these migrants to re-invent themselves and re-write what it means to be Jewish in Germany. The Israeli migrants’ aesthetic creations expand Germany’s understanding of Jewish identity beyond the limiting philosemitic lens through which it has been so often framed. The shadows of the Shoah that occupy the physical and cultural spaces of Berlin, as well as the pervasive guilt in Germany’s memory culture, evoke a deep form of responsible remembering: simultaneously commemorating the past with care and focusing on creating a more ethical present and future in Europe and the Middle East.Comparative literatureJudaic studiesArt historyAestheticsEuropean studiesBerlinIntergenerational TraumaIsraeli MigrantsJewish CulturePostmemorypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/62b217n3etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0qp642cc2026-08-03T06:31:18Zqt0qp642ccScalable Estimation and Decision-Making for Multi-Agent SystemsWu, ZidaMehta, Ankur2026-07-29Multi-agent systems have attracted attention in applications such as satellite networks and autonomous traffic. However, as the number of agents grows, the joint state, observation, and action spaces expand. This growth can lead to higher computational complexity, communication overhead, and unstable optimization. Scalability therefore asks whether agents can operate without their online burden growing with the total system size. We study scalability in estimation and decision-making, focusing on these two problems under uncertainty. In estimation, uncertainty appears through unknown inputs, unmeasured signals that nonetheless enter the dynamics. In decision-making, uncertainty arises from changing population distributions and common noise. Based on how agents are modeled and interact, we consider two regimes: the networked regime and the population regime. We primarily study estimation in the networked regime and decision-making in the population regime. In the networked regime, agents are finite and identifiable, and communicate over a time-varying graph. In the population regime, agents are numerous and interchangeable, each responding to the population distribution rather than to individuals.
In the networked regime, we develop recursive filters that jointly estimate the state and unknown input. By decoupling the unknown-input and state-estimation steps, the filters remain unbiased and prevent model mismatch from contaminating the state estimate. Prior knowledge of the unknown input is further incorporated to reduce estimation variance, and its effect on estimator rank conditions is analyzed. These filters are then decentralized for heterogeneous networks with time-varying topology, where agents exchange only local estimates while approaching full-information accuracy. Because sensing and planning are coupled, we also study sensor coverage, whose placement admits a submodular approximation bound governed by a curvature constant. We prove that this curvature is inflated by the discretization itself and derive the explicit law by which it grows as the grid is refined.
In the population regime, we formulate the problem as a mean-field game and develop a Master Online Mirror Descent algorithm that learns a single policy network conditioned on the population distribution and common-noise history. Through iterative learning and a specialized regularizer, the policy converges stably toward Nash equilibria across different initial distributions and common-noise realizations. On benchmarks, it reduces exploitability faster than existing deep reinforcement learning methods, allowing each agent to make decisions independently even as the population approaches the infinite limit, while still driving the overall system toward equilibrium.RoboticsComputer scienceArtificial intelligenceApplied mathematicscontrolmean field gamemulti-agent systemreinforcement learningstate estimationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0qp642cchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0qp642cc/qt0qp642cc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt19s7j29v2026-08-03T06:31:13Zqt19s7j29vSuicidal Behaviors and Juvenile Legal System Involvement: A Multi-Method InvestigationSchiff, SaraLee, Steve SMeza, Jocelyn2026-07-29Suicide is a leading cause of death among youth and young adults; however, effective intervention and prevention strategies are limited in their generalizability and applicability to acutely at-risk populations. To successfully develop strategies to decrease suicide prevalence across childhood, suicidality must be contextualized using frameworks such as ecodevelopmental theory and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model which situate suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) within individual, family, community, and cultural systems. One salient system associated with STBs is the Juvenile Legal System (JLS), where individuals experience markedly higher rates of STBs and related risk factors. However, temporal associations between engagement in STBs and JLS involvement are unclear, including their shared risk factors. This dissertation consists of two studies designed to address these shortcomings and examine the relationship between STBs and JLS involvement, with the goal of illuminating the pathways between them as well as the factors contributing to each of their occurrence.Study I prosecuted the relationship between JLS involvement and STBs across development with consideration of related risk and protective factors. Propensity score matching capitalized on 2,426 adolescents enrolled in a sub study of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study to test the association of police contact at 10-13 years-old with suicidal outcomes (i.e., self-harm, suicidal ideation, suicide attempt) two years later, covarying for age, education, race-ethnicity, sex/gender, discrimination, adverse childhood events (ACEs), and familism. After adjusting for demographic, experiential, and family-level factors identified as potential confounders of this relationship, police contact in preadolescence did not significantly predict suicidal outcomes two years later. However, girls were more likely to report lifetime self-harm compared to boys and Black youth were less likely to report lifetime suicidal ideation compared to White youth. In addition, lower familism predicted self-harm and suicidal ideation two years later.Study II utilized qualitative methods to retrospectively explore the nature, timing, and consequences of individuals’ JLS involvement and engagement in STBs across development. Temporal sequencing of events was illuminated with collaborative mapping of events onto shared visual timelines. While some individuals experienced suicidality prior to legal system contact, often rooted in early trauma, unstable or harmful family relationships, or peer-related stressors, others experienced suicidality because of JLS involvement—particularly during arrest, detention, or other coercive system encounters. Across individuals, mutually reinforcing factors intensified both STBs and JLS involvement including hopelessness, implicit/risk taking behaviors, dehumanization, sense of social capital, and discrimination. These experiences further propagated cyclical patterns in which system involvement heightened STBs, and engagement in STBs heightened vulnerability to further JLS contact.Results from these two studies increment knowledge about the interplay between JLS involvement and STB engagement, as well as the common factors that increase risk for both. These findings provide critical insights into specific psychosocial targets for intervention (e.g., discriminatory experiences, trauma history, hopelessness) and implicate sensitive periods (i.e., preadolescence) that should guide intervention delivery, as well as where interventions are most effectively enacted across JLS contact points (e.g., arrest vs. courts vs. community supervision). Future research should prioritize large, longitudinal studies to better map JLS involvement and STBs temporally for more generalizable and high acuity populations and to elucidate additional factors contributing to the presentation of both across childhood and adolescence.Clinical psychologyPsychologyMental healthCriminologyjuvenile legal systemsuicideyouthapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/19s7j29vhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt19s7j29v/qt19s7j29v.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7cc2m9rk2026-08-03T06:31:08Zqt7cc2m9rkAI-Assisted Integrated Sensing and Communication for NextG Wireless NetworksLu, HaofanAbari, Omid2026-07-30Wireless technologies have been evolving significantly over the past few decades, forming the backbone of many modern applications. Two key paradigms have emerged for different purposes: communication and sensing. Wireless communication systems, such as WiFi and 5G, are optimized to encode as much information as possible into the limited time-frequency resources for high-throughput, low-latency data transmission. Wireless sensing systems, such as radar, focus on extracting information about the environment, such as the location and movement of objects, by analyzing the wireless signals reflected off them. These two paradigms have been evolving separately, developing different hardware and software stacks.
Next-generation wireless systems seek to integrate sensing and communication into a unified system to enhance performance and enable new applications. Many challenges exist in achieving this integration. One key challenge is designing unified radio software and hardware that can support both sensing and communication functionalities. Another challenge is to design synergistic mechanisms that create mutual benefits between sensing and communication. The advancement of machine learning and artificial intelligence has opened up new opportunities for addressing these challenges.
This dissertation introduces three systems towards this objective. First, we present MilBack, a unified design of a millimeter-wave sensing and communication system based on the backscatter principle. MilBack enables high-accuracy target localization and high-throughput, two-way communication with ultra-low power consumption. Next, we present two systems, NeWRF and mmDiff, that materialize the notion of sensing the wireless environment for improving communication. NeWRF is a deep learning framework that reconstructs the wireless radiation field from sparse channel measurements and predicts the channel state information at unseen locations. It enables operators to identify coverage dead zones and optimize access point placement. mmDiff is a differentiable ray-tracing simulation framework that learns the radio material properties of the environment from sparse measurements. It enables robust mmWave beam prediction in complex 3D environments, which is critical for high-throughput, low-latency communication.EngineeringTechnical communicationElectrical engineeringCommunicationMachine LearningSensingWirelessapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cc2m9rkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7cc2m9rk/qt7cc2m9rk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt62h4r6fj2026-08-03T06:31:03Zqt62h4r6fjMonitoring Change in Urban Forests: Remote Sensing Methods for Evaluating Canopy Cover, Removals, and Fire RecoveryPawlak, Camille ChristineGillespie, Thomas W.2026-07-30This dissertation develops remote sensing methods to monitor urban forest canopy cover changes, phenology, removal, and post-fire recovery across California. I combine high-resolution National Agriculture Imagery Program aerial imagery, repeated PlanetScope satellite observations, tree inventory data, parcel information, and field and image-based validation to examine urban forest change across multiple spatial and temporal scales.First, I developed a four-year canopy cover time series for all California census-designated places from 2016 to 2022 using 60-cm aerial imagery and a deep learning classification model. I estimated canopy cover and change using an error-adjusted area estimation, which showed apparent statewide canopy decline was not statistically distinguishable from no change once mapping uncertainty was considered. Residential parcels consistently contained more than half of the canopy within incorporated urban areas, showing that statewide canopy goals will depend on engaging with private landowners. Second, I combined biannual canopy maps with monthly PlanetScope time series to identify likely individual tree removals and estimate when they occurred. Seasonal PlanetScope data classified broad foliage types with 84% accuracy across two California cities. NAIP-derived canopy change identified removals over a two-year interval with 91.7% accuracy, while a PlanetScope-based classifier identified removals from time-series data with 81.0% accuracy. For 36 of 49 manually validated removals, PlanetScope estimated a removal date within a validated removal window. These results show that aerial imagery can identify canopy loss between image dates, while repeated satellite observations can provide more information about when that loss occurred. Finally, I applied these methods to measure individual-tree canopy condition after the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires. I compared post-fire canopy condition with each tree’s own pre-fire seasonal baseline to distinguish trees that were returning toward typical condition from those that remained below baseline. Approximately 26.7% of large fire-affected trees were within their pre-fire range by April 2025, increasing to 38.5% by April 2026. Burn severity was the strongest and most consistent predictor of post-fire canopy condition, while foliage type, species, property type, and city were also associated with recovery patterns. The methods developed in this dissertation make it possible to monitor urban forest change at scales that are difficult to capture through field assessment alone, both through broad spatial scales and frequent temporal updates. Although developed and applied across California, these methods provide an approach that can be extended to other cities with comparable high-resolution imagery, repeated satellite observations, and tree-location data. Cities can use this information to plan urban forest management better and to track whether canopy goals are being met by showing where canopy is being retained, lost, or recovering after disturbance.GeographyRemote sensingremote sensingurban forestsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/62h4r6fjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt62h4r6fj/qt62h4r6fj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt66f9m2bd2026-08-03T06:30:58Zqt66f9m2bdUnderstanding Contributors to the Black Immigrant Health Paradox: Leveraging a Social-Cognitive ApproachOwoyemi, PraiseStanton, Annette L2026-07-30Extant research has provided support for the immigrant health paradox within the Black community. Specifically, Black immigrants in the United States largely demonstrate better physical and mental health outcomes than U.S-born Black individuals. Investigations of current explanatory hypotheses of the immigrant health paradox have yielded mixed findings and notable limitations. Accordingly, the present research aimed to test a new framework for understanding potential key contributors to the Black immigrant health paradox. This framework employed a social-cognitive approach by integrating a race-conscious lens with system justification beliefs (via the meritocratic worldview or MW), in charting how ideologies may shape perceptions of discrimination, and subsequently, how differences in perceived discrimination might mediate the differential health outcomes between Black immigrants and their American-born counterparts. Two interrelated studies examined and tested the constructs underlying the social-cognitive model (i.e., nativity status, the meritocratic worldview, perceived discrimination) as factors hypothesized as potential mechanisms of the Black immigrant health paradox.
Study 1 examined secondary analyses of data from a large nationally representative sample that included Black Americans and Black Caribbean immigrants. Structural equation modeling was conducted to test the proposed social-cognitive framework. Findings provided partial support for my hypotheses. MW was significantly related to psychological distress through discrimination, but nativity status did not moderate the relationship. Contrary to my hypothesis, MW did not buffer against psychological distress; instead MW was associated with greater psychological distress. Notably, nativity status moderated the structural relations among MW and physical health. Specifically, MW was significantly associated with poorer physical health (as measured by number of medical conditions) in U.S. Born Black Americans, but there was not a significant association for Black immigrants.
Study 2 complemented Study 1 by exploring current Black immigrants’ perspectives on the immigrant health paradox and constructs embedded in the social-cognitive model. Black immigrants reported significant health-related changes after immigrating to the United States. Participants attributed these changes to a confluence of cultural, social, and lifestyle factors alongside anti-Black racism. Collectively, findings from study 1 and study 2 advance understanding of how MW and discrimination influence health among Black communities and help facilitate targeted interventions to support health outcomes in U.S. Born Black Americans and Black immigrants.Clinical psychologyCognitive psychologyBlack studiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/66f9m2bdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt66f9m2bd/qt66f9m2bd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4st400rq2026-08-02T05:03:59Zqt4st400rqNovel Analysis and Design Techniques for High-Speed Wireline ReceiversTyagi, KshitizRazavi, Behzad2024-01-01The steady growth in global internet traffic continues to push the aggregate bandwidth requirementsin chip-to-chip communications, which is supported by an increase in both the number of lanes per
chip and the per-lane data rate, rising by about a factor of two every four years. This trend dictates
that both the power efficiency and area consumption of the transceivers (TRXs) be minimized so
as to balance overall system costs. The problem of power consumption is further aggravated by the
worsening speed-power-loss tradeoffs at high-speeds, with the state-of-the-art 56/112 Gb/s TRXs
drawing between 2.5-4.5 mW/Gb/s; well above the generally-desired target of 1 mW/Gb/s.
A study of these TRX architectures reveals that they employ 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) in order to alleviate the high channel loss, but do so at the cost of reduced signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio and increased sensitivity to cross-talk and channel reflections. This dictates
power hungry ‘mostly-digital’ receiver (RX) architectures which comprise of a high-speed, highly-interleaved analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) front-end and a digital back-end providing equalization and clock-and-data recovery (CDR). The high power consumption can be attributed to the
high interleaving factor (40-50 channels), as well as the generation and distribution of low-jitter,
multi-phase clocks to these channels.
In this work, we aim to resolve these speed-power tradeoffs through novel analytical and circuit
design techniques that enable a threefold reduction in both the power efficiency and area consumption. In the first part, we introduce an RX design for short to medium reach links that is based
on NRZ signaling, thus avoiding an ADC-based architecture altogether, instead relying on power
and area efficient ‘analog’ linear equalizer (CTLE) and decision-feedback equalizer (DFE) implementations. The issue of increased channel loss associated with NRZ modulation is resolved with
design techniques that raise the loss equalization capability considerably with a minimal power
penalty. Further, a new DFE-CDR co-design is introduced that ensures robust operation for high
channel losses. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated through measurement results of a prototype RX chip fabricated in TSMC 28-nm digital CMOS technology. The
RX operates at 56 Gb/s and equalizes channel losses up to 25.5 dB with a bit-error-ratio (BER) <
10-12, while consuming only 16.84 mW from a 1-V supply, and occupies a core area of only 0.018
mm2
, representing a threefold improvement in both metrics compared to the prior art.
Second, we discuss the problem of clock jitter and its impact on the SNR in ADC-based topologies. We introduce a rigorous and intuitive approach that enables a simple estimation of the maximum jitter for a given SNR penalty, and show that this estimate considerably relaxes the specification set by the conventionally applied models, thus alleviating the power consumption associated
with the clock generation and distribution.Electrical engineeringAnalog DesignCircuit DesignHigh speed receiversIntegrated CircuitsSerdesWirelineenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4st400rqhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4st400rq/qt4st400rq.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0g04x2fb2026-07-30T06:31:15Zqt0g04x2fbGreek and Indo-European Syllabification: A Study from the Materiality of Writing to Phonological AnalysisSabattini, PaoloVine, Brent H.Yates, Anthony D.2026-07-27This dissertation investigates the historical development of Greek syllabification from Mycenaean through the Archaic first-millennium dialects, with particular attention to its implications for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) syllable structure. It develops a unified account of Greek syllabification by integrating linguistic, orthographic, metrical, and philological evidence within an Optimality-Theoretic (OT) framework.The study draws primarily on Mycenaean and Homeric Greek, the earliest attested stages of the language, while also incorporating comparative Indo-European evidence where relevant. Four complementary sources of evidence are examined: sound changes and synchronic phonological processes sensitive to syllable structure; Linear B orthography and inscriptional practices; metrical evidence from Homeric poetry; and observations preserved in the ancient grammatical tradition. Philological analysis and phonological modeling are employed jointly to reassess longstanding problems concerning Greek and PIE syllable structure.The dissertation reaches four main conclusions. First, a comprehensive reexamination of the evidence shows that Liquid Metathesis was not a productive feature of Mycenaean phonology. Second, the directionality of sonorant vocalization in Mycenaean is demonstrated to be governed by syllable well-formedness rather than occurring in free variation, supporting an analysis in terms of vowel epenthesis conditioned by syllabification. Third, Linear B orthography is shown to be compatible with an independently established account of Greek syllable structure based on cluster heterosyllabicity, allowing both regular spelling conventions and apparent exceptions to be derived within an OT model. Fourth, the comparison between Mycenaean and Homeric Greek indicates that the Greek linking vowel -o- originated as a phonologically conditioned repair strategy before being reanalyzed as a stem-level morphological process. A Stratal OT analysis accounts for this development and relates it to other changes in Greek syllable structure between the second and first millennia BCE.Taken together, these findings reconcile linguistic and orthographic evidence that has traditionally been regarded as contradictory and support a reconstruction of Greek syllable structure based on cluster heterosyllabicity. They further indicate that Mycenaean preserves several properties of PIE syllable structure that predate innovations attested in the first millennium BCE, demonstrating that linguistic, orthographic, metrical, and philological evidence can be integrated within a single account of the early history of Greek phonology.Classical studiesLinguisticsComparative literatureAegean StudiesGreek LinguisticsIndo-EuropeanMycenaeanOptimality TheoryPhonologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0g04x2fbhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0g04x2fb/qt0g04x2fb.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5jj175kx2026-07-29T06:44:48Zqt5jj175kxEngineering Platinum-based Nanocatalysts for Proton-exchange-membrane Fuel Cells in Heavy-duty ApplicationsTsai, Yu-HanHuang, Yu2026-07-27Proton-exchange-membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) directly convert chemical energy into electricity with water as the only byproduct, providing a promising pathway toward a zero-emission future. Their commercial success has been demonstrated in light-duty vehicles (LDVs) exemplified by the Toyota Mirai. Compared with battery electric vehicles (BEVs), fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) offer distinct advantages for heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs), including shorter refueling time, higher payload capacity, and reduced weight penalty. However, the harsh operating conditions and prolonged service life of HDVs impose stringent requirements on PEMFC durability, while the increasing demand for Pt catalyst calls for reduced Pt utilization and scalable manufacturing. Therefore, developing highly durable, cost-effective, and industrially scalable Pt-based electrocatalysts is critical for the widespread commercialization of PEMFCs in heavy-duty transportation.
Chapter 2 presents a graphene-nanopocket protected Pt nanoparticle (Pt@Gnp) that enhances durability by suppressing Pt dissolution, particle coalescence, and ionomer poisoning during accelerated-stress-tests (ASTs). The resulting fuel cell exhibits only 1.1% rated power loss after 90,000 AST cycles, corresponding to a projected lifetime exceeding 200,000 h, more than seven times the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) ultimate target for heavy-duty applications (30,000 h). Chapter 3 introduces a unique design of Pt nanoparticles embedded with cerium oxide clusters (CeOx@Pt), in which strong CeOx-Pt interactions suppress Pt dissolution, migration, and particle growth. The catalyst satisfies the DOE heavy-duty end-of-life (EOL) performance target of 1.07 A/cm2 at 0.7 V after 90,000 AST cycles at a low total-PGM-loading of approximately 0.1 mgPGM/cm2, reducing Pt cost by 70% relative to the DOE Million-Mile Fuel Cell Truck (M2FCT) Consortium target. Chapter 4 develops a laser ablation-based synthesis strategy for Pt nanocatalysts that increases production throughput by 10-folds compared with conventional wet-chemical synthesis. The rapid heating and cooling inherent to laser ablation also create metastable nanotwinned structures that enhance catalyst durability during fuel cell operation.
Overall, the work presented in this dissertation demonstrates complementary catalyst design and synthesis strategies that simultaneously improve durability, reduce Pt utilization, and enable scalable catalyst manufacturing. These advances provide practical pathways toward the commercialization of PEMFCs for heavy-duty transportation and contribute to the broader transition toward sustainable, zero-emission transportation.EnergyApplied physicsMaterials scienceNanotechnologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jj175kxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5jj175kx/qt5jj175kx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt36q672b32026-07-29T06:44:42Zqt36q672b3Ozonolysis and DealkenylationDworkin, JeremyKwon, Ohyun2026-07-24About 2.7% of the 187 years spent researching ozone are encapsulated in this dissertation. The main goal of the research conducted was to improve dealkenylation, an emerging organic chemistry method for synthesis through C(sp3)–C(sp2) bond scission. The first generation of dealkenylation required the use of ozone to generate a high-energy peroxide intermediate which enabled radical cascades to break bonds and create new, valuable products. A second generation was developed through this work to bypass the ozone requirement and thereby diversify the chemical space available to dealkenylation. Not only did this second generation solve issues regarding incompatibilities of alkenes with ozone, but also it broadened the products available after radical functionalization. Further research into the ozonolysis reaction led to the development of a predictive tool to quantify the dealkenylation peroxide intermediate and provide a more complete understanding of the overall transformation.
Additionally, two new transformations involving ozone were uncovered. The first applies dealkenylation to cycloalkanones to access their 1-carbon deleted analoges. Samarium iodide was the key to both initiate the radical cascade and to reform the ring after carbon excision. The second is the ozonolysis of a C–C sigma-bond. The bridging C–C sigma-bond of a bicyclo[1.1.0]butane and a bicyclo[2.1.0]pentane was activated to enable radical addition of ozone. Computational studies predicted two mechanistic pathways, of which the major supports the formation of a 1,2,3-trioxane, which has never been realized in a flask.
Chapters one, two, and four originate from review articles that provide background on the field of peroxide chemistry (chapter one), and present day dealkenylation (chapter two and chapter four). Chapters two and four are each included with permission from the first authors. Chapter three introduces the second generation of ozone-free dealkenylation. Chapter five offers solutions to enable ozonation of some compound classes previously thought to be incompatible. Chapter six discusses the experimental work completed to generate the dataset for the machine learning model to quantify ozonolysis products. Chapter seven provides a proof of concept for the dealkenylative ring contraction strategy. Finally, chapter eight reveals the first ozonolysis of C–C sigma-bonds.
Overall, this research advances the dealkenylation methodology, expanding into ozone-free techniques, predictive tools, and new atom-editing strategies. This work culminates with the discovery of C–C sigma-bond ozonolysis.ChemistryOrganic chemistryPhysical chemistryDealkenylationMolecular EditingOzoneOzonolysisPeroxideapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/36q672b3https://escholarship.org/content/qt36q672b3/qt36q672b3.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2xz8x8ph2026-07-28T06:37:51Zqt2xz8x8phTherapist Missteps in Youth Mental Health ServicesPark, Hyun SeonChorpita, Bruce F2026-07-21Treatment engagement challenges are among the most persistent barriers to effective youth mental health treatment, with a substantial proportion of youth and families terminating services before achieving expected clinical gains (Becker & Chorpita, 2023). Despite growing recognition of the multidimensional, dynamic, and transactional nature of treatment engagement, relatively little is known about the within-session therapist behaviors that may occur in the context of and inadvertently contribute to engagement challenges. This dissertation examined therapist “missteps,” or inadvertent, less optimal, or noncollaborative therapist behaviors, across two studies using observational data from the Reaching Families Study, a multisite cluster-randomized trial focused on improving use of evidence to target low treatment engagement in publicly funded youth mental health settings (Chorpita et al., 2025).
Study 1 sought to first understand how therapists misstep by examining the occurrence of missteps across several key contextual factors, including session composition, the recipient of the misstep, and the surrounding in-session therapist behaviors. Therapist missteps were prevalent, occurring in over half of recorded therapy sessions with an average of approximately 2.5 missteps per session. In family sessions, missteps were most frequently directed at the youth. Advice-giving emerged as the most prevalent type of therapist misstep to occur across all session types. Descriptively, approximately 38.1% of observed missteps occurred following another misstep occurrence (10.6%) or in the absence of an identifiable evidence-based technique (27.5%). These findings suggest that missteps may be a common occurrence when delivering care, particularly in the context of engagement challenges, and may be more vulnerable to occur during unstructured or uncertain moments in a session.
The first study also sought to examine when therapists may misstep by examining associations between misstep occurrences and factors related to therapist preparedness. Findings suggest that neither the timing of supervision relative to treatment nor the presence and quality of a treatment plan established for the session were credibly associated with total misstep frequency. These findings converge with later findings in Study 2, which indicated that the presence of a treatment plan did not appear to moderate the relationship between misstep frequency and average practice extensiveness, an aggregate indicator of the overall quality of treatment delivered in the session. Together, these findings suggest that identifying what to do in the next session alone may not be sufficient in supporting therapists from engaging in inadvertent missteps. However, provision of comprehensive, coordinated decision-making supports for the detection, identification, and targeted intervention of engagement challenges (i.e., the Coordinated Knowledge System, CKS) was associated with substantially lower expected misstep rates in Study 1. This robust effect remained in exploratory analyses even after accounting for the therapist’s optimal practice quality in the session (i.e., the maximum practice extensiveness across all practices delivered in the session).
Study 2 extended these findings by examining what happens in the therapy session when missteps occur. Misstep frequency was credibly associated (i.e., in Bayesian estimation, displaying sufficient evidence that the effect is real and in a consistent direction given the posterior distribution of the parameter) with the therapist’s overall treatment quality for the session (i.e., average practice extensiveness) in the originally proposed analyses, however, the credible interval marginally excluded zero and should be interpreted with caution. Exploratory analyses using the therapist’s maximum practice extensiveness revealed a credible association with misstep occurrences, in which increases in the therapist’s practice quality were associated with decreases in misstep occurrences in the session. Misstep occurrences were also credibly associated with a modest decrease in session-level engagement for both youth and caregivers, after accounting for baseline engagement challenges, maximum practice extensiveness, site, and study condition. Variance decomposition of youth and caregiver session-level engagement also revealed that although the therapist level accounted for significant variance (23.0%) in youth session engagement, caregiver session engagement was more organized at the client level (22.3%). Together, these findings reinforce the conceptualization of engagement as a dynamic, state-like phenomenon that is co-constructed within the session rather than trait-like features of clients, and position therapist behaviors as an important component of session-to-session engagement.
Overall, these studies found that therapist missteps occur routinely in youth publicly funded mental health settings and are associated with measurable changes in session-level engagement. Additionally, provision of coordinated clinical supports aimed at supporting therapists with navigating well-documented “blind curves” when delivering care in complex contexts, as well as extensive delivery of an evidence-based practice, were associated with expected decreases in misstep occurrences. These findings continue to support the theoretical framing of therapist missteps as predictable features of treatment delivery and center a locus of intervention that shifts away from the therapist’s intrinsic traits and qualities and towards scaffolding flexible, matched, and coordinated clinical decision-making supports to improve care for youth and families.PsychologyMental healthHealth care managementengagementmisstepyouth mental healthapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xz8x8phhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2xz8x8ph/qt2xz8x8ph.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt77c4n9852026-07-28T06:37:46Zqt77c4n985Boundaries and Defects in Quantum Field Theory and GravityKim, SeolhwaKraus, Per J.2026-07-23Boundaries and defects host localized interactions of the dynamic degrees of freedom and provide the certain conditions on the field at the location of them. In guage theories and gravity, the dynamics of the large gauge degrees of freedom is localized on the boundary and are best described within the covariant phase space formalism using the symplectic form and boundary action. When the gravitational effects are strong, these large gauge degrees of freedom dress the on-shell matter action, which can be described using Hamiltonian formulation by integrating out these edge modes. We present the two efficient methods of computing the symplectic form associated with the boundary degrees of freedom. We then consider the near-extremal charged black holes in 4d, where the gravitational effects are enhanced at low temperature and study the Hawking radiation at near-horizon AdS2 using the Hamiltonian formulation, with emphasis on comparing this to the JT gravity. Extending this perspective to study of defects, we develop a Lagrangian based method for computing the higher structure of non-invertible defects and compute the associators of the duality and triality defects in the 4d Maxwell theory. We then consider a family of codimension-1 non-conformal defects in the free non-compact boson theory and relate the two descriptions—localized interaction and discontinuous relations and study its scaling behavior and effects in spectrum.PhysicsApplied physicsQuantum physicsAdS/CFTBlack HolesBoundaryDefectsNon-invertible SymmetriesQuantum Gravityapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/77c4n985https://escholarship.org/content/qt77c4n985/qt77c4n985.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7pz4q1642026-07-28T06:37:41Zqt7pz4q164Positive and Negative Emotion Persistence as Transdiagnostic Measures of Psychological Well-BeingLosiewicz, Olivia MarieCraske, Michelle G2026-07-24Understanding emotion dynamics is important in order to ascertain transdiagnostic mechanisms underlying anxiety and mood disorders. Emotional inertia, the stability of emotion over time, and emotion network density, a measure of the interconnectedness of emotions, both represent the persistence of emotions over time. Previous literature suggests that emotional persistence, particularly of negative emotions, is related to depression, anxiety, and difficulty with emotion regulation. However, this research is limited in that studies examining idiographic network density, longitudinal relationships, and transdiagnostic, continuous, or objective outcome measures are scarce. Additionally, existing studies present mixed findings on the implications of positive emotional persistence. This dissertation contains three studies designed to address these shortcomings and examine relationships among emotional persistence and transdiagnostic psychological well-being in adults with moderate-to-severe depression, with the ultimate goal of illuminating mechanisms underlying anxiety and depressive disorders such that current treatments may be improved.Study 1 examined both cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships among emotional inertia, emotion network density, and self-reported well-being. Inertia and density were both calculated using self-reported affect ratings from ecological momentary assessment (EMA) surveys administered five times per day in two eight-day epochs. Inertia and density were calculated separately for negative and positive affect. Positive contemporaneous network density was positively associated with well-being six weeks later. Positive emotional inertia was inversely associated with well-being six weeks later. Neither negative inertia nor negative network density was associated with subsequent well-being, and emotional persistence was not related to concurrent reports of well-being.Study 2 examined cross-sectional associations between emotional persistence and heart-rate variability. Inertia and density were again calculated using EMA surveys, this time from three eight-day epochs. Heart-rate variability was measured via Apple Watch both during the day and at bedrest throughout all three epochs. Negative contemporaneous network density was inversely associated with both median daytime and median bedrest heart-rate variability. That is, participants with more densely connected negative emotions demonstrated lower heart-rate variability. Positive emotional persistence was not related to heart-rate variability.Study 3 examined relationships between emotional persistence and linguistic indicators of well-being. Measures of emotional persistence were the same as in Study 2. Natural linguistic processing was used to analyze transcripts of a ten-minute structured interview where participants answered questions about their previous week. Probability of both positive and negative sentiment was obtained using natural linguistic processing, and tendency towards positive sentiment was operationalized as the participants’ average difference between probability of positive and negative sentiment. Tendency towards positive sentiment was examined in relation to positive and negative emotional persistence. No metric of emotional persistence was associated with linguistic sentiment. However, participants who reported higher levels of average positive affect via EMA demonstrated higher tendency towards positive sentiment during the interview.Taken together, these findings provide insight into the implications of positive and negative emotional persistence. Emotional inertia and emotion network density seem to represent different, and at times opposing, presentations of emotional persistence. Broadly, this dissertation supports the literature suggesting that denser negative emotion networks are maladaptive and denser positive emotions reflect better psychological well-being. Contrasting results for negative and positive emotional persistence suggest that persistence of differently valenced emotions may relate to different components of psychological and physiological well-being. This study also highlights the methodological challenges of using objective measures of emotional functioning such as natural linguistic processing. Future research should continue to address these methodological limitations and investigate the mechanisms underlying the relationship between emotional persistence and psychological well-being to inform clinical interventions.Clinical psychologyMental healthPsychobiologyPhysiological psychologyDepressionecological momentary assessmentnegative emotionnetwork analysisPositive emotionapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7pz4q164https://escholarship.org/content/qt7pz4q164/qt7pz4q164.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt34m6k6ck2026-07-28T06:37:36Zqt34m6k6ckThe Beginning of Chinese Overseas Travel and Settlement: Merchants, Officials, and Trade Communities in Maritime Asia (9th–12th c. CE)Sattler, Gregoryvon Glahn, Richard2026-07-15This dissertation examines the early history of Chinese people traveling and migrating overseas (c. 800–1127 CE). Despite the political, cultural, and economic significance of ethnic Chinese communities across much of the world today, as well as international interest in China’s involvement in the greater domain of maritime Asia, very few attempts have been made to understand the origins of Chinese people living and traveling beyond Chinese borders. Through the examination of primary sources written in Classical Chinese, Kanbun, Arabic, Old Malay, and Old Javanese, as well as the material record of shipwrecks and former port cities, this dissertation explores the earliest records of Chinese people living and trading outside of China, the regions where they were active, the communities they formed or joined, their reasons for traveling long distances, and how their migration was viewed both within and beyond China. Such an analysis reveals that Chinese people were active across a wide region that spanned from Kyoto to Baghdad, that they cooperated closely with native inhabitants and rulers in the areas they traveled to, and that they frequently intermarried with the local populace. Even during such early times, it is evident that they formed cohesive region-based networks, that much of their success depended on informal connections with political leaders within and beyond China, and that settlement overseas was determined by their own interests and initiatives. Such a study demonstrates how Chinese migrants and their descendants became a vital component of the cosmopolitan entrepôts that characterize the history of exchange across maritime Asia over the last millennium.HistoryEast Asian studiesSoutheast Asian studiesChinadiasporasEast AsiaMaritime AsiaOverseas ChineseSoutheast Asiaapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/34m6k6ckhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt34m6k6ck/qt34m6k6ck.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1r2627ss2026-07-28T06:37:31Zqt1r2627ssConsidering Hippocampal Inflammation in the Pathogenesis of Cognitive Deficits and Symptoms in Psychotic DisordersRuby, EugeneMalaspina, DoloresKarlsgodt, Katherine H2026-07-23Accumulating evidence suggests a neuroinflammatory subtype of psychotic illness. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) can indirectly assess neuroinflammation via measurements of neurometabolite biomarkers: myo-inositol (mI) for glia; choline (Cho) for membrane turnover; creatine (Cr) for energy metabolism; N-acetylaspartate (NAA) for neural integrity; and glutamate and glutamine (Glx) for glutaminergic neurotransmission. Previous MRS studies of psychoses show mixed findings, which could reflect most: 1) only comparing metabolite levels between cases and controls rather than also examining associations with symptoms and cognitive deficits; 2) intermixing different psychoses (e.g., schizophrenia vs. affective psychoses) rather than stratifying them, a common research practice that echoes transdiagnostic approaches like NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which posits similar cellular pathologies across diagnostic categories for deficits with neurobehavioral functions. The present study used hippocampal proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (¹H-MRSI) and measured correlations of neurometabolite concentrations with MATRICS cognitive scores and symptom levels (five-factor PANSS and Hamilton Depression and Young Mania Scales) in 26 healthy, 22 non-psychotic affective, and 33 psychotic participants (including 20 schizophrenia and 13 affective psychosis). Despite similar metabolite levels across groups, affective psychosis showed a strong association between increased mI (glia) and worse attention (ρ=-.847, p=.016), and a moderate association between increased Cho (membrane turnover) and mania (ρ=.654, p=.015). In schizophrenia, elevated levels of PANSS activation (behavioral dyscontrol) factor were related to reductions in all neurometabolites (NAA, Cr, Cho, mI, Glx) (p’s<.05), robustly for mI (ρ=-.842, p=.0002). Between-group comparisons suggested distinct cellular abnormalities across diagnostic categories for social cognition and reasoning deficits, activation, and mood symptoms, but similar abnormalities for negative symptoms and PANSS autistic preoccupation (disorganized) factor. These findings suggest neuroinflammatory underpinnings for attention deficits and manic symptoms in affective psychosis patients with greater severity of these clinical features. Results in schizophrenia indicate a process causing widespread multisystem cellular deficits and substantial glial loss for patients with higher levels of activation. Both distinct and similar cellular pathologies were suggested for cognitive and symptom domains across psychotic vs. non-psychotic disorders and affective vs. non-affective psychoses. The differences support categorizing disorders and stratifying different psychoses in research rather than fully abandoning diagnostic labels for transdiagnostic approaches.NeurosciencesCognitive psychologyPsychologyPathologycognitionmagnetic resonance spectroscopyMATRICS Consensus Cognitive Batteryneuroinflammationpsychosisschizophreniaapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1r2627sshttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1r2627ss/qt1r2627ss.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8j4586t22026-07-22T06:33:07Zqt8j4586t2Evaluation of a Psychoeducation Program to Reduce Depression Stigma Among Korean AmericansKim, Eun YoungBrauer, Eden2026-07-20Background: Depression is highly prevalent among Korean Americans, and stigma continues to contribute to delayed help-seeking and persistent symptoms. Help-seeking behaviors are often influenced by family members and social networks. Culturally tailored, evidence-based interventions targeting these groups remain limited. Objectives: This quality improvement project aimed to evaluate the impact of a single-session, culturally tailored, Korean-language psychoeducation program in reducing depression stigma among Korean American caregivers, family members, and friends of individuals with depression. Methods: The quality improvement project used a one-group pretest–posttest design. The psychoeducational program was delivered across four cohorts, with two cohorts participating in in-person sessions and two cohorts participating in virtual sessions. Korean American adults aged 18 years and older who self-identified as caregivers, family members, or friends of someone with depression were invited to participate through a Korean church in Los Angeles. Participant demographic data included self-reported history of depression, with 35.5% of participants reporting a personal history of depression. The 90-minute session included education on depression and culturally relevant myths, supportive communication practice, and small-group discussion. Depression stigma was measured using the Depression Stigma Scale (DSS; personal and perceived subscales). Pre–post changes in DSS scores were analyzed with paired t tests. Results: Personal stigma scores decreased following the intervention (mean difference = 6.6, SD = 4.4, p < .001, Cohen's d = 1.5), and perceived stigma scores also showed a reduction (mean difference = 3.2, SD = 6.6, p = .012, Cohen's d = 0.5). Conclusion: The culturally tailored psychoeducational program was associated with reductions in both personal and perceived depression stigma among the social networks of Korean Americans with depression. The findings suggest that a brief, community-based, and culturally relevant approach may offer a feasible approach to addressing stigma-related attitudes, which has been identified as one contributor to delayed help-seeking among Korean Americans. The initial results support the importance of future initiatives with larger samples and longer follow-up to assess whether observed changes are sustained and whether the program can be implemented successfully in other community settings.NursingEducational psychologyMental healthapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j4586t2https://escholarship.org/content/qt8j4586t2/qt8j4586t2.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1959j62j2026-07-22T06:33:02Zqt1959j62jDigital Oppression of Black GirlhoodHenderson, DomoniqueWray-Lake, Laura2026-07-20Digital anti-Black girlhood is a complex form of multi-layered oppression enacted in digital spaces deeply rooted in sexist and racist stereotypes specifically targeting adolescent Black girls. Black teenage girls are subjected to experiencing digital anti-Black girlhood through posts, comments, and direct messages from peers, adults, and strangers, which may negatively shape their wellness, self-perception, and self-esteem. Although growing research focuses on online racism, there is minimal empirical research investigating gendered racism intersectionally on social media experienced by Black girls qualitatively. Thus, it is imperative to explore gendered racism in online spaces. This qualitative study employed constructivist grounded theory, photovoice, and Black Girl Youth Participatory Action Research (BGYPAR) to explore their experiences and implications of racialized sexism on social media. One-on-one virtual semi-structured interviews were conducted with a diverse sample of N=41 Black girls and non-binary individuals in the U.S., ages 14-18. Data was analyzed inductively via initial and post- coding memos, open coding, focused coding, analytic memos, and team discussions. Digital anti-Black girlhood is detrimental to the well-being and development of Black girls. Identifying how racialized sexism emerges for teenage Black girls is an initial step to dismantling it. Social work practitioners and scholars can combat gendered racism in digital spaces by developing interventions, policies, and educating youth and adults about this form of online violence. Furthermore, social workers can develop tools to support youth in pathways to socio-emotionally responding to and processing distress stemming from digital anti-Black girlhood.Social workWomens studiesEarly childhood educationBlack studiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1959j62jhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1959j62j/qt1959j62j.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt81j7k5bm2026-07-21T06:32:56Zqt81j7k5bmBioorthogonal host–guest pairs for labeling biological systemsHammer, PrairieSletten, Ellen M.2026-07-16Selective recognition within a biological system is a key challenge in the sphere of chemical biology. Most often, it is achieved by leveraging abiotic functionalities that react covalently through a bioorthogonal chemical reaction. These reactions can achieve high rates and selectivity, yet their translation to complex organisms is hindered by their reliance on large and unstable reactive partners, which cannot be metabolically incorporated for the bioorthogonal chemical reporter strategy. Inspired by the need for small and stable chemical reporters, we turned to an alternative approach, harnessing selective noncovalent, or host–guest, chemistry to achieve bioorthogonal detection. This strategy, deemed bioorthogonal complexation, involves stable binding partners and rapid binding events, making it primed for use in complex biological systems. This dissertation presents the benefits of noncovalent interactions for bioorthogonal labeling, beginning with the design and in cellulo applications of a bioorthogonal host–guest system, and concluding with an investigation of noncovalent nanomaterial formulations for in vivo imaging.Chapter One is a perspective on current applications of host–guest chemistry for labeling biological systems. Common host–guest pairs are discussed, as well as their applications in detection of biomolecules, delivery of imaging agents, and labeling of unnatural chemical reporter groups. The challenges of each of these techniques is discussed, including the need for new hosts designed for selective binding within a biological environment.Chapter Two describes the design, synthesis, and binding investigations of a phenanthrene-based designer bioorthogonal host (PhenDBH) that complexes perfluoroaromatic guests. By designing PhenDBH around an ideal chemical reporter, a new approach to host–guest development is introduced, in which rare-to-biology noncovalent interactions dictate host design and binding selectivity. This chapter also discusses the interplay of arene-perfluoroarene interactions, hydrogen bonding, and preorganization in organic and aqueous solvents, highlighting the solvent-dependent contributions of each interaction. These investigations set the stage for use of the designer host–guest system for labeling within a biological system.Chapter Three reports the translation of PhenDBH–perfluoroarene host–guest pairs for application in the bioorthogonal chemical reporter strategy. The modification of both host and guest for use in biology is discussed, and perfluoroaromatics are successfully metabolically incorporated into mammalian cell glycans. Then, PhenDBH is used to selectively detect the perfluoroaromatic chemical reporters, excelling at low concentrations and low labeling times. This work represents the first use of a host–guest system specifically designed for the bioorthogonal chemical reporter strategy.Chapter Four presents applications of PhenDBH in labeling a versatile perfluoroaryl azide chemical reporter. The unique reactivity of the perfluoroaryl azide group presents opportunities in bioorthogonal chemistry, bioorthogonal complexation, and photo crosslinking. This work lays the groundwork for use of a trifunctional chemical reporter for iterative labeling steps, as well as harnessing each labeling technique to address the challenges of the others.Chapter Five summarizes attempts at developing a dendrimer-based synthetic lectin for detection of chemical reporters. An azide-functionalized fluorescent dendrimer is developed, and attempts are made towards a dendrimer conjugated with PhenDBH, which would allow for multivalent binding and improved water solubility of PhenDBH. The azide-functionalized dendrimer is found to excel at bioorthogonal chemistry, even at low concentrations, suggesting that functional dendrimers could address challenges of bioorthogonal labeling.Chapter Six details an investigation of soft material nanoformulations for delivery of a super-hydrophobic shortwave infrared emissive fluorophore. The hydrophobicity and unique noncovalent interactions of the fluorophore are assets that enable optimization and comparison of four types of formulations. Through development of the fluorophore and the formulations, we present a new strategy for developing bright, biocompatible nanoformulations.Chapter Seven discusses lessons learned in the assessment of binding affinities of moderate affinity, low solubility host–guest pairs. Special consideration is given to the challenges and methods of determining binding affinities in water. These challenges allow for the development of new techniques for assessing host self-assembly and for managing the low solubility of different host–guest systems.ChemistryMolecular biologyBiochemistryBioengineeringpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/81j7k5bmetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6pz7b2t92026-07-21T06:32:50Zqt6pz7b2t9A Counting and Accountability for Peace: Conflict Justice and Civil War ViolencevanSonnenberg, Erik ClintonGeddes, BarbaraSteinberg, Richard2026-07-16Among more than 120 countries to endure an average 15 years of civil conflict since 1989, more than 85 have turned to legal interventions to punish and/or pardon armed actors. Within this period, civil wars have killed more than 10 million persons—roughly 90% civilians—dying mostly at the hands of government forces. As peace- and policymakers grapple with equally historic 140 ongoing armed conflicts and hundreds of thousands of annual fatalities—paralleling democratic backsliding’s re-reversed of the democratic third-wave and (transitional) justice cascade that brought both to three of four nations—transitional justice’s 21st-century conflation of justice for (victims of) past repressors amid political transitions, with wartime prosecutions and amnesties of tens and hundreds of thousands of fighters, respectively, has confounded both phenomena. Peacemakers and democracy advocates have been left without internally or externally valid evidence on justice to guide peace and democratization. This project’s conceptual point of departure decouples transitional justice—trials, amnesties, truth commissions, and reparations, designed to help post-authoritarian polities remedy past repression and consolidate democracy and human rights amid political transitions—from what I call conflict justice—trials, amnesties, and other interventions targeting combatants and leaders with (un)accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other conflict violence. After reviewing civil war research and transitional justice’s conflation of accountability for repressive political regimes with the wholly distinct acts, actors, processes, and objectives of wartime justice, I propose a relational taxonomy of conflict justice to decouple these fields—and stimulate interdisciplinary, especially empirical research into wartime justice—its causes, components, and consequences. Chapter 4 proposes theoretical pathways through which conflict justice trials, amnesties, and connected policies may relate to (non-)state armed networks, their members, patterns and repertoires of victimization, and responses to forces of conflict justice. The chapter closes with statistical analyses of disaggregated forms of conflict justice and violence globally. Chapter 5 further employs statistical network analyses: (re)estimating undocumented casualties in Peru’s and Colombia’s armed conflicts, before briefly outlining continuing research into dozens of Colombian conflict justice programs and their impacts on spatiotemporal and other patterns of conflict violence.Political sciencePeace studiesInternational relationsLatin American studiesWorld historyConflict JusticeConflict StudiesInternational Law and Human RightsLatin American PoliticsStistical Analysis of ViolenceTransitional Justiceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pz7b2t9https://escholarship.org/content/qt6pz7b2t9/qt6pz7b2t9.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt47q1j4072026-07-21T06:32:44Zqt47q1j407Multivariate neurobiological profiles of symptomatology across the psychosis spectrumWang, HaleyKarlsgodt, Katherine H2026-07-16Psychotic spectrum disorders, including schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder with psychotic features, represent complex neuropsychiatric conditions characterized by overlapping symptomatology and substantial clinical heterogeneity. Traditional categorical diagnostic approaches often fail to capture the nuanced neurobiological mechanisms in these disorders, particularly during early psychosis when diagnostic instability is high. Dimensional approaches, exemplified by frameworks such as the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), offer complementary perspectives by examining symptom dimensions that transcend diagnostic categories, potentially revealing shared neurobiological correlates and novel understanding of symptomatology.
Multimodal neuroimaging provides unprecedented opportunities to investigate brain-behavior relationships across multiple levels of neural organization. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) enables examination of white matter microstructural integrity, resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) captures intrinsic network organization, and task-based fMRI during reward paradigms allows investigation of specific motivational processes. Integrating these complementary neuroimaging modalities with both categorical and dimensional analytic approaches provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the multifaceted nature of psychosis spectrum disorders.
This dissertation presents three studies employing multimodal neuroimaging to examine neurobiological correlates across psychosis spectrum disorders. Study 1 utilized DTI in two independent early psychosis cohorts, revealing through categorical analysis that affective psychosis patients showed reduced fractional anisotropy compared to non-affective psychosis patients, while dimensional Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis identified a transdiagnostic latent component linking widespread white matter alterations to specific negative symptoms. Study 2 employed rs-fMRI in early psychosis patients, finding no categorical group differences but identifying through PLS analysis increased between-network connectivity involving sensory-motor, default mode, and subcortical regions, associated with cognitive rigidity and arousal dysregulation across diagnoses. Study 3 implemented reward task fMRI in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients, demonstrating categorical differences with bipolar patients showing orbitofrontal hyperactivation while schizophrenia patients exhibited blunted responses, and dimensional analysis revealing enhanced ventral striatum-orbitofrontal connectivity associated with mania symptoms across both groups. These findings demonstrate that psychosis spectrum disorders arise from multiple, distinct yet complementary patterns of neural dysregulation, supporting the integration of categorical and dimensional approaches to inform and advance more biologically-grounded understanding of psychopathology.Clinical psychologyNeurosciencesMedical imagingCognitive psychologyBipolar DisorderMultivariate analysisNeuroimagingPsychopathologyPsychosisSchizophreniaapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/47q1j407https://escholarship.org/content/qt47q1j407/qt47q1j407.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt66p8w3xx2026-07-21T06:32:40Zqt66p8w3xxDifferential responses of the anaerobic oxidation of methane to nitrate amendment in coastal wetland sedimentsVetushko, GeorgeTreude, Tina2026-07-17Wetlands are the largest natural contributor of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere. The anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM) is a major sink to methane in coastal wetland sediments and is typically sulfate-dependent. Anthropogenic activity may feed nitrogen pollution into nearby coastal wetlands yet its effect on AOM is poorly understood. This study utilized isotope-labeling experiments with in vitro sediment (0–3 cm) slurry incubations to identify how nitrate in nitrogen pollution may affect coastal wetland AOM. Nitrate generally suppressed AOM, but its effect was pathway-specific: while sulfate-dependent AOM was suppressed, nitrate/nitrite and sulfate-independent AOM (e.g. iron and humics substances-dependent AOM) was not. Overall, nitrate/nitrite and sulfate-independent AOM potentially accounted for over half of AOM across the nitrate-amended incubations. Contrary to prior assumptions that sulfate-dependent AOM dominates in coastal wetland sediments, these findings suggest that nitrate pollution may shift dominant AOM pathways to nitrate/nitrite and sulfate-independent AOM.GeochemistrySedimentary geologyEnvironmental scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/66p8w3xxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt66p8w3xx/qt66p8w3xx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9ph6t8gr2026-07-21T06:32:35Zqt9ph6t8grMeasurement of the Strangeness Production Ratio of Cascade Baryons to K-Short Mesons in Proton-Proton Collisions at 200 GeV Center of Mass Energy with sPHENIXMarshall, Thomas RossHuang, Huan Z2026-07-16Collisions of heavy nuclei at ultra relativistic energies are used to study properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), a state of matter theorized to be the state of the universe approximately one microsecond after the Big Bang. This requires an enormous temperature exceeding 1012 K, and results in deconfinement of quarks and gluons from their constituent hadrons. In the extremely high temperatures created by the fireball from these collisions, pair production of strange quarks is observed to be enhanced relative to its production in smaller collision systems. The increased strangeness present in the QGP medium persists through chemical freeze out and results in an enhanced yield of strange hadrons, with strange baryons (hyperons) demonstrating greater enhancement than strange mesons. This produces an enhanced ratio of hyperon to meson production in the final state.The sPHENIX Experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL) Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is a next generation experiment designed to probe the innerworkings of the QGP through study of p + p, Au + Au, and O + O collisions at √ s = 200 GeV. With the sPHENIX p + p data collected in 2025, an important baseline measurement of strange hadron yields can be performed in preparation for analysis of the Au+Au data collected the same year. While work to understand absolute efficiencies in the tracking detectors of sPHENIX is ongoing, measurements of individual particle pT spectra still await the final calibration and validation of the sPHENIX track system. Particle ratio measurements, however, allow for an analysis where many of these effects are found to cancel and many of the shortcomings that persist in the tracking framework can be revealed and investigated further. In particular, measurements of the (Ξ− + Ξ¯+)/2K0 S production ratio have been the focus of several recent results at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). An sPHENIX measurement of this quantity would provide an excellent avenue for comparison of strangeness production at RHIC and LHC energies.Using a small sample of the total sPHENIX p + p luminosity from Run 2025, a measurement of the (Ξ− + Ξ¯+)/2K0 S ratio as a function of the particle of interest’s (referred to as the mother to distinguish from the decay daughter tracks) transverse momentum, pT , is performed. This result is among the first tracking-based analyses in the sPHENIX experiment. The measured ratios are in general agreement with the published STAR data at RHIC and ALICE data at the LHC, although significant deviations are observed at the low pT region where tracking of low pT particles in sPHENIX still suffers from significant distortions in the TPC and misalignment between the TPC and silicon detectors. The current status of sPHENIX tracking-based weak-decay particle topological reconstruction is reported and areas of future improvement and investigation for sPHENIX in the next phase of its physics analyses are discussed.Nuclear physicsPhysicsParticle physicsEnergyPlasma physicsQuark Gluon PlasmaRHICsPHENIXStrangenessapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ph6t8grhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9ph6t8gr/qt9ph6t8gr.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt83q2t9h82026-07-20T06:44:42Zqt83q2t9h8Latina Laboring Bodies: Intergenerational Narratives of Labor, Memory, and Survival.López, Alicia InésValenzuela jr., AbelGaspar de Alba, Alicia2026-07-14This project examines the lived experiences of Latina-identifying working-class women to explore how racialized, gendered, and cultural expectations shape the forms, meanings, and invisibility of their labor. Drawing on oral histories, testimonios, and memory work, this project centers the experiences of a Latina mother and daughter to reveal how labor is learned, inherited, and reproduced. This research argues that Latina women’s labor extends beyond formal employment and must be understood through the everyday practices of care and sacrifice that are rendered invisible. By situating personal collective memories and narratives as legitimate sites of knowledge, this thesis demonstrates how women's narratives expose the structure that relies upon their labor while simultaneously obscuring its value.Ethnic studiesGender studiesLabor economicsGenderLaborLatinaOral HistoryTestimoniosWorking-Classapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/83q2t9h8https://escholarship.org/content/qt83q2t9h8/qt83q2t9h8.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2xn0h3932026-07-20T06:44:37Zqt2xn0h393Understanding How Metabolism Shapes The Human Cerebral CortexSoto, Jose AlbertoBhaduri, Aparna2026-07-14The metabolic programs supporting human cortical development remain poorly characterized despite their relevance to inborn errors of metabolism and neurodevelopmental disorders. Radial glia, the primary neural stem cells of the developing cortex, must coordinate rapid proliferation, biosynthesis, and differentiation, placing specific demands on metabolic pathways. Understanding which metabolic enzymes regulate radial glia specification and how they interface with gene regulatory programs remains as an unresolved question. This dissertation addresses it through two complementary approaches: a comprehensive atlas of metabolism across human cortical development, and a genome-scale functional screen identifying metabolic regulators of cell fate.To generate a metabolic atlas, we applied Seahorse Assays, nutrient tracing, metabolomics, and immunofluorescence to 31 human primary cortical tissue samples spanning gestational weeks 6 through 20, organized into five developmental periods. A parallel atlas in cortical organoids at matched timepoints enabled systematic benchmarking of in vitro metabolic fidelity. Across both systems, the atlas revealed an unexpected peak in glycolytic and pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) activity during late neurogenesis, coinciding with peak outer radial glia abundance. Depletion of extracellular glucose, pharmacological inhibition of PPP enzymes G6PD and transketolase, and genetic knockdown in FACS-isolated radial glia each produced convergent shifts in cell fate, increasing outer radial glia, inhibitory neurons, and astrocytes. Ribose supplementation, but not antioxidants or nucleosides, rescued gene expression programs and cell type composition, implicating the non-oxidative PPP branch as a specific regulator of radial glia maturation. To extend these findings, a pooled CRISPRi screening platform was developed in cortical organoid chimeroids. Forty-five metabolic gene candidates prioritized by integrating atlas metabolite dynamics, genetic associations with neurodevelopmental disorders, and organoid radial glia expression were screened across a key neurogenic window using scRNA-seq. IDH1 and IDH2 emerged as top candidates, with knockdown of each producing divergent effects on cell type composition reflecting their distinct subcellular compartments. Collectively, this dissertation establishes a causal link between specific metabolic pathways and radial glia fate specification, provides a publicly accessible metabolic resource spanning primary tissue and organoids, and delivers a functional screening framework for discovery of metabolic regulators relevant to human brain development and neurodevelopmental disease.Molecular biologyNeurosciencesMedicineBiologybrain developmentcell fateCRISPR screenmetabolismapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xn0h393https://escholarship.org/content/qt2xn0h393/qt2xn0h393.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1vv0f7932026-07-20T06:44:32Zqt1vv0f793The Va (Space Between) Race and Faith: Community Resiliency Among Indigenous Tongan Latter-day Saints in the United States Amidst COVIDSoakai, Sarah LautahaUmemoto, Karen2026-07-14Tongan Latter-day Saint (LDS) faith communities simultaneously have indigenized their faith-based space with United States roots and transformed themselves as a result of the Anglo American faith vā (space, space between) they consume. An established Tongan LDS vā is where the Indigenous community navigates a sense of community within larger LDS Church postwelfare structures. This is the space where Tongan LDS communities seek justice and equity during disaster shock events such as COVID-19 and daily crises of safety and security. Third-sector, community-based, faith-based organizations and institutions fill the socio-spatial support gaps not provided by the state and are often the first to respond to such events.
This study is informed by key theories of race and Indigeneity to illuminate the relationship between race and faith. It focused on Indigenous Tongan LDS ward and stake congregations in three specific states where there is a critical mass, namely California, Hawaiʻi, and Utah. Ethnographic participatory observations, talanoa-views (informal interviews, ‘talk story’) LDS Church archives, and document analysis were methods used to study the interactions of Tongan LDS congregations during the COVID-19 pandemic and in times of daily crises regarding basic safety and security.
The Tongan LDS vā has become indigenized by Tongan saints, who are simultaneously transformed as a result within the LDS faith established in the United States. The Pacific Islander notion of vā is not just about space but also about space being relational. Indigenous community disaster planning amongst Tongans means a continued effort in state planning entities working with the churches across the United States, as well as Indigenous congregants’ willingness to seek assistance not only with their churches, but also across sectors that include the state, since planning is largely a state actor.
Indigenous faith-based organizations and institutions play a central role in developing community and seeking equity and justice. These organizations provided institutional and mutual aid and played critical roles in four areas of pandemic relief and recovery: social, physical/mental, economic, and educational resiliencies. A pre-existing vā enabled Tongans in the Church to organize support and resiliently persevere during a critical time. The vā continued to make and indigenize space, providing community, and practicing and preserving Indigenous culture and language despite socio-physical distancing mandates at the peak of the pandemic. Tongan LDS communities continued to transform because of their navigation of the faith vā they consume. Indigenous spatial practices of resistance and re-existence are practices of community and ethno-racial resilience during the pandemic. This has implications for disaster preparedness and community resiliency policies and practices, where community-based, faith-based organizations can play a more central and collaborative role with state-sponsored efforts.Urban planningNative studiesCommunity DevelopmentIndigenous PlanningLatter-day Saintsrace and faithTongan Pacific IslanderUnited Statesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1vv0f793https://escholarship.org/content/qt1vv0f793/qt1vv0f793.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6cm9w7hg2026-07-17T13:15:36Zqt6cm9w7hgA 140-GHz 40-mW Receiver with LO(Local Oscillator) Signal Generation and Phase Shifting for Beamforming ApplicationsSnai, Makar ChandRazavi, Behzad Professor2024-01-01While the 5G standard has mainly focused on enhanced data connectivity, the next generation, 6G, will attempt to converge many technologies (AI, ML, communication, computing). The use of the D-band for its wide bandwidth is attractive for such systems. But the high path loss requires a large beam-forming array and hence high power consumption. Thus, compact, low-power D-band radios are of high interest. We describe a receiver with a minimum NF of 4.7 dB that draws 40 mW, a factor of 2.5 less than state of the art, and, requires only a 250-MHz reference frequency while providing a phase shift range of more than 180°in each beamforming element. This performance is achieved by several new techniques: (1) an RF path with low-impedance interfaces to ease the noise-stability trade-off, (2) a 94-GHz subsampling PLL, (3) a new quadrature LC QVCO, and (4) a new phase shift technique that resides at low frequencies. The new QVCO reduces the phase noise by 6 dB and resolves the mode ambiguity observed in conventional QVCOs. Our proposed phase shift technique offers several benefits. First, it avoids the loss-phaseshift trade-offs encountered in the RF or LO paths. Second, it has no effect on the signalpath’s gain. Third, it operates at low frequencies, consuming 0.5 mW and producing an rms jitter of 15 fsrms. Moreover, the RX and its dedicated PLLs occupy a total area of 1.1 mm x 0.9 mm in 28-nm CMOS technology, offering a low-cost compact solution. In addition to the architecture and circuit concepts proposed below, this work reduces the power by avoiding three types of circuits, namely, buffers, passive power splitters, and passive
frequency multipliers.
Electrical engineeringenpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cm9w7hgetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9np981zz2026-07-17T05:04:05Zqt9np981zzNavigating State Power: Urban Space, Memory, and Affect in Dersim, TurkeyBUGU, BURCUAciksoz, Salih Can2024-01-01This dissertation asks: How do marginalized communities navigate and resist state surveillance and control, and what strategies do they use to preserve their cultural identity and historical consciousness against state-imposed narratives? More specifically, how do state surveillance practices, cultural representation, and tourism initiatives affect the daily lives, identities, and resistance strategies of the Kurdish Alevi community in Dersim, Turkey? Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2023, I examine the intersections of urban space, memory, and affect in a region marked by political violence and marginalization. Dersim, officially renamed Tunceli, is home to a double-minoritized population that is both ethnonationally Kurdish and ethnoreligiously Alevi. The city has long been a focal point of political subjugation, marked by the genocidal campaign of 1937-1938 and persistent militarization. I explore how state power permeates daily life through surveillance and control of the spaces and bodies, processes that are contested by the local population. This dissertation employs a multi-methodological approach, drawing on participant observation, in-depth interviews, archival research, and media and material culture analysis. It illuminates the affective encounters and ordinary acts of resistance that characterize life in Dersim. By framing Dersim as an ‘affective geography,’ the study underscores the ontological connection between the people and their sacred landscape. It highlights how environmental destruction serves as a form of cultural and symbolic violence.
The dissertation posits that while state surveillance and control shape the daily lives of marginalized communities, these communities actively resist such impositions through various strategies. The strategies include the negotiation of public and private spaces, the creation of counter-narratives, and the maintenance of cultural practices that reinforce historical consciousness and local identity. The dissertation contributes to the broader discourse on urban space, memory politics, state power, and resistance. It offers a nuanced understanding of how marginalized communities navigate and contest their imposed identities and histories in contemporary Turkey.
Cultural anthropologyAffectDersimMemorySpaceStateViolenceenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9np981zzhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9np981zz/qt9np981zz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1wd358dd2026-07-16T06:31:49Zqt1wd358ddThe Vision and Disillusionment of Confederate Settlement in Southeastern Brazil: A Case Study of Santa Bárbara D’oeste and AmericanaKhym, Do WonBell, Stephen2026-05-12This study investigates the post–Civil War migration of former Confederates to Brazil as a case of voluntary exile shaped by political defeat, racial ideology, and the psychological aftermath of war. Rather than viewing the movement simply as an economic search for opportunity, the project situates it within broader global patterns in which defeated populations confront the loss of status, the collapse of familiar social orders, and the pressures imposed by victorious regimes. For many Confederates, the transition to a society moving toward racial equality proved incompatible with their worldview, prompting thousands to leave the United States for Brazil.The research traces both the material and emotional dimensions of this migration. Settlers faced the practical challenges common to nineteenth-century agricultural colonization: new environments, unfamiliar crops, and the need to reconstruct livelihoods. Yet the study argues that the deeper struggle was psychological: migrants grappled with a form of homesickness intensified by the realization that the antebellum South they longed for no longer existed. This sense of irretrievable loss contributed to the high rate of return migration, as many found that Brazil could not substitute for a homeland transformed beyond recognition. A smaller cohort remained and established communities that became part of Brazil’s diverse immigrant landscape. Drawing on archival sources, personal correspondence, oral histories, and material culture, the study examines how their descendants inherited and reshaped the emotional legacy of exile. Central to this process was the Campo cemetery, which emerged as a symbolic locus of memory, belonging, and identity formation. Through commemorative practices, festivals, and ongoing negotiations over contested symbols, including the Confederate battle flag, the community constructed a sense of “home” rooted not in the United States but in the cultural space they created in Brazil. By analyzing the interplay of migration, memory, and identity across generations, the study demonstrates how the Confederate diaspora transformed an act of political flight into a long-term process of cultural reinvention.GeographyHistoryLatin American studiesBrazilCivil WarConfederatesDiasporaImmigrationSlaveryapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wd358ddhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1wd358dd/qt1wd358dd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3f10x5g12026-07-16T06:30:41Zqt3f10x5g1Quantitative Topics in Arithmetic CombinatoricsRaghavan, RushilTao, Terence C2026-05-27We give new quantitative bounds for a number of problems in arithmetic combinatorics.First, we answer a question of Erdős about sets of integers with distinct subset products. Given a set A ⊆ {1, . . . , N} such that, for any distinct B, C ⊆ A, ∏ b∈B b ≠ ∏ c∈C c, we show that |A| ≤ π(N) + π(N1/2 ) + O(N5/12), where π is the prime counting function.Next, we obtain an improved bound for Roth’s theorem on three-term arithmetic progressions. If A ⊆ {1, . . . , N} has no nontrivial three-term arithmetic progressions, we prove that |A| ≤ exp(−(log N) 1/6−o(1))N.Third, we give an improved bound for the Freiman-Ruzsa theorem. Given a finite subset A of an abelian group G with |A + A| ≤ K|A|, we show that for any ε > 0, there exists a constant Cε such that A can be covered by at most exp(Cε log(2K) 1+ε ) translates of a convex coset progression with dimension at most Cε log(2K) 1+ε and size at most exp(Cε log(2K) 1+ε )|A|. This falls just short of the polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture, which asserts that this statement is true for ε = 0.Finally, we present some previously unpublished work in information theory motivated by the polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture. We prove an integer analogue of the Kac-Bernstein Theorem. For symmetric integer-valued random variables, this leads to a new proof of the discrete Shannon-Stam inequality, with an improved bound on the error term and without any reliance on a continuous approximation argument.MathematicsTheoretical mathematicsComputational physicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3f10x5g1https://escholarship.org/content/qt3f10x5g1/qt3f10x5g1.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5m55q74b2026-07-14T06:32:35Zqt5m55q74bKapé for Who?: Filipinx American Coffee Trade and Diaspora GivingRibancos, Lauren Casey SeseBurns, Lucy M2026-07-09Filipino American-owned coffee shops employ multiple forms of giving. Ron Dizon and his shop, Teofilo Coffee Company, provide a space unlike extractive, corporate coffee shops. Building on community and ethnic pride, partnerships and collaborations with organizations that share a dedication to fostering relationships. This coffee shop reconstitutes “giving back” as a practice of regard for what makes consumption possible. More specifically, Teofilo offers a space to learn more about colonial and imperial history and highlights the impact of consumerism on the farmers.
This thesis foregrounds Teofilo as an ethnic entrepreneur contending with its diasporic privilege while negotiating the constraints of the State. The interview with Dizon and analysis of the State-produced documents expose the entanglement of all actors in the global coffee trade and consumption. Within and against the State’s role in determining our participation in coffee consumption, I see Teofilo Coffee Company providing an alternative that opens up how we can loosen the grip of the State.Asian American studiesMarketingEntrepreneurshipEthnic studiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5m55q74bhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5m55q74b/qt5m55q74b.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5h40r29c2026-07-10T06:35:02Zqt5h40r29cCan Large Language Model Multi-Agent Simulations Reproduce Expert Interdisciplinary Discussions? A Four-Layer Fidelity Framework with Behavior-Anchored AgentsChoi, SungjinWu, Ying Nian2026-06-11Controlled experiments on how interdisciplinary research teams discuss and converge are difficult to run. An interdisciplinary cohort takes years to assemble, and once a team finishes its work, the same discussion cannot be replayed under altered conditions. Large language model (LLM) multi-agent simulation has been proposed as a way to bypass this constraint, but only if simulated discussions can serve as a limited stand-in for real human teams. This thesis tests that condition using five interdisciplinary teams from an annual mobile-health research training program, with about 24,000 utterances across the five teams and six sessions per team.
The thesis makes two contributions. First, it proposes a behavior-anchored agent setup that injects observed participation and functional tendencies into agent personas, in contrast to role-only personas. The Anchor condition consistently moves simulated outcomes closer to the human teams than the Naive condition. Second, it introduces a four-layer evaluation framework, transcript-level process metrics, an LLM process judge, an LLM outcome judge, and statistical inference, which scores process and outcome separately. Under this framework, process and outcome layers do not always move together: some simulations score lower on process yet higher on outcome, a pattern this thesis terms process-outcome divergence.
The experiments produce three findings. At the transcript surface, anchoring moves the simulation closer to the human teams on a majority of metrics, but not uniformly. At the judge layers, anchoring closes roughly 39% of the process gap and 64% of the outcome gap between Naive and Human under matched-length evaluation. A coverage asymmetry in the original fixed-length setup created an apparent process advantage that disappeared once the judge read comparable portions of each transcript. Step 2 produced the sharpest case of the divergence: the no-broadcast condition produced the lowest process scores but the highest outcome scores. Together, these results argue that simulation as a research instrument depends on measuring fidelity layer by layer, with both the simulation side and the judge side validated separately.StatisticsComputer scienceArtificial intelligencebehavioral anchoringinterdisciplinary collaborationlarge language modelsLLM-as-judgemulti-agent simulationprocess-outcome divergencepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5h40r29cetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt911967j42026-07-09T06:33:38Zqt911967j4Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference Under Time-Varying Evolutionary RateDatta, PratyusaSuchard, Marc A.2026-07-06Reconstructing evolutionary histories and estimating the rate of evolution from molecular sequence data is of central importance in evolutionary biology and infectious disease research. This thesis develops a flexible Bayesian phylogenetic inference framework that accommodates changing evolutionary rates over time by modeling sequence character substitution processes as inhomogeneous continuous-time Markov chains (ICTMCs) acting along the unknown phylogeny, where the rate remains as an unknown, positive and integrable function of time. The integral of the rate function appears in the finite-time transition probabilities of the ICTMCs that must be efficiently computed for all branches of the phylogeny to evaluate the observed data likelihood. To circumvent computational challenges that arise from a fully nonparametric function, I first parameterize the rate function as piecewise constant with a large number of epochs. This makes the transition probability computation relatively inexpensive and continues to flexibly capture rate change over time. I employ a Gaussian Markov random field prior to achieve temporal smoothing of the estimated rate function. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling enabled by scalable gradient evaluation under this model makes the framework computationally efficient. Next, I parameterize the log transformed rate as a smooth function of time using B-splines. Under this smooth parameterization, integrals of the rate function over all branches can be numerically approximated efficiently and with high accuracy using Gauss-Legendre quadrature. Smoothing is achieved through a Bayesian P-splines framework, where a proper Gaussian Markov random field prior is assigned to the spline coefficients. I assess the performance of these models in recovering true time-varying rates through extensive simulations under diverse evolutionary scenarios and apply these models to examine the evolutionary rate of several pathogenic viruses including Dengue, Lassa, influenza A/H3N2, foamy virus, and also to learn the rate of spatial diffusion of SARS-CoV-2 across Europe, recovering substantial rate variation across all data sets. This framework provides a principled and computationally efficient framework for uncovering temporal variation in evolutionary dynamics across a wide range of biological systems.BiostatisticsMolecular biologyBioinformaticsGeneticsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/911967j4https://escholarship.org/content/qt911967j4/qt911967j4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2319p1xn2026-07-08T06:33:19Zqt2319p1xnContinuum Ferrobotic Platform for Scalable Decentralized Automation of Native Biochemical WorkflowsSabet, Kiarash A.Emaminejad, Sam2026-06-12The deployment of laboratory-grade biochemical assays outside centralized facilities is limited by the size, cost, and mechanical complexity of existing liquid-handling automation. While microfluidic technologies have successfully miniaturized assay chemistries, the execution of native laboratory workflows at scale remains constrained by bulky, single-agent systems that scale poorly and are difficult to decentralize. This dissertation introduces continuum ferrobotics, a compact and electronically programmable liquid-handling paradigm that embeds high-force, multi-agent actuation directly within the assay cartridge to enable scalable and flexible automation of the native biochemical workflows.Continuum ferrobotics employs printed-circuit coil arrays to generate continuously tunable magnetic energy landscapes, which are shaped through ratiometric current control to steer localized magnetic potential wells across the chip. Millimeter-scale magnetic agents operate within the near-field amplification regime, providing large force margins for manipulating viscous biofluids, transferring reagents across extended liquid–solid interfaces, and actuating droplets spanning microliter to hundreds-of-microliter volumes. This architecture enables analog, chip-wide spatiotemporal control and coordinated multi-agent operation within a compact, chip-matched footprint. Building on this actuation framework, the platform automates a broad range of standard liquid-phase, immunoassay, electrochemical, and nucleic-acid–based workflows without requiring assay re-engineering. Quantitative on-chip measurements across diverse molecular classes demonstrate accuracy and reproducibility comparable to conventional laboratory methods. The system further supports complex, collaborative workflows—such as pooled testing and high-throughput multi-panel analysis—while operating on microliter-scale clinical samples using low-cost, easily manufacturable cartridges paired with reusable electronic control hardware. Together, these results establish continuum ferrobotics as a general-purpose liquid-handling infrastructure that unifies high-force magnetic actuation, continuous spatial control, and multi-agent coordination within a scalable, decentralized platform. This work provides a foundation for distributed, autonomous biochemical workflows across clinical, biomedical, and research applications.BioengineeringElectrical engineeringBiomedical engineeringAutomatedDiagnosticsDigital MicrofluidicsFerroboticsMulti-agenticSwarmpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2319p1xnetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3453x04r2026-07-08T06:33:14Zqt3453x04rOld Age in Contemporary Chilean Film and Literature (2010-2025)Mora, CristianCortínez, Verónica2026-05-26Discussions about old age have been increasingly prevalent in the media. Issues such as low pensions, rising healthcare costs, caregiving burdens, and loneliness have brought aging into public debate after long remaining in the background. This shift reflects broader demographic trends: life expectancy continues to increase while global fertility declines. As a result, many societies must adapt to a reality in which older people constitute a significant proportion of the population, requiring both political reforms and cultural change, given that the “old” label has long carried “pejorative connotations,” as Simone de Beauvoir noted in her seminal essay Old Age (1972). In this context, the study of the representation of old age in contemporary media is particularly relevant, especially due to its influence on social discourse. Scholarship by Pamela Gravagne, Raquel Medina, and Barbara Zecchi has laid the groundwork for cultural aging studies. Building on their work, this dissertation examines the representation of old age in contemporary Chilean cinema and literature (2010-2025), an area that remains largely understudy. Since 2010, Chilean cinema has had a significant increase in films centered on older protagonists, from Sebastián Silva’s Gatos viejos (Old Cats 2010) to Maite Alberdi’s Oscar-nominated La memoria infinita (The Eternal Memory 2023), more than thirty films have focused on old age. Although to a lesser extent, Chilean writers such as Andrea Jeftanovic and Maivo Suárez, among many others, have also shown interest in the subject, following the footsteps of renowned Chilean and Latin American boom writer José Donoso.This project examines the representation of old age in a collection of Chilean fiction films, documentaries, novels, and short stories. These works coincide with the rapid growth of Chile’s people aged sixty and older, who are projected to be 30 percent of the total population in 2050 (INE). I argue that these works employ three narrative frameworks to depict their subject: decline, resistance, and renewal. As Pamela Gravagne notes in The Becoming of Age (2013), the current dominant narrative when illustrating old age is “inevitable decline” (19), which has been the prevalent type of depiction of the elderly for a long time. This dissertation demonstrates that Chilean directors and authors are representing old age as a heterogeneous experience in which decline coexists with resilience and renewal. Examples include Alfredo Pourailly’s La fabulosa máquina de cosechar oro (The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine 2024), which explores aging in relation to labor, and Nicol Ruiz’s La nave del olvido (Forgotten Roads 2020), which addresses sexuality and the possibility of new beginnings. Through close reading and comparative analysis, this study reveals a sustained effort to move beyond both prejudice and idealization, offering a nuanced portrayal of aging that both reflects present realities and anticipates future challenges.AgingCinematographyLatin American literatureLanguageHispanic American studiesAging narrativesAging studiesChilean cinemaChilean literatureGender and sexualityOld Ageapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3453x04rhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3453x04r/qt3453x04r.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt47n4v91w2026-07-06T10:10:59Zqt47n4v91wDevelopment and Characterization of a Conductive Microneedle Patch for Cardiac RepairLee, Albert YuhengAnnabi, Nasim2024-01-01Myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) are the most common cause of cardiac damage globally, leading to the significant health consequences and even death. Biomaterials, such as hydrogels, can serve as a better method to manage cardiac damage. However, an exploration of the current biomaterial and microneedle solutions shows a lack of directed drug delivery capabilities or conductivity. Given the density and conductivity of human cardiac tissue, these aspects are critical in improving the effectiveness of any biomaterial solution. Introduced in this thesis is the combination of both elements into a conductive hydrogel-based microneedle patch. We utilized a new, naturally derived biomaterial, tannic acid:PEDOT (poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), also known as TADOT. We then combined this with gelatin methacryoyl (GelMA) hydrogel to develop a biomaterial-based microneedle platform aimed to solve both issues. The formation of a tannic acid complex with PEDOT to form TADOT allows the hydrogel to be conductive, while the GelMA provided sufficient mechanical strength. With the anti-inflammatory characteristics of tannic acid, and the biocompatible nature of gelatin, the material is designed for better contribution to cardiac healing. We were able to engineer a microneedle patch based on TADOT-GelMA into microneedles which could penetrate porcine cardiac tissue, proving the potential for this biomaterial as a platform for cardiac repair applications. The conductive and mechanical characteristics of the TADOT-GelMA microneedles can allow it to serve as a delivery platform to be combined with other cardiac repair solutions.Chemical engineeringBioengineeringMaterials ScienceCardiac repairHydrogelMicroneedleMyocardial InfarctionTannic acidenpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/47n4v91wetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5sm5j6d52026-07-05T05:03:20Zqt5sm5j6d5Engineering Stage-Specific Developmental Cues to Generate iPSC-derived, Non-allogenic, Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cells for ImmunotherapyYoo, Sang PilCrooks, Gay M2024-01-01Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has demonstrated remarkable results in otherwise treatment-refractory diseases, most notably for B cell malignancies. However, there are several challenges to autologous CAR T therapy that limit its accessibility and widespread adoption. First, the de novo generation of each treatment can lead to CAR T cells that exhibit varying clinical responses, in part due to inherent variations in the T cell composition of each product. The variable outcomes are compounded by complex manufacturing processes and T cell expansion procedures that can produce a prematurely exhausted and less efficacious CAR T product. These challenges contribute to cancer relapse rates as high as 57-66% after treatment. Thus, there is a growing interest in generating functionally enhanced CAR T cells in vitro from a self-renewing source of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). iPSC-engineered T cell therapy would ensure immediate access to treatment that delivers a more durable and consistent clinical response.Unlike peripheral blood T cells, the introduction or the perturbation of biologically active genes can pose serious challenges to the in vitro differentiation of iPSCs. Inappropriate signaling or developmental cues at critical stages of T cell development can result in a block in differentiation or diversion to an undesired lineage. We and others have identified two critical biologic barriers to the generation of iPSC-derived CAR T cells: (1) expression of the CAR in early, T cell precursors diverts differentiation towards the innate lineage, instead of the conventional T cell pathway, and (2) Removal of endogenous T cell receptor (TCR) to address the risk of alloreactivity halts T cell development due to the absence of positive selection. This dissertation introduces a novel CRISPR/Cas9 editing strategy that aim to address both CAR-mediated innate diversion and rescue of positive selection in the absence of endogenous TCR. We report the generation of iPSC-derived, TCR-null CAR T cells using the in vitro “Artificial Thymic Organoid” (ATO) system developed in our labChapter 2 introduced the gene editing strategies used to circumvent CAR-mediated innate diversion and TCR-mediated alloreactivity. Our approach leverages the stage-specific expression profile of endogenous genes to regulate and drive the expression of the CAR transgene that is restricted to mature T cells, after commitment to the conventional T pathway. As a proof-of-concept, we showed that Granzyme A (GZMA) - regulated expression of a high tonic signaling CAR generated conventional and mature CD8+ CAR T cells with robust antigen-specific cytotoxicity. However, the removal of the endogenous TCR resulted in the halt in T cell development, which prompted the need to engineer an alternative source of positive selection signals.Chapter 3 combined both stage-specific expression of the CAR and the introduction of the CAR cognate antigen in the ATO microenvironment to rescue development in the absence of endogenous TCR. We used the gene CD8B to drive and regulate CAR expression at the physiologically appropriate stage for positive selection. Using this approach, we showed the robust production of TCR-CD3- CD8+ CAR T cells that exhibit a uniform and homogenous “naïve-like” CD45RA+CD62L+CCR7+ phenotype. We further investigated the impact of ex vivo expansion on T cell function and alternative methods of DP activation on T cell phenotype. Single-cell RNA and ATAC sequencing comparing TCR- versus CAR-mediated development revealed possible key mediators that contribute to the production of TCR-null, naïve CAR T cells. Molecular biologyATOCAR TImmunotherapyStem Cellenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5sm5j6d5https://escholarship.org/content/qt5sm5j6d5/qt5sm5j6d5.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0jn366fr2026-07-05T05:01:21Zqt0jn366frEnzyme Nanohybrids and Fungal Processes for the Degradation of Emerging ContaminantsGao, YifanMahendra, Shaily2024-01-01Enzymatic biocatalysts offer the advantage of functioning without substrates or conditions required by living organisms. Solid support immobilization of enzymes aims to enhance stability and longevity but confronts issues like reduced activity and utilization of hazardous materials. Addressing these issues is critical for applications in environmental bioremediation.This investigation evaluates two nanomaterials—vault nanoparticles and boron nitride nanosheets (BNNSs), known as "white graphene"—as supports for enzyme immobilization. Vault nanoparticles provide extensive space for enzyme bonding, increasing purity and minimizing leakage, while BNNSs, typically used in medicine, exhibit potential for enzyme support with proper surface modifications. These materials were tested with fungal laccase, an enzyme from wood-rot fungi with high redox potential, making it ideal for synthetic dye degradation. Vault-encapsulated laccase was particularly effective in decomposing industrial dyes. A novel in vivo vault-packaged laccase system was used for 1,4-dioxane degradation. Laccase immobilized on BNNSs was also tested against atrazine, a prevalent herbicide, to demonstrate its potential in managing agricultural pollutants. Moreover, the study explored fungal cultivation on sorghum, offering a viable alternative to traditional immobilization for environmental applications. This work shed light on how fungi metabolize per- and polyfluorinated compounds (PFASs) through enzymatic and metabolomic perspectives as well. In conclusion, this research validated the effectiveness of enzyme nanohybrids and fungi on solid substrates for treating water and other environmental remediation efforts. It highlighted the strategic deployment of enzyme-immobilized nanomaterials and microbial cultivation to selectively address specific industrial pollutants, positioning these methods as crucial tools for sustainable environmental management.
Environmental engineeringenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jn366frhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0jn366fr/qt0jn366fr.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8hr062b92026-07-01T05:37:44Zqt8hr062b9Fruit Flux: Performative Ethics of Interdependence and Non-Harm as a Critical Future StorySantos, VabiannaCarriger, MichelleDominguez, Ricardo2024-01-01 Fruit Flux blends performative language, queer auto-ethnographic methods and traditional research citations. The text studies speculative narrative strategies by highlighting relational details within social and physical interactions after a fictive catastrophic planetary event. Of the need for speculation in order to shift systemic harm, Jones & Harris have written that queer futurity emerges from the refusal to “remain unmoved by the systematic loss of human and other life...”1 This project is concerned with producing rhetorical possibilities for unknowing the transmission systems of hate. To do this, it utilizes ethical and corporeal conjunctions to speak compassionately to scales of self-destruction ranging from individual to ecological. Investigating performative approaches to scholarship also generates new trajectories for art research in relation to bodily and collective ways of knowing and the collision of text and artistic inquiry. Methodologically, a performance studies approach considers how aesthetic modalities are useful for intervening upon larger social scales to propose tactics for transformation of cultural inequities. To this end, chapters integrate non-Western, Buddhist praxes of non-harm to explore the recent emergence of explicit critical discussions around interdependence in apparently disparate fields. This critical interdisciplinary dialogue beneath the fiction includes: queer and disability studies, social justice approaches to suicide prevention within Critical Suicidology and Peace Studies. Fruit Flux’s investigation of interdependence points humanistic concern towards the contemporary perils of extinction, suicide and despair– redirecting both environmental exploitation and the formation of distorted self-regard towards alternative performances of irreverent joy and impromptu care. 1 Jones, Stacy Holman and Anne M. Harris. “Queering Massacres.” Queering Autoethnography, Routledge, 2019, p. 34. EthicsLGBTQ studiesFine artsBuddhist embodiment and non-harmCritical suicidologyEcological ethicsInterdependencePerformative writingQueer narrative strategiesenpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8hr062b9etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2pp6j1tq2026-07-01T05:02:04Zqt2pp6j1tqBuilding an Empire: Chamorro Land, Filipino Labor, and Settler Carceral Geographies in Guåhan/GuamOng, Josephine FaithGoeman, Mishuana RCamacho, Keith L2024-01-01In 2006, the U.S. military announced transfer the Marine base in Okinawa to the island of Guåhan/Guam, a nearby U.S. territory that already holds an Air Force and Navy base. To make room for the Marines and their dependents, the Department of Defense has begun to construct additional firing ranges, barracks, and other forms of militarized infrastructure that would allow it to defend and maintain its interests in Asia and the Pacific. Rather than a homebase for U.S. militarized interventions, however, Guåhan’s Indigenous peoples- the Chamorros- have emphasized their collective genealogical ties to Guåhan’s lands and oceans. Thus, many Chamorro protectors have resisted the build-up, and critiqued the Chamorro politicians and Asian contractors who have worked with the military to further militarize the island. Much of the physical labor required by the U.S. military’s construction projects are performed by Filipino workers, because of their perceived historical connections and their earlier participation in Guåhan’s Cold War militarization. In this dissertation, I investigate the history of Filipino participation in colonial infrastructure projects that have dispossessed and dislocated Chamorros. Utilizing multi-lingual and multi-temporal archives and oral history interviews with Chamorro protectors and Filipino organizers, I trace the impacts of the Spanish empire’s nineteenth century practice of sending Filipino convict laborers and the U.S. military’s twentieth century recruitment of Filipino lawyers, surveyors, and construction workers, in identifying lands and waters for the military to build its bases. Through the framework of Indigenous feminist geography and queer of color critique, I question the extent to which carceral infrastructures and logics have contained Chamorro-Filipino relations. At the same time, I also point to possible moments when Chamorros and Filipinos found ways to resist the Spanish and U.S. empire’s control over their relationalities. Pacific Rim studiesAsian American studiesIndigenous studiesCarceralityChamorro-Filipino relationsGuamIndigenous geographiesMilitarismPhilippinesenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2pp6j1tqhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2pp6j1tq/qt2pp6j1tq.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2br7k17x2026-06-28T05:01:41Zqt2br7k17xAbyss//merica Central: A Futurist(s) Archive, the Sonic Collage and “Caminxs del Sur”Ayala, Paula SofiaAlma, KarinaBoj-Lopez, Floridalma E2024-01-01My master's thesis is an in-depth look at a video production by the collective Quetzal Beats that includes my role as co-producer. This six minute video production was organized alongside Ana Pano from Fresno, CA and Chiapas, Nancy Escalante from Los Angeles, El Salvador and Honduras, and myself, Paula Ayala from Fresno, CA and El Salvador. Quetzal Beats formed as a sonic space between and with the lineages of ancestral lament opening into pluriversal worlds. As said by the EZLN, ‘a world where many worlds fit’ in (what I posit as) a central Abyssmerica/Yala. This video project invites listening viewers to enter into worlds that sense-think memories, people, land, color, sound and the continuities of socially defying death. The ‘sonic collage’ allows an unraveling of the illusory formulations of settler innocence. Centering the question, “How do the grounded knowledges of experiential opposition to oppression throughout the isthmus, detail what I deem, a condicion istmica? Herein perspectives and actions realize hemispheric convergences with many processes of definition, positionalities, obstructions, and epistemes. This text will offer insights into a six-minute audio-visual curation of 500 years of colonial sonic resistance. My research offers an autoethnographic and communitarian testimony that recovers over 10 years of documentation, archival sources, primary sources, and photographic and sonic collages witnessed in Quetzal Beats’ video. A portion of this thesis is meant to articulate to readers how Quetzal Beats has formed as a collective in various projects, and for the purposes of this thesis, to fully explain how it was that we produced the sonic-collage “Caminxs del Sur.” As author of this piece, I have used my own voice and memory to recount these processes, and have consulted with most interlocutors mentioned here, about the writing for this thesis. Artist, community worker and journalist once described as the “the octopus of Leimert Park,” Ben Caldwell’s KAOS THEORY, is a testament to the power of documenting one's processes of artistry in relation to the socio-political forces and communities one engages and lives among. This thesis may or may not become one of the earliest treaties on Quetzal Beats’ visual and sonic productions made by and about Central Americans.Latin American studiesAestheticsMusicCentral American StudiesEthnography and AutoethnographyFuturitySonicsTerritoriesVisual Collageenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2br7k17xhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2br7k17x/qt2br7k17x.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt27m5f04c2026-06-27T05:01:51Zqt27m5f04cSpirit of Power: Bunsen and the Anglo-Prussian Axis of Protestantism, 1815-1860Keeley, Samuel BlaineSabean, David W2019-01-01This dissertation examines the role and status of Protestant religious belief in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as it was harnessed and deployed by a network of diplomats, theologians, and missionaries in Prussia. Domestically, religious practice was being reconfigured by the Prussian state to foster social cohesion as they dealt with an influx of Catholic subjects after annexing new territories in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat. Beyond Prussian borders, officials sought to promote Protestant strength on the global stage, as a counter against Prussia’s Catholic rivals in Austria, France, and Italy, while attempting to strengthen ties with the other major Protestant superpower of the era - England.Drawing upon evidence from British and Prussian archival sources in Germany and England, I reconstruct the transnational network that formed around its central figure: the diplomat Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen, a powerful and pious Prussian ambassador to the Vatican and to England between 1817-1839 and 1840-1854, respectively. I look at the projects of Bunsen and his allies to protect the faith of German Protestants living beyond German territory, and their attempts to inject a new flavor of revivalist religious sentiments via a re-worked liturgy and hymnbook for the German churches. At the same time, the network was used as the basis for a bilateral, transnational alliance between Prussia and England in the 1840s. This culminated in the establishment of a colonial, jointly-run Anglican-Lutheran Protestant Bishopric in Jerusalem in order to convert Jews and other non-Protestant Christians to Protestantism.This dissertation reveals a robust and lively network of elites bound together by eschatological, millenarian, and revivalist theological ideas, with official positions within the Prussian and English administrative apparatuses of both state and church, university faculties, missionary, social-welfare, and philanthropic institutions. Crucially, these findings show that a small group of elites were able to wield enormous influence over the configuration of religion in society, and attempted at every turn to steer both nations towards each other, while also promoting spiritual revival based on dramatic, emotional inner conversions. With these studies, I challenge the narrative of secularization and disenchantment that once characterized the historiography of the nineteenth century, in order to argue that enthusiastic religious beliefs had lasting consequences on statecraft, diplomacy, and colonial ambitions well into the latter decades of the century.HistoryEuropean historyReligionEnglandGermanyNetworksProtestantismPrussiaTransnationalenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/27m5f04chttps://escholarship.org/content/qt27m5f04c/qt27m5f04c.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5xz399zd2026-06-26T06:37:56Zqt5xz399zdWho Belongs to the University? Florida’s Anti-DEI Efforts and Its Impact on Asian American Students: A Critical Race Theory CounterstorytellingJumapao, Othelia NChun, Jennifer2026-06-12This thesis aims to answer the question: What is the impact on the lived experiences of Asian American students in response to the closure and eventual rebranding of the Asian Pacific Islander Desi Student Engagement suite at the University of Florida to the Center of Belonging and Engagement? Through a policy analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s and the Manhattan Institute’s conservative anti-Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy memos as well as Florida’s “Higher Education” Senate Bill 266, the study assesses the political landscape of anti-DEI policies, sentiment, and implementation. The use of critical university studies provides a theoretical framework to approach understanding the site of the neoliberal University as a site of institutional harm and oppression. With the use of semi-structured interviews, I generated themes through reflexive thematic analysis on the lack of administrative transparency, emotional responses of students, loss of a counterspace, political influence of DeSantis, student responses, and envisioning the future. From the information gathered through the interviews, I created a composite counterstory to compile the research from the archives and the counterstories of the participants while injecting my own personal experiences as an alum of the University of Florida. The purpose of a composite counterstory lies in the need for an accessible format to disseminate my research. The act of counterstorytelling revealed thematic connections between the interviews, archival research, and my own personal knowledge. In conclusion, I underscore the political ambivalence of Asian American students in a state where academic repression runs rampant. However, insurgent modes of resistance still exist and will continue to persist to undermine the power structures like racial capitalism in the space of the University.Asian American studiesHigher educationSociologyEducational sociologyPolitical sciencecounterstorycritical race theorycritical university studiesdiversity equity inclusionapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xz399zdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5xz399zd/qt5xz399zd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5fh5174c2026-06-24T06:33:18Zqt5fh5174cTransient Multiphysics Modelling of Confined Combustion Processes with Application to Hydrogen–Methane Blend Combustion in a Quartz TubePanbude, Shashwat ShekharManousiouthakis, Vasilios2026-06-11This thesis presents the development of a transient computational fluid dynamics model for hydrogen–methane combustion inside a quartz cylinder using detailed chemical kinetics in COMSOL Multiphysics. The system consists of a quartz reactor with a coaxial nozzle arrangement through which a hydrogen–methane fuel blend and air are introduced at specified flow conditions, followed by spark ignition at the nozzle exit. The objective of the study is to predict the spatial and temporal evolution of temperature, velocity, pressure, density, and species concentrations throughout the reactor during ignition and combustion. The model incorporates reacting flow, multicomponent species transport, heat transfer, and a reduced finite rate chemical kinetic mechanism capable of describing the oxidation of hydrogen and methane and the formation of major and intermediate combustion products, including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, water vapor, nitric oxide, and nitrogen dioxide. Appropriate assumptions, governing equations, initial conditions, and boundary conditions are established to represent the physical system while maintaining computational feasibility. The quartz wall is included to account for heat transfer between the reacting gases and the solid boundary. The simulation results provide insight into flame development, ignition behavior, heat release, species formation, and the influence of transport and chemical kinetics on reactor behavior. The study demonstrates how CFD coupled with detailed chemical kinetics can be used to analyze reactive flow systems involving hydrogen-enriched fuels and can serve as a foundation for future work in combustion optimization, emissions prediction, and clean energy applications.Chemical engineeringThermodynamicsFluid mechanicspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fh5174cmultimediaoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8318f7z22026-06-23T05:03:07Zqt8318f7z2Light Aging Analysis: Lightfast Qualities of Natural Dyes on River Cane and Commercial Reed Substrates Used in Choctaw BasketryCaraway, CheyennePearlstein, Ellen J2025-01-01For centuries, the Choctaw endured several removal campaigns from their ancestral homeland into what is now Oklahoma. Traditional knowledge has been impacted by these extractive practices, prompting tribal members to continue and strengthen their lifeways through revitalization efforts, including traditional basket-making with natural dyes. Specifications of traditional dyes and their unique parameters are not as well known within the Oklahoma Choctaw community as they may be in Mississippi. Therefore, this research aims to contribute to the renewal of traditional knowledge by investigating dye recipes and their specific hues while analyzing their lightfast properties. Dye application techniques involved using different substrate materials, including river cane and commercial reed, with traditional dyes extracted from black walnut, Osage orange, and bloodroot, under varying parameters of pH, dye concentration, and mordants. The Q-Sun Xenon Test Chamber (model Xe-1B) at the UCLA/Getty Conservation Training Labs and the Legacy Whitmore Microfading Tester at the Getty Conservation Institute were both utilized for this research. Spectrophotometric readings of the prepared samples were used to determine their light sensitivities. Those with comparatively greater lightfastness were the undyed (aged) river cane, salt-mordanted samples, and those with a higher pH bath. Results for concentration-based parameters were conflicting. This research vocalizes the importance of accessibility to traditional practices and provides a tangible piece of critical information for weavers to equip them in their dyeing practices, given the parameters within these recipes and the types of colorants they produce; it can also serve institutions and individuals alike to address light-level standards when considering the exhibition of these types of materials.Archaeologyaccelerated light agingbasketryChoctawfugitive dyeslightfastnessnatural dyesenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8318f7z2https://escholarship.org/content/qt8318f7z2/qt8318f7z2.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt84j936jh2026-06-22T06:34:03Zqt84j936jhStandardizing Diastolic Function Assessment of Doppler Echocardiography by Utilizing Machine LearningShahbazian, Sera DuraPackard, Reńe2026-06-12Pulse wave (PW) Doppler echocardiography is an essential tool in assessing diastolic function of the heart and specifically measures the frequency shift of ultrasound waves upon blood flow through the mitral valve. The changes in the velocity of moving blood is displayed as a distinct E and A wave per cardiac cycle, where the E wave represents the peak velocity of blood flow resulting from left ventricular relaxation in early diastole, and the A wave represents the peak velocity during left atrial contraction in late diastole. In healthy diastolic function, the E wave velocity is greater than the A wave velocity, and each wave displays a distinct peak with a brief diastasis period between both peaks, representing the trough between the two apexes. A recurring problem scientists face is the challenge of fused E and A mitral inflow waves due to high heart rates in murine models and inconsistencies in fusion resulting from technician technique variability. This limitation of diastolic assessment via ultrasound makes it difficult for researchers to study murine models and ultimately rely on this piece of data. The objective of this study is to develop a machine learning model trained to identify and distinguish E and A waves in echocardiograms when presented with fused waveforms. The initial dataset was imaged on control mice with varying degrees of fusion, with the echocardiography ultrasound machine set to Radio Frequency (RF) mode. Complete fusion of the E and A waves was labeled as 0%, while the best quality data with distinct E and A waves was labeled as 100%. Partial fusion falls between 0% and 100%, with the 50% label representing greater partial fusion and the 75% label representing less partial fusion. The data is then downloaded and transferred to the VevoLabs program, where further analysis is conducted. Each spectral image obtained per mouse is hand-annotated for each E and A wave and is then downloaded as a CSV file and In-Phase Quadrature (IQ) data. The dataset is organized by group type, fusion category, CSV, and IQ files for each mouse. The IQ data undergoes further processing and is run through MATLAB code to extract the RF data and reconstructed spectral Doppler image from the minimally processed IQ data. Given that RF is the purest and raw form of data, it represents the frequency captured by the ultrasound probe upon the ultrasound wave bouncing from the blood as it flows through the mitral valve, this information allows the machine model to be trained on raw data and helps standardize the machine model across different ultrasound machine vendors. Upon extraction and reconstruction of the RF data and spectral Doppler image from the IQ data, the machine is trained on this dataset. The specific machine learning model used in this study is called Dense Convolutional Networks (DenseNet). It is initially trained on “Good” quality waveforms, which are the highest quality E/A waveforms obtained from a healthy mouse and display a distinct E and A wave. Following preliminary training, the model is then trained on “Bad” data with varying degrees of E and A fusion. DenseNet utilizes a feedforward mapping mechanism in which thousands of Doppler images are layered and pooled to create a collective knowledge base. By doing so, the machine model can learn from the “Good” data and map the characteristics of a healthy waveform to identify the peak of the A wave during partial or complete fusion. Upon designing and adapting DenseNet to PW Doppler images, the trained model is further verified using datasets from heart failure murine models, including HFpEF and HFrEF models induced by isoproterenol, anthracycline and immune checkpoint inhibitor chemotoxicities, and high-fat diet with L-NAME treatment. By further validating the model in heart failure mouse models, the dataset maintains translational relevance to human heart failure. This approach helps ensure that researchers can obtain reliable and consistent results, even when working with imperfect echocardiographic data. The major finding of this study is that the machine model can accurately detect E and A waves upon verification using ground truth human-labeled data. The study was successful in designing a Machine Learning-based Analysis and Evaluation of Cardiac Diastolic Function for Standardization of Mitral E/A Ratios (MAESTRO), which can accurately predict and label fused Doppler waves (Fig. 1). The ultimate goal of this study is to make the model open access so that researchers can use it to standardize and improve the assessment of PW Doppler data.PhysiologyBiomedical engineeringBioengineeringapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/84j936jhhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt84j936jh/qt84j936jh.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8km5k0pq2026-06-22T06:33:58Zqt8km5k0pqTEMPORAL DISSOCIATION BETWEEN STRUCTURAL BONE PRESERVATION AND CELLULAR VIABILITY DURING EARLY MEDICATION-RELATED OSTEONECROSIS OF THE JAW DEVELOPMENTParnia, AranTetradis, Sotirios2026-06-12Medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (MRONJ) is a complication of antiresorptive therapy whose earliest stages are difficult to recognize, because current diagnostic criteria require clinically exposed bone. Bisphosphonates preserve the radiographic appearance of bone even as the underlying tissue becomes nonviable, which can conceal disease during the interval before bone exposure. This study tested the hypothesis that, during early MRONJ development, antiresorptive treatment preserves alveolar bone structure while osteocyte death and bone necrosis progress, producing a temporal dissociation between radiographic appearance and tissue viability.Ligature-induced experimental periodontitis was established in rats treated with zoledronic acid or vehicle, with the contralateral non-ligated side of each animal serving as an internal control. Maxillae were collected at 72 hours and at 1, 2, and 4 weeks after ligature placement. Alveolar bone structure was assessed by micro-computed tomography, osteocyte viability and the bone-to-epithelium relationship by hematoxylin and eosin histomorphometry, osteoclast activity by tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase staining, and the area of necrotic bone. Zoledronic acid attenuated the ligature-induced loss of alveolar bone height that developed in vehicle animals. Despite this structural preservation, the treated ligated animals accumulated empty osteocyte lacunae and necrotic bone area at the 2- and 4-week timepoints and showed persistent separation of the junctional epithelium from the bone crest. Over the same period, the osteoclastic remodeling response that cleared damaged bone in vehicle animals was suppressed under antiresorptive treatment. These findings indicate that structural bone preservation and cellular bone viability become dissociated early in MRONJ. Antiresorptive treatment maintains a radiographically intact alveolar bone while osteocyte death and necrosis progress and the remodeling that would normally remove necrotic bone is suppressed, a combination consistent with progressive disease that is not detectable on standard radiographic imaging during the Stage 0 interval.DentistryCellular biologyPathologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8km5k0pqhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8km5k0pq/qt8km5k0pq.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6039t9482026-06-22T06:33:53Zqt6039t948The Mexican Exception: Race and Masculinity in John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California BanditInfante Casiano, EmilioGaspar de Alba, Alicia2026-06-12John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), the first novel by a Native American author, has long been read as ambivalent; critics attribute this to Ridge’s mixed-race positionality and assimilationist politics. This thesis relocates that ambivalence from Ridge’s biography to the genre in which he wrote. Through close reading of the novel against theories of myth, colonial racial capitalism, and bare life, and alongside scholarship in Chicano and Native literary studies, it traces how the conventions of the Western novelette constrain Ridge’s critique. The study finds that the tragic form deployed to humanize Murieta is also the form that requires his death.American studiesAmerican literatureAmerican historyLiteraturepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6039t948etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6mr6n9mc2026-06-22T06:33:48Zqt6mr6n9mcLaser Ablation for Rapid Thinning of Single Crystal DiamondSandhu, Terrindeep SinghGoorsky, Mark S2026-06-12UV laser ablation is explored as a processing step towards diamond thinning compatible with wafer bonding and advanced packaging. Diamond remains among the most challenging wide bandgap materials to process due to its hardness, thermal conductivity, and inert chemical nature. Single crystal thin film diamond is uniquely attractive for next generation power, RF, and heat-spreading technologies. Traditional thinning relies on mechanical lapping that is slow or on Smart-Cut™ ion implantation, which has had limited success. Ultraviolet (UV) laser ablation provides an alternative that can remove over ten microns per minute.Experiments were performed with a 330 nm UV Laser over a 5x5 mm area, focused at 10 µm below the substrate surface. Parameter sweeps which indicate regimes for high ablation efficiency include high power, low number of raster passes, and pattern geometry with raster lines spaced microns apart. This process succeeds as a coarse removal step, surfaces resulting from high laser power and slow mark speed exhibit roughness on the order of hundreds of nanometers RMS over 2 μm, readily polishable for further processing. The laser parameters of 5 Watts, 60 KHz and machine parameters of 100 mms⁻¹ mark speed and beam spacing of 4 μm show the lowest roughness.Two effects dominate material response: shadowing, where residual, unablated amorphous carbon shields adjacent regions, and overlap, where neighboring pulses compound local heating and deepen furrows, or the elongated grooves aligned with the raster direction resulting from material removal along scan lines. Removal rate and surface roughness were jointly optimized by balancing power, design of raster patterns, and pulse frequency. This method demonstrates a path toward fast, scalable thinning of diamond suitable for heterogeneous integration with Gallium Nitride (GaN) or Silicon Carbide (SiC) electronic devices.Electrical engineeringOpticsMaterials scienceEngineeringSingle Crystal DiamondSubstrate ThinningUltraviolet Laserapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6mr6n9mchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6mr6n9mc/qt6mr6n9mc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0wc0n4tc2026-06-19T06:34:16Zqt0wc0n4tcEnvironmental Justice in Watts: Community-Led Research on Lead Contamination, Policy Advocacy, and InclusionHoague, Danielle ShelleyTripati, AradhnaNorris, Keith2026-06-12Watts, Los Angeles, California, is a culturally vibrant community burdened by environmental injustice. This dissertation describes collaborative research that supports community goals in addressing environmental concerns. It presents the positioning of this research in the relevant disciplines (Background), a framework we co-developed and co-published to support participatory action research and community-university partnerships (Chapter 1), a policy brief we co-authored on exploring the probability of pipes containing lead in Watts (Chapter 2), a report we co-authored documenting lead contamination in the Watts public housing developments and private properties and press coverage of the research (Chapters 3 and Appendix), a paper showing how racial and spatial identity impact environmental justice organizing in Watts (Chapter 4), a co-developed memorandum of understanding between UCLA and the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC) and the Better Watts Initiative (BWI) to facilitate a community-university partnership (Appendix), and a summary and recommendations for further work (Conclusion).Environmental justiceEnvironmental managementSustainabilityenvironmental justiceenvironmental racismapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0wc0n4tchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0wc0n4tc/qt0wc0n4tc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3kg785pb2026-06-19T06:34:11Zqt3kg785pbSocial Media for Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support among Hispanic Adults with Type 2 DiabetesDiaz, Lisa MarieChoi, Sarah E2026-06-12Background. Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) affects over 34 million adults in the U.S., with a significant impact on Hispanic communities, who face higher complication rates and access barriers. Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support (DSMES) can improve glycemic outcomes and self-efficacy, but participation remains low, especially among underserved populations. The rise of digital technologies and social media may present new opportunities for culturally relevant diabetes education and support.Aims. (1) Examine the effectiveness of Social Media Use for Self-Management Education and Support for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Adults: Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis. (2) Assess the quality of TikTok-based T2DM information in English and Spanish using the Association of Diabetes Care and Education Specialists' seven self-care behaviors (ADCES7) framework. (3) Analyze TikTok content about T2DM in English and Spanish using thematic analysis and computational psycholinguistics.Methods. A systematic review was conducted using PubMed, CINAHL, Web of Science, and PsycINFO, assessing risk of bias. A random-effects meta-analysis estimated pooled standardized mean differences and performed subgroup analyses. A descriptive study analyzed 300 TikTok videos with T2DM-related hashtags, categorizing them using the ADCES7 framework and the Global Quality Scale (GQS) for video quality. A multi-method approach combined qualitative thematic analysis and computational psycholinguistic analysis, coding transcripts and on-screen text using Natural Language Processing.Results. Across 13 studies, participation in DSMES via social media was associated with meaningful reductions in HbA1c from baseline to post-intervention. The pooled meta-analytic effect was statistically significant. The video analysis showed that “Healthy Eating” was the most frequently highlighted ADCES-7 behavior. Healthcare professionals' videos had higher GQS scores than personal accounts and companies, though overall scores were low. Engagement varied by source, with personal creators receiving the most likes and comments. Thematic analysis yielded seven themes, while psycholinguistic analysis revealed that company-created videos were more analytical, healthcare professional videos had greater authority, and individual creators appeared more authentic in English.Conclusions. Structured social media DSMES improved glycemic outcomes in adults with T2DM, especially with > 3-month interventions. Sampled TikToks contained low-quality content on ADCES7 and an information imbalance. Content creators share information about T2DM, but the linguistic approaches vary and may include misleading or commercial content.Health educationCommunicationEndocrinologyWeb studiesHispanic American studiesDiabetes EducationDSMESHbgA1cHispanicSocial MediaType 2 Diabetesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kg785pbhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3kg785pb/qt3kg785pb.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7dh7m1x62026-06-19T06:34:05Zqt7dh7m1x6Experiences and Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Individuals with Implantable Cardioverter DefibrillatorsMeinhausen, CorinneSumner, Jennifer A2026-06-12Individuals who receive an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) following a life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia often face substantial challenges, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite their clinical significance, research examining whether these symptoms differ from PTSD symptoms following external trauma (e.g., assault, accidents) and evaluating evidence-based PTSD interventions in this population remains limited. This dissertation comprised two studies designed to characterize the psychological experiences and treatment needs of these individuals and evaluate Written Exposure Therapy (WET), a brief trauma-focused intervention, in this population.Study 1 used semi-structured interviews with individuals who had received an ICD and reported heightened cardiac trauma-related PTSD symptoms (N = 6). Reflexive thematic analysis examined the alignment of participants’ descriptions with DSM-5 PTSD criteria and the Enduring Somatic Threat (EST) model of medically induced PTSD. Participants' accounts reflected all four DSM-5 PTSD symptom clusters and extended beyond the manifestations described in the EST model. Common themes included recurrence-oriented intrusions, medically rationalized restriction, ICD concealment and identity disruption, and hypervigilance toward internal and external threat cues. Study 2 was a single-arm, open-label, proof-of-concept trial examining the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of WET, in the same sample (N = 6). Feasibility and acceptability were assessed through recruitment, attrition, treatment credibility, and satisfaction. PTSD symptoms, cardiac trauma-related fear, and ICD-related quality of life (QoL) were assessed at baseline, 1 week posttreatment, and 1-month follow-up. Rapid qualitative analysis of entrance and exit interviews provided additional information about intervention acceptability and perceived changes. Despite modest recruitment, no drop out occurred, and treatment credibility and satisfaction were high. Exploratory analyses showed improvements in PTSD symptoms, cardiac trauma-related fear, and ICD-related QoL that were maintained at follow-up, with large effect sizes. Participants also described improved distress tolerance, reduced avoidance, greater ICD acceptance, and enhanced communication with medical providers. Together, these studies provide preliminary support for the feasibility, acceptability, and potential clinical utility of WET following life-threatening cardiac events and ICD implantation and supports the need for future large-scale trials. Findings also suggest that established PTSD measures may benefit from cardiac- and ICD-specific examples to improve symptom recognition by patients and providers.PsychologyClinical psychologyHealth care managementapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dh7m1x6https://escholarship.org/content/qt7dh7m1x6/qt7dh7m1x6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2mw1w9d22026-06-19T06:34:01Zqt2mw1w9d2Experimental Validation of Salvinia Superhydrophobic Surfaces for AntibiofoulingZhang, MengjunKIM, CJ2026-06-12Antibiofouling surfaces are designed to prevent the settlement and adhesion of marine organisms, thereby reducing maintenance requirements and preserving the hydrodynamic performance of submerged structures. This thesis presents the development of a laboratory-based testing protocol, including a custom sample-mounting module, to validate the antifouling performance of previously engineered surface samples under well-controlled experimental conditions. Particular attention is given to ensuring stable sample fixation, minimizing experimental variability, and reproducing environmental factors such as continuous hydration and simulated daylight exposure.Biological samples, including barnacle cyprids, were prepared and supplied by Dan Rittschof's Lab at Duke University to ensure consistency in organism quality, developmental stage, and settlement conditions across all experiments. This controlled biological input enables reliable comparison between different surface designs and experimental runs.The target surface concept investigated in this work integrates superhydrophobicity with antibiofouling functionality. Superhydrophobicity is achieved through the combination of micro/nanostructured surface and low-surface-energy modification, enabling the retention of an interfacial air layer (plastron) under water. This air layer reduces the effective solid–water contact area and alters the interfacial environment, thereby interfering with the ability of larvae to recognize the surface as a suitable attachment substrate, ultimately preventing biofouling.Antifouling performance is primarily evaluated based on the absence of significant reduction of barnacle settlement relative to a control surface, which is smooth with no microstructure on it. In addition to qualitative observation, quantitative metrics are employed, including settlement density, adhesion strength (measured via controlled detachment), and the extent of residual fouling after removal. These metrics provide a more comprehensive assessment of both initial attachment and long-term adhesion behavior.Mechanical engineeringMaterials scienceHydrologic sciencesBiological oceanographyAntibiofoulingBarnacle cypridsMarine biofoulingSalvinia effectSuperhydrophobic surfacespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2mw1w9d2etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt21k8r7762026-06-19T06:33:56Zqt21k8r776Broadband Sampling Phase Locked Loop with Noise Shifting Colpitts OscillatorGao, YunxiangBabakhani, Aydin2026-06-12The problem of designing a low-noise broadband phase locked loop (PLL) becomes exceptionally intriguing as more and more electronic devices have been integrated to achieve Internet of Things. This thesis investigates a broadband sampling PLL architecture incorporating a noise-shifting Colpitts oscillator to improve phase-noise performance.The sampling phase detector is first analyzed from both mixer-based and time-domain perspectives. Phase-noise generation in LC oscillators is then reviewed using phasor-based and impulse sensitivity function (ISF) interpretations. Several baseline oscillator topologies, including cross-coupled LC, noise-filtered cross-coupled, Colpitts, and Clapp oscillators, are compared under common design constraints. A g_m-boosted noise-shifting Colpitts oscillator is designed and evaluated. ISF and noise modulation function simulations show that the proposed topology reduces the effective ISF near the zero crossings, explaining its improved phase-noise performance. The 20 GHz oscillator achieves a best simulated FoM of approximately -188 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. However, undesired oscillation modes are observed, which limit the effective tuning range and degrade the FoM. Future work may focus on suppressing these undesired modes to improve tuning robustness and phase-noise performance.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringApplied physicsColpitts oscillatorcurrent-mode logicISFPLLapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k8r776https://escholarship.org/content/qt21k8r776/qt21k8r776.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1549v7492026-06-19T06:33:51Zqt1549v749Double ConcertoSchreiber, Thacher PaulKrouse, Ian2026-06-12Double Concerto is a work inspired by an instrumental genre which would not exist, had it not been for the husband-and-wife duo of Heinz and Ursula Holliger, for whom dozens of works for oboe and harp have been written by several of the greatest composers of the last century, including Elliott Carter, Hans Werner Henze, André Jolivet, Witold Lutosławski, Frank Martin, Alfred Schnittke, Tōru Takemitsu, and Isang Yun. This work is modeled off of the instrumentation of Lutosławski’s own Double Concerto (oboe, harp, two percussionists, and twelve strings), composed in 1980; although not a structural derivative of Lutosławski’s work, Double Concerto endeavors to expand on the tonal and textural qualities inherent with such an ensemble, with each movement pursuing different sonorities and compositional processes.Musical compositionMusicMusic historyMusical performancescomposerconcertoharpmusicoboeorchestraapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1549v749https://escholarship.org/content/qt1549v749/qt1549v749.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt23h1m0g52026-06-19T06:33:46Zqt23h1m0g5Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Pharmacotherapies and The Role of Local Access to Specialty Care Among Medicare Enrollees with Late-Onset Rheumatoid ArthritisAra, Ashkan FEttner, SusanFitzGerald, John2026-06-12Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease in which disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) are the cornerstone of long-term management. Among Medicare beneficiaries with late-onset rheumatoid arthritis (LORA), less is known about whether access to these therapies is equitable across racial and ethnic groups, particularly for specialty DMARDs and Part B-covered specialty DMARDs, which are more infrastructure-dependent and often require office- or infusion center-based administration. I examined racial and ethnic differences in pharmacotherapy use among Medicare beneficiaries with LORA, the association of local specialty-care supply with pharmacotherapy outcomes, and the extent to which observed racial and ethnic differences were mediated through low financial resources and local outpatient care supply.
Using a 20% sample of Medicare claims data from 2016 to 2020, I conducted a retrospective cohort study of 39,706 fee-for-service beneficiaries aged 65 years or older with incident LORA, continuous Medicare Parts A, B, and D coverage, and no competing indications for DMARD use. Logistic regression models were used to examine any DMARD use, any specialty DMARD use, any Part B-covered specialty DMARD use, chronic glucocorticoid use, and chronic opioid use, as well as any rheumatologist visit, and any infusion event. Mediation analyses were then used to assess whether racial and ethnic differences in the pharmacotherapy outcomes operated through low financial resources and local outpatient care supply.
Racial and ethnic differences were not uniform across outcomes. The clearest inequity was concentrated in Part B-covered specialty DMARD use rather than in any DMARD use or specialty DMARD use overall. In the full cohort, Black, Hispanic, and Other Race beneficiaries had lower adjusted probabilities of Part B-covered specialty DMARD use than White beneficiaries. Among beneficiaries who had already received a specialty DMARD, Hispanic and Other Race beneficiaries remained less likely than White beneficiaries to receive a Part B-covered specialty DMARD, whereas the Black-White difference was smaller. By contrast, chronic glucocorticoid use was lower among all non-White groups, and chronic opioid use was lower among Hispanic and Other Race beneficiaries but did not differ significantly between Black and White beneficiaries.
In mediation analyses, low financial resources emerged as the most consistent determinant and the dominant mediator across analyses. Across the mediation analyses, low financial resources was the largest pathway for most racial and ethnic contrasts. For DMARD outcomes, low financial resources mediated lower model-implied use among Black, Hispanic, and Other Race beneficiaries relative to White beneficiaries. Local supply pathways were generally smaller, although infusion-center supply contributed to some specialty DMARD and Part B-covered specialty DMARD pathways, especially for Hispanic and Other Race beneficiaries. Additionally, low financial resources mediated lower chronic glucocorticoid use but higher chronic opioid use.
These findings suggest that pharmacoequity in LORA is not simply about whether beneficiaries receive any treatment, but whether they can reach the most infrastructure-dependent segment of high-value RA pharmacotherapy, particularly Part B-covered specialty DMARDs. They also suggest that continuous Medicare coverage alone is not sufficient to ensure equitable access. Even within a uniformly insured population, financial resources and local treatment infrastructure remained important in shaping who accessed high-value therapy and who relied on low-value treatments.Health care managementPublic healthPharmacologyDisease-Modifying Antirheumatic DrugsLate-Onset Rheumatoid ArthritisMedicarePharmacoequityRacial and Ethnic disparitiesSpecialty DrugspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/23h1m0g5etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt48x2p7j22026-06-19T06:33:41Zqt48x2p7j2Strong, Striving, and Stressed: Goal-Striving Stress and Allostatic Load among Black WomenBradley, AngelicaThomas Tobin, Courtney2026-06-12Background: Black women experience disproportionate health burdens driven by chronic exposure to stressors shaped by intersecting racial and gender inequality. Allostatic load (AL), a biomarker of cumulative physiological wear and tear, captures the long-term health impact of chronic stress. Identifying psychosocial factors that contribute to AL is important for understanding how social and structural stressors shape physiological health among Black women. Goal-striving stress (GSS), defined as the psychosocial stress associated with striving toward goals while facing constrained opportunities and systemic barriers, may capture an important yet understudied dimension of stress within this population. This study examines the relationship between GSS and AL among Black women.Methods: Data were drawn from the Nashville Stress and Health Study (NSAHS, 2011-2014), an epidemiological community sample of non-Hispanic Black and White adults ages 22–69 in Nashville, Tennessee. Analyses were restricted to 329 Black women. The primary study variables were goal-striving stress (GSS) and allostatic load (AL), with age, socioeconomic status (SES), marital status, parental status, and depressive symptoms included as covariates. GSS was categorized into low, moderate, and high levels, while AL was measured as a continuous composite score reflecting cumulative physiological dysregulation. Descriptive statistics characterized the sample, bivariate analyses examined correlates across levels of GSS, and weighted ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models assessed the relationship between GSS and AL.Results: Age, SES, and marital status were associated with GSS, while parental status and depressive symptoms were not. In addition, age was positively associated with AL (b=0.04, p<0.01), formerly married women had higher AL than married women (b=0.73, p<0.01), and parents had higher AL than non-parents (b=0.90, p<0.001). SES, marital status, and depressive symptoms were otherwise not associated with AL. The association between GSS and AL was not significant in unadjusted models; however, after adjustment for sociodemographic and psychosocial factors, women with moderate GSS had lower AL than women with low GSS (b=-0.49, p<0.01).Conclusions: This study extends research on GSS among Black women by demonstrating its association with AL after accounting for key sociodemographic and psychosocial factors. Findings highlight the complex relationship between GSS and physiological dysregulation among Black women and underscore the importance of examining GSS within broader systems of inequality. To our knowledge, this study is among the first to examine the association between GSS and AL specifically among Black women, underscoring the importance of examining how goal-related stress may become biologically embedded within broader systems of inequality.African American studiesMental healthWomens studiesBlack studiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/48x2p7j2https://escholarship.org/content/qt48x2p7j2/qt48x2p7j2.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8rq2v0zz2026-06-19T06:32:54Zqt8rq2v0zzGraph-Based Anti-Money Laundering in BitcoinWu, KathleenWu, Yingnian2026-06-12Anti-money laundering (AML) in cryptocurrency networks represents one of the most challenging problems at the intersection of financial security, legal compliance, and machine learning. Bitcoin's pseudonymous design has been widely exploited for illicit financial activities such as ransomware, dark-market transactions, and money laundering. However, the open and immutable nature of the Bitcoin blockchain simultaneously creates an unprecedented forensic opportunity in which the full history of every transaction is publicly available as a traversable graph. Consequently, the development of automated methods to detect these illicit transactions is imperative for global financial security.This thesis uses a comparative framework for detecting illicit Bitcoin transactions using the Elliptic Dataset. The thesis establishes machine learning baselines including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, and Multilayer Perceptron, and then we subsequently also conduct a systematic comparison of three graph neural network architectures, with Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), GraphSAGE, and Graph Attention Networks (GAT/GATv2). These different GNN frameworks utilize the full transaction graph structure alongside all 165 node features, leveraging techniques such as inductive neighborhood sampling and learned attention weights to prioritzie and aggregate local information. From the results, it shows that Random Forest achieves the strongest overall score. Amongst GNNs, GraphSAGE outperforms both GCN and GAT/GATv2. Looking at performance metrics such as F1 scores, our GNN models do not surpass our best machine learning model, suggesting that the features in this dataset already encode a portion of the graph specific characteristics that GNNS must learn, that tell GNNS how money flows through the network. It also suggests that while GNNs can capture fraud patterns, future research exploring different architectural frameworks such as hybrid frameworks that combine the decision-tree efficiencies of ensemble methods with edge-conditioned graph convolutions, could potentially close the remaining performance gap.StatisticsArtificial intelligenceFinanceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rq2v0zzhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8rq2v0zz/qt8rq2v0zz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt21j688ph2026-06-19T06:32:49Zqt21j688phStatistical Modeling to Forecast Player-Level Shot Output in Premier League MatchesGrover, Matheus DanielSchoenberg, FredericLew, Vivian2026-05-28Shot volume is a fundamental indicator of attacking involvement in soccer because shots occur more frequently than goals and provide a more stable measure of opportunity. This thesis develops a statistical framework for predicting player-level shot output in Premier League matches using player match logs and match-level team context. The model predicts shots per 90 minutes from long-term shooting rate, recent form, non-penalty expected goals, shot-creating actions, team possession, team attacking form, opponent defensive form, venue, and position. Out-of-sample validation compares a shooting-only baseline, expanded linear model, count models, and a quadratic linear specification. The final approach translates predicted shots per 90 into expected match-level shot totals using expected minutes and then maps those totals to Poisson probabilities. A case study for Bukayo Saka against Chelsea illustrates how the method produces interpretable probabilities for over/under shotlines. An interactive Shiny app extends the framework into a sportsbook-style prototype that allows users to select players, view model projections and Poisson shot-count probabilities, and simulate Over/Under betting decisions.StatisticsKinesiologyModelingPlayer-LevelPredictionPremier LeagueShotSoccerapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/21j688phhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt21j688ph/qt21j688ph.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8230631x2026-06-18T06:33:22Zqt8230631xA Comparative Study of Shear Bond Strength and Failure Mode of Glazing Resin on 3D-Printed Dental MaterialGhulman, MoayyadKim, Reuben2026-06-12Three-dimensional (3D) printing has transformed digital dentistry, enabling chair-side and laboratory fabrication of provisional crowns, bridges, and definitive restorations from photopolymer resins. Surface glazing of these printed restorations is performed to seal the oxygen-inhibited layer, improve color stability, polish, and wear resistance. However, the compatibility of commercially available glaze coatings with newer 3D-printable resin chemistries is incompletely characterized, and clinically meaningful delamination of the glaze layer remains an under-reported failure mode.This in vitro study evaluated the shear bond strength (SBS) and failure mode of five commercially available light-cured glaze coatings applied to a 3D-printed permanent crown and bridge resin (EZPRINT Crown & Bridge 2.0; Aidite). 150 standardized disk specimens were fabricated and randomly assigned to three groups of thirty (n = 30): Group ID380, ID NANO GLAZE 380 nm (ID America); Group ID460, ID NANO GLAZE 460 nm (ID America) Group R, Rodin 3D Resin Glaze (Pac-Dent); Group OG, Optiglaze (GC America); and Group M, MAZIC (Vericom). After surface cleaning, glaze application, light-curing, and glycerin-assisted oxygen-inhibition removal, all specimens were stored in distilled water at 37 °C for 24 h (HERA Therm Incubator; Thermo Scientific). Shear bond strength was measured on an Ultradent UltraTester at a crosshead speed of 1 mm/min using a notched-edge shearing rod. Failure modes were classified by stereomicroscopy as adhesive, cohesive, or mixed. Data were analyzed by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Tukey's honestly significant difference (HSD) post-hoc comparisons in GraphPad Prism 11. The non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis test was performed as a sensitivity analysis because of the zero variance in one group. Statistical significance was set at α = 0.05.All thirty specimens in the Optiglaze group exhibited complete failure of the glaze layer to adhere to the 3D-printed substrate at the time of application. The material was therefore deemed clinically incompatible with this substrate and these specimens were not advanced to the storage step. A second group, ID NANO GLAZE 460 nm, also produced 0 MPa across all specimens — but for a different reason: the glaze never polymerized (a curing failure rather than an adhesion failure). Bond strength was recorded as 0 MPa for all specimens in both groups. Mean ± SD shear bond strength values were 13.82 ± 3.49 MPa for ID NANO GLAZE 380 nm, 10.49 ± 3.48 MPa for Rodin, 6.57 ± 3.83 MPa for MAZIC, and 0.00 ± 0.00 MPa for both ID NANO GLAZE 460 nm and Optiglaze. One-way ANOVA demonstrated a highly significant overall group effect (F(4, 145) = 147.81, p < 0.001; η² = 0.80, indicating a very large effect). Tukey HSD post-hoc analysis confirmed that 9 of the 10 pairwise comparisons among the five glaze groups were statistically significant (adjusted p < 0.001); only the comparison between the two zero-strength groups (ID NANO 460 vs Optiglaze) was non-significant. The glazes ranked in descending order of bond strength as ID NANO 380 > Rodin > MAZIC > (ID NANO 460 = Optiglaze).Within the limitations of this in vitro study, the choice of glaze material exerted a clinically and statistically significant effect on the shear bond strength of glaze coatings applied to 3D-printed permanent restorative resin. The light-cured 380 nm nano-glaze formulation produced the highest bond strength, the dimethacrylate-based Rodin glaze produced intermediate performance, and the urethane-based Optiglaze coating failed catastrophically under simple aqueous aging at body temperature. These findings should inform material selection when finishing 3D-printed crown and bridge restorations and highlight the importance of evaluating glaze–substrate chemical compatibility prior to clinical application.DentistryBiomedical engineeringMedicineBiology3D printingBonding strengthDelaminationGlazingInorganic compositionapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8230631xhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8230631x/qt8230631x.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3jx9x6cj2026-06-18T06:33:17Zqt3jx9x6cjVirtual Segregation- Black History, Politics and Resistance in Video GamesJackson, Joshua ChristopherOdinga, Sobukwe2026-06-12Once thought of as a children’s toy, video games have developed into a valuable storytelling tool, adapting and creating stories that routinely permeate popular culture. As their influence has grown, so has the variety of stories being told through the medium. This includes stories centering Black diasporic experiences through folklore and cultural values. Yet, as Black presence in video games has increased, concentrated efforts to silence their voices through hate movements have emerged to a point where they have now grown to influence global politics.Most notably, Steve Bannon, the former Chief Political Strategist to Donald Trump, recognized the potential of radicalizing and weaponizing white male gamers as far back as 2005 within World of Warcraft communities. Bannon’s subsequent appointment as the head of far right website Breitbart News in 2012 put him in an ideal position to follow through on a far more ambitious project of radicalization which manifested as the GamerGate controversy of 2014. What started as a movement largely contained in fringe pockets of websites like Reddit would snowball to the point where it helped form an emerging political demographic, one that helped carry Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016, fueled by the misogynist and anti-Black rhetoric that continues to the present day. My research will draw connections to these hate movements and historical efforts to deny Black storytellers space in media, explain the importance of digital representation to shape cultural attitudes, and emphasize how the interactive power of video games places them in a unique position to express culture outside of a Western hegemonic standard. This dissertation’s methodology includes a literature review foregrounding selected scholars of Media Studies and Black Studies, citations of quantitative research drawing from case studies of specific game releases, autoethnography recounting my lived experience in these online spaces as these cases unfolded in real time, and discourse analysis.. In addition, I cite historical examples of resistance in entertainment to develop analyses foregrounding how Black creatives in the contemporary video game industry manage to disrupt the domination of far-right ideologies in gamer discourse and provide alternatives to the radicalization pipeline that has captured so many young men in the demographic that consumes these cultural products.African American studiesBlack historyBlack studiesBlack cultureBlack historyCultural productionInternet cultureMedia studiesVideo Gamesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jx9x6cjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3jx9x6cj/qt3jx9x6cj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7fb5z5hg2026-06-18T06:33:12Zqt7fb5z5hgVESTIBULE: A Soundtrack for DanceMiedziak, Grace LaurenKrouse, Ian2026-06-12Vestibule is an original score composed for a three-movement dance production, created in collaboration with choreographer Kate Myers. This project extends the practice of composing for visual media beyond its home in film and television, treating dance as a visual medium with its own scoring logic. Drawing on minimalism and tactile sound-design sensibilities of experimental electronic music, the score integrates foley-based and ambient textures as core compositional material. The three movements trace stages of a personal journey: "Rooting," the most kinetic and production-forward movement, depicts the necessary disorder preceding growth; "Flowing" opens into a spacious, meditative ambience built from organic sound textures before introducing synthesizer and strings; and "Beaming" releases into joyful energy before settling into a warm, bittersweet string finale centered on acceptance. Vestibule reflects the potential of cross-medium collaboration and the challenge of embracing unfamiliar musical vocabulary while preserving one's own compositional voice.Musical compositionMusicDancePerforming artsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7fb5z5hghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7fb5z5hg/qt7fb5z5hg.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6g3427zv2026-06-18T06:33:07Zqt6g3427zvDesign and Optimization of a Reconnecting Plasmoid Thruster Using Permanent Magnet Field ArchitecturesMergia, Yohannes TeshomeJoshi, Chandrashekhar2026-06-12This thesis investigates whether permanent magnets can replace electromagnetic coils in a reconnecting plasmoid thruster, where magnetic reconnection drives Alfvenic plasma outflows and thrust scales as ? = ? 2?/?0, decoupling exhaust velocity from propellant ion mass. The magnetic topology required for plasmoid-unstable reconnection at ? ≳ 104 was reproduced using an optimized array of discrete permanent dipoles, formulated as constrained sparse regression over candidate magnet locations. Two algorithms were implemented in SIMSOPT: Greedy Permanent Magnet Optimization, which produced a binary layout of 178 magnets across 6 concentric rings at a fixed dipole moment of 11.3 A · m2 , and Relax-and-Split, which allowed continuous dipole strengths between 11.3 A · m2 and 61.2 A · m2 for closer field matching at higher fabrication cost. Both solutions reproduce the large-scale field reversal topology required for current sheet formation with good agreement against the NIMROD coil reference. The device was scaled to an outer radius of 0.16 m for testing at the Big Red Ball facility at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where experimental validation is ongoing. Electrical engineeringPhysicsAstrophysicsElectromagneticsElectric PropulsionMagnet OptimizationMagnetic ReconnectionPermanent MagnetsPlasmoid InstabilityPlasmoid Thrusterapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6g3427zvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6g3427zv/qt6g3427zv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4nb9x2c52026-06-18T06:33:02Zqt4nb9x2c5Efficient Applications of Information-Theoretic Randomized Encodings to Constant-Round MPCHuang, JasonOstrovsky, Rafail2026-06-12Secure multiparty computation (MPC) allows mutually distrusting parties to jointly evaluate a function while keeping their inputs private. The recent protocol of [GLOS25] is, at the time of writing, the most asymptotically efficient constant-round MPC protocol known under minimal cryptographic assumptions. Although that work does not consider randomized encodings (RE), we show that RE are compatible with the underlying round-collapsing compiler framework. Using RE, we propose a candidate extension of the baseline protocol in the honest-but-curious honest-majority setting that reduces the κ factor in the communication complexity to κ o(1) when the circuit C has depth bounded by o(log κ). For constant-depth circuits, we remove the κ factor altogether. We then discuss the limitations of this result: the depth restriction restricts our new protocol to low-depth circuits and it is unclear whether optimizations such as the transpose protocol for SIMD circuits carry over from garbled circuits to decomposable affine randomized encodings.Computer scienceInformation scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nb9x2c5https://escholarship.org/content/qt4nb9x2c5/qt4nb9x2c5.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3zx1979p2026-06-18T06:32:57Zqt3zx1979pComparison of TurboID and split-TurboID for Mitochondrial Proteome Mapping Under Depolarization StressSargsyan, AnnaSchmitt, Danielle2026-06-12The mitochondrial proteome is a dynamic environment that undergoes significant remodeling under stress conditions such as depolarization and aging, contributing to mitochondrial dysfunction implicated in neurodegenerative disease, metabolic disorders, and cardiovascular pathology. Despite its biological importance, comprehensive characterization of the mitochondrial proteome under stress conditions remains challenging, as traditional approaches such as subcellular fractionation and co-immunoprecipitation are limited by their inability to capture transient interactions and condition-dependent protein associations in their native cellular context, necessitating proximity-dependent labeling approaches. While the recent development of biotinylating enzymes TurboID and split-TurboID have emerged as powerful proximity-dependent biotinylation tools for proteome mapping in living cells, a direct comparative evaluation of their performance for outer mitochondrial membrane (OMM) proximal proteome mapping under stress conditions has not been established. Here we employ OMM-targeted and cytosolic variants of both TurboID and split-TurboID in U2OS cells to map the mitochondrial proteome under basal and CCCP-induced depolarization stress, comparing their coverage, specificity, and sensitivity using LC-MS/MS, CRAPome contaminant filtering, and gene ontology enrichment analysis. TurboID identified 619 and 848 high-confidence mitochondrial proteins under basal and depolarization conditions respectively, while split-TurboID identified 52 and 46. Split-TurboID predominantly labeled mitochondrial proteins, with 59-63% of its enriched proteins exclusively detected in the mitochondria-targeted condition compared to approximately 30% for TurboID. GO enrichment analysis confirmed capture of established mitochondrial biological processes across all conditions, with split-TurboID uniquely capturing inner mitochondrial membrane organization and cristae formation under depolarization stress.These findings demonstrate that TurboID and split-TurboID differ in their effectiveness for mitochondrial proteome mapping. This comparative framework may guide the selection of proximity labeling strategies for future investigations of mitochondrial biology in disease-relevant contexts.BiochemistryMolecular biologyNeurosciencesBiologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zx1979phttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3zx1979p/qt3zx1979p.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt58j715f72026-06-18T06:32:52Zqt58j715f7Spatial Modeling of the Los Angeles County FiresRamaseshan, AshwinSchoenberg, Frederic2026-06-12Wildfire risk has become an urgent concern across the western United States, with California experiencing unprecedented fire seasons over the past two decades. Los Angeles County is a particularly compelling study area: its unique geography of coastal zones, dense urban development, and mountainous terrain creates highly heterogeneous fire regimes, further amplified by Santa Ana winds, prolonged droughts, and expanding development at the wildland–urban interface (WUI). High-profile events such as the 2019 Getty Fire, the 2021 Palisades Fire, and more recent incidents in 2025 have demonstrated how rapidly wildfires can ignite and spread within this region. Wildfires are inherently spatio-temporal phenomena whose risk is shaped by both environmental conditions and past events, making space-time statistical models—which jointly account for location and timing—especially well suited to this problem.In this thesis, I first develop exploratory analyses using kernel density estimates and summary statistics to identify spatial hotspots and temporal trends in wildfire occurrence across Los Angeles County. Building on these baselines, I apply and extend the Stoyan– Grabarnik (SG) space-time model, which incorporates covariates to estimate the conditional intensity of wildfire occurrence. Particular attention is given to time-since-burn metrics— capturing the time since a given location or nearby locations last burned—which reflect fuel dynamics and spatial spillover, both of which are critical to understanding fire recurrence. Le risque d'incendies de forêt est devenu une préoccupation urgente dans tout l'ouest des États-Unis, la Californie connaissant en particulier des saisons d'incendies sans précédent au cours des deux dernières décennies. Selon le Département des forêts et de la protection contre les incendies de Californie (Cal Fire), sept des dix plus grands incendies de l'histoire de la Californie se sont produits depuis 2017, soulignant une crise qui s'intensifie rapidement. Le bilan humain et économique est immense : outre les vies perdues et les habitations détruites, les assureurs doivent faire face chaque année à des milliards de dollars de demandes d'indemnisation, tandis que les collectivités locales peinent à allouer leurs ressources limitées à la lutte contre les incendies et à leur prévention. Ces événements soulignent la nécessité de disposer de modèles rigoureux, fondés sur les données, capables d'améliorer notre compréhension des lieux et des moments où les incendies sont le plus susceptibles de se déclarer. Le comté de Los Angeles constitue une zone d'étude particulièrement pertinente. Sa géographie singulière englobe des régions côtières, un tissu urbain dense et des terrains montagneux, créant ainsi des régimes d'incendie d'une grande hétérogénéité. La combinaison des vents de Santa Ana, de sécheresses prolongées et de l'expansion croissante de l'interface forêt-urbain (WUI) amplifie à la fois la fréquence et le caractère destructeur des incendies. Des événements marquants tels que le Getty Fire de 2019, le Palisades Fire de 2021 et des incidents plus récents survenus en 2025 ont démontré avec quelle rapidité les feux de végétation peuvent s'allumer et se propager au sein de cette région, dépassant souvent les capacités d'intervention. Comprendre la variabilité spatiale du risque d'incendie au sein du comté de Los Angeles est par conséquent crucial, tant pour la recherche scientifique que pour l'évaluation pratique des risques. Les feux de végétation posent un problème à la fois riche et complexe pour la modélisation statistique. Les incendies sont, par nature, des phénomènes spatio-temporels : ils surviennent en des lieux et à des moments précis, mais leur risque est influencé tant par les événements passés que par les conditions environnementales. Contrairement aux modèles purement temporels — qui traitent les événements comme étant spatialement indépendants — ou aux modèles purement spatiaux — qui ignorent l'évolution dynamique du risque au fil du temps —, les modèles statistiques spatio-temporels permettent de traiter conjointement les dimensions spatiale et temporelle. Cela les rend particulièrement bien adaptés aux applications liées aux feux de forêt, domaine dans lequel la récurrence des événements sur un même site constitue un élément fondamental du processus.Dans cette thèse, je développe tout d'abord des analyses exploratoires fournissant un aperçu descriptif des schémas d'occurrence des feux ; pour ce faire, j'utilise des estimations par densité de noyau ainsi que des statistiques descriptives afin de mettre en évidence les points chauds spatiaux et les tendances temporelles. Ces méthodes de référence établissent des jalons permettant d'évaluer des modèles plus avancés. Dans un second temps, j'applique et j'enrichis le modèle spatio-temporel de Stoyan-Grabarnik (SG), lequel intègre explicitement des covariables pour estimer l'intensité conditionnelle de l'occurrence des feux de forêt. Une attention particulière est portée aux indicateurs liés au « temps écoulé depuis le dernier feu » : le temps écoulé depuis la dernière combustion d'un site donné, d'une part, et le temps écoulé depuis la combustion des sites voisins, d'autre part. Ces mesures permettent de saisir la dynamique du combustible ainsi que les effets de débordement spatial, deux facteurs déterminants pour la compréhension de la récurrence des feux.StatisticsGeographic information scienceEnvironmental scienceRemote sensingNegative Binomial RegressionStoyan-Grabarnik (SG)Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD)VIIRSWildfireWildland-Urban Interface (WUI)application/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/58j715f7https://escholarship.org/content/qt58j715f7/qt58j715f7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt98r5g5nk2026-06-18T06:32:47Zqt98r5g5nkEstrogen Receptor Expression In Sleep Regulatory Brain Regions: Effects of Genotypic and Phenotypic SexKahan, MackennaPaul, Ketema2026-06-12Sleep disorders are a major public health concern with many known comorbidities, such as heart disease, depression, and anxiety. Women are more susceptible to sleep disorders such as insomnia. Previous studies have shown that males exhibit more resilient recovery phenotypes following sleep disruptions.1 There is a significant overlap in regulatory brain regions involving sleep and stress, particularly in the hypothalamus. We hypothesize that the resilience to sleep loss typically observed in males is a component of the sleep recovery response following psychological stress. The Four Core Genotype (FCG) is a mouse model that allows us to elucidate sex differences in sleep by separating genotypic and phenotypic aspects of sex. Brain regions responsible for homeostatic mechanisms of sleep and stress will be isolated from the hypothalamus following either one hour of sleep deprivation (GH) or restraint stress (RS). We performed fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) to visualize and quantify estrogen receptor ? and ? expression levels. Our results will contribute to our understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of sex differences in sleep. Our findings demonstrated significant differences in ERα expression were observed within the SCN between genotype and phenotypic sex groups under intact conditions. Following gonadectomy, ERα expression remained significantly altered within the SCN, while significant phenotypic sex differences in both ERα and ERβ expression emerged within the VLPO.PhysiologyNeurosciencesMental healthClinical psychologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/98r5g5nkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt98r5g5nk/qt98r5g5nk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt64q454tm2026-06-18T06:32:41Zqt64q454tmThe Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Social Avoidance in All-Female Wild-Type MiceFletcher, Janette AshaPaul, Ketema N2026-06-12Chronic sleep disruption is a major risk factor for anxiety, depression, and stress-related disorders, yet the behavioral consequences of sleep loss in females remain significantly understudied. The majority of preclinical sleep-stress research has been conducted in male animals, yet the field lacks an effective understanding of how sleep deprivation shapes stress susceptibility in females, who experience higher rates of insomnia and affective disorders. The purpose of this project is to determine whether chronic sleep deprivation induces social avoidance behavior in female mice and whether the severity of sleep loss modulates these behavioral outcomes. Using a graded sleep deprivation paradigm (six h/day or 12 h/day for 10 days), we assessed social interaction behavior before and after sleep disruption using an automated tracking system with a novel CD-1 male mouse stimulus. We compared time spent in the interaction zone, number of approaches, and total distance traveled before and after CD1 exposure in female (C57BL/6) mice. Contrary to prior findings in male models, chronic sleep restriction did not significantly impact social avoidance behavior in female mice. Instead, the profound behavioral suppression, especially seen in increases in immobility, decreases in total distance traveled, Non-Avoidant Zone entries, and average speed, was driven entirely by the novel CD1 male stimulus. These effects parallel human consequences of sleep restriction, suggesting that females exhibit sex-specific resilience or divergent stress responses following sleep loss, such as increased hyperactivity rather than distinct social withdrawal. NeurosciencesBehavioral sciencesBiologyBehaviorNeuroscienceSex DifferencesSleepSocial InteractionStressapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/64q454tmhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt64q454tm/qt64q454tm.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2qq0n7qx2026-06-18T06:32:36Zqt2qq0n7qxSpectral composition of daytime light differentially shapes circadian dynamics in miceChen, CaihanColwell, Christopher SBlock, Gene D2026-06-12Light is the dominant environmental cue for circadian entrainment, yet the relative contributions of spectral composition and illuminance to daytime entrainment remain incompletely resolved. We tested the hypothesis that short-wavelength–enriched daytime light would promote more robust circadian regulation than longer-wavelength light in wild-type C57BL/6J mice. Adult male and female mice were exposed to one of six daytime lighting conditions that varied in spectral composition and intensity: 7000 K blue-enriched white light, 4500 K white light, or red light, each delivered at either 50 or 10 photopic lux. Daily locomotor activity was monitored using running wheels to assess entrainment under stable 12:12 light:dark conditions. Mice were subsequently challenged with a series of photic manipulations, including re-entrainment to phase shifts, negative masking, photic phase shifting in constant darkness, exposure to constant light, and entrainment to a skeleton photoperiod. Under stable 12:12 light:dark conditions, daily activity waveforms and standard rhythm metrics did not differ across lighting groups, indicating that spectral composition had limited impact on stable entrainment at these illuminance levels. However, red light substantially impaired dynamic circadian responses: mice re-entrained more slowly to 6-hr phase advances and delays, exhibited weaker negative masking, and showed markedly attenuated light-induced phase delays. The 7000 K condition produced the fastest adaptation to a phase advance, whereas both 7000 K and 4500 K conditions supported faster re-entrainment than red light after a phase delay. Under a skeleton photoperiod, mice exposed to either blue-enriched light or red light at 10 lx successfully entrained under baseline conditions. However, following a 6-hr shift of the skeleton photoperiod, all animals in the 7000 K condition re-entrained, whereas red light produced heterogeneous responses, with most animals failing to re-entrain. Finally, red light was less disruptive than blue-enriched or white light under constant-light conditions. Together, these findings indicate that a broad range of white-light spectra can maintain stable entrainment at recommended daytime housing illuminance, whereas longer-wavelength light is less effective when the circadian system must respond to acute or shifting photic signals. Thus, light spectrum appears to play a greater role in dynamic circadian regulation than in the maintenance of stable entrainment. 光照是昼夜节律同步的主要环境信号，但光谱组成和光照强度对日间同步的相对贡献仍未完全阐明。我们检验了以下假设：在野生型C57BL/6J小鼠中，富含短波长的日间光照比长波长光照更能促进昼夜节律的稳定调节。成年雄性和雌性小鼠分别暴露于六种不同的日间光照条件下，这些光照条件在光谱组成和强度上有所不同：7000 K富含蓝光的白光、4500 K白光或红光，每种光照强度分别为50或10光度勒克斯。在稳定的12:12光暗周期条件下，使用跑轮监测小鼠的每日运动活动以评估其昼夜节律同步情况。随后，小鼠接受了一系列光照操作，包括重新同步到相位偏移、负掩蔽、在持续黑暗中进行光照相位偏移、暴露于持续光照以及同步到骨架光周期。在稳定的12:12光暗周期条件下，不同光照组的日活动波形和标准节律指标无显著差异，表明光谱组成在这些照度水平下对稳定的昼夜节律同步影响有限。然而，红光显著损害了动态昼夜节律反应：小鼠对6小时相位提前和延迟的重新同步速度较慢，负掩蔽效应较弱，且光诱导的相位延迟明显减弱。7000 K光照条件下小鼠对相位提前的适应速度最快，而相位延迟后，7000 K和4500 K光照条件下的重新同步速度均快于红光。在骨架光周期下，暴露于10 lx蓝光或红光的小鼠在基线条件下均能成功同步。然而，在骨架光周期发生6小时偏移后，7000 K光照条件下的所有小鼠均能重新同步，而红光则产生了异质性反应，大多数小鼠未能重新同步。最后，在恒定光照条件下，红光比富含蓝光或白光的干扰更小。这些发现共同表明，在推荐的日间饲养光照强度下，多种光谱的白光可以维持稳定的昼夜节律同步，而当昼夜节律系统必须响应急性或变化的光照信号时，长波长的光效果较差。因此，光谱似乎在动态昼夜节律调节中发挥着比维持稳定同步更大的作用。PhysiologyHealth sciencescircadian rhythmentrainmentjetlaglightmelanopsinmouseapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2qq0n7qxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2qq0n7qx/qt2qq0n7qx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt66b7z4t12026-06-18T06:32:31Zqt66b7z4t1Touchy-Feely: An Exploratory Study on What Early Childhood Teachers Think About Rewarding and Shepherding Touch in a Transitional Routine ScenarioDrmandjian, Vartuhe RoseFranke, Megan2026-06-12This qualitative study explored early childhood teacher perceptions on the use of shepherding and rewarding touch in hypothetical routine transition scenarios. The study sought to understand what early childhood teachers thought about the use of each touch type, and the considerations they believed the teacher in the scenario made before using each touch type. Fourteen participants currently employed in classrooms with 3-to-5-year-old children were interviewed online using the Zoom video conferencing application. The study revealed that participants regarded affectionate-rewarding touch more highly than controlling-shepherding touch even though they believed shepherding touch was used more commonly in early childhood settings. The temporal environment in early childhood settings and power were themes that explained why shepherding touch was so much more common. Participants also shared their perspectives on the social-emotional and behavioral implications of each touch type, discussing how children’s abilities, perspectives, consent, and the duration and frequency with which the touch was experienced would all make a difference.EducationEducational psychologyEarly childhood educationDevelopmental psychologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/66b7z4t1https://escholarship.org/content/qt66b7z4t1/qt66b7z4t1.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt46p5h47f2026-06-18T06:32:26Zqt46p5h47fTowards Bidirectional Human–AI Scientific Reasoning: From Concept-Role Graphs to Negotiated InterpretationSimon, MichaelJun, Eunice2026-06-12As AI systems take on more of the cognitive work of science, a foundational question arises: how can human and AI reasoning be made legible to each other? This thesis argues that any productive human-AI scientific collaboration must employ an intermediate representation (IR) that makes each party’s reasoning visible, structured, and contestable.We present Syrup, a system in which humans and AI collaboratively reason about scientific papers through a shared concept-role graph, a network of concepts and their argumentative roles that both parties can inspect, restructure, and negotiate. Through design probe studies with researchers conducting paper revision and reading, we find that Syrup supports different modes of reasoning and facilitates human-AI communication.We situate the system within an investigation of representation consistency. An early two-step LLM graph-extraction pipeline tested whether such a representation could be canonically extracted; its failure modes shaped Syrup’s design. We then propose an empirical follow-up study that revisits the consistency metric using Syrup’s agentic construction phase, report a preliminary study of how the graph’s serialization format governs which structural signals an agent can read from it, and surface design implications for intermediate representations that support scientific reasoning.Artificial intelligenceComputer engineeringComputer scienceAI for ScienceComputational ArgumentationHuman-Centered AIIntermediate RepresentationsScientific Reasoningapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/46p5h47fhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt46p5h47f/qt46p5h47f.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8rw4622q2026-06-18T06:32:21Zqt8rw4622qChilling effects in the workplace: An analysis of ICE arrests and OSHA complaint inspections across the US, 2024-2025Young, JosephineKuhn, Randall2026-06-12Under the 47th presidential administration, immigration has become increasingly criminalized through intensified ICE arrests, and workplace safety efforts have been reduced through budget cuts and decreased federal enforcement from OSHA. While immigration enforcement and its economic and political impact on workplace safety have been studied over the years, there is a gap in understanding whether a relationship exists between immigration enforcement and OSHA complaints.Drawing on the Theory of Work Adjustment and the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study hypothesizes that increased immigration enforcement may have spillover effects on occupational health and safety regulation outcomes. This may lead to a chilling effect, reducing workers’ willingness to report workplace violations and resulting in a decline in OSHA complaints and subsequent inspections. A secondary data analysis was conducted to examine whether an increase in ICE arrests from 2024 to 2025 is associated with declines in OSHA complaint inspections across U.S. states. This study also evaluates whether the relationship between ICE arrests and OSHA complaint inspections changes after January 2025. Findings provide limited but suggestive evidence that intensified immigration enforcement may be associated with reductions in workplace safety reporting, though broader national temporal trends and policy changes during 2025 may account for some of the observed relationship.Public healthOccupational safetyMental healthapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rw4622qhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8rw4622q/qt8rw4622q.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt48q797c02026-06-18T06:32:11Zqt48q797c0Forecasting NFL Futures Using an Improved Elo Model with Quantified UncertaintyWong, Nicholas GambuzziMichailidis, Geroge2026-06-12This thesis is in collaboration with WagerWire and focuses on NFL futures markets, where wagers on outcomes such as Super Bowl winners and season win totals must account for long forecasting horizons and substantial uncertainty. This thesis develops a quantitative framework for NFL futures forecasting built around an optimized Elo rating system combined with Monte Carlo season simulation, with application to WagerWire’s secondary marketplace for futures tickets.
The proposed Elo model incorporates margin-of-victory adjustments, a decaying K-factor, and a market-anchoring mechanism that considers market-betting closing lines. Preseason ratings are initialized using a combination of regressed prior-season Elo, Super Bowl futures odds, and sportsbook season win totals. Core model parameters are optimized through grid search using soft-label log loss against devigged closing odds across 11 NFL seasons, from the 2015-2016 through the 2025-2026 season. These game-level probabilities are extended to full-season outcome distributions through a Monte Carlo simulation, with scoring margins generated from a conditional kernel density estimate fitted on historical NFL results. An anchor-week mechanism enables midseason conditional forecasting, and a nested simulation design provides confidence intervals for all probability outputs. Confidence intervals are validated through calibration and coverage analysis. The confidence intervals are applied to futures market bets to aid decision-making.StatisticsInformation scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/48q797c0https://escholarship.org/content/qt48q797c0/qt48q797c0.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3b4401z62026-06-18T06:32:06Zqt3b4401z6Social Sentiment and Theatrical Success: An Analysis of Trailer Comments and Box Office PerformanceJuarez, Alysa ReneeSchoenberg, Frederic2026-06-12The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the rise of streaming services, have had a substantial impact on theatrical box office performance. Studios are no longer solely focused on producing high-quality films but must also market them effectively to encourage audiences to attend theatrical screenings. One of the most important components of a film's marketing campaign is its official trailer. This study examines the relationship between audience reactions to trailers and eventual box office success by conducting sentiment analysis on YouTube comments associated with official movie trailers. Results indicate that positive sentiment is positively associated with commercial success, while also suggesting that additional factors contribute to theatrical performance.Film studiesStatisticsMarketingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b4401z6https://escholarship.org/content/qt3b4401z6/qt3b4401z6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7q21j0g62026-06-18T06:32:01Zqt7q21j0g6Institutional Characteristics and Financial Return in U.S. Higher EducationZhuravleva, DariaSchoenberg, RickTsiang, Michael2026-05-28This thesis examines how institutional characteristics are associated with median earnings ten years after entry across U.S. colleges and universities using institution-level data from the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard. The analysis includes institutional control, predominant degree awarded, geographic region, location type, open-admission status, in-state tuition, median student debt, Pell Grant share, federal loan share, undergraduate enrollment, and completion rate. Missing predictor values were addressed using multiple imputation by chained equations. Multiple linear regression, log-linear regression, and random forest were used to evaluate these relationships. Across models, institutional control, predominant degree awarded, Pell Grant share, and completion rate emerged as important correlates of earnings outcomes. The log-linear model provided improved diagnostics and the preferred basis for interpretation. Overall, the findings suggest that earnings outcomes differ systematically across institutions and are associated with sector, credential structure, student composition, and institutional performance.StatisticsHigher educationHigher education administrationFinanceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7q21j0g6https://escholarship.org/content/qt7q21j0g6/qt7q21j0g6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7kj737112026-06-18T06:31:56Zqt7kj73711Detecting AI Generated Text via Peer Elicitation GamesHui, ChristyDai, Xiaowu2026-05-28This thesis investigates the applicability of Peer Elicitation Games (PEG) to the task of AI-generated text detection. PEG, introduced by Chen et al., is a training-free, game theoretic framework that aligns a team of large language models and has them interact in a peer evaluation setting; reward utilities are computed using a determinant-based mutual information score which provably incentivizes truthful reporting without requiring ground truth. This study adapts the PEG framework to a binary bot detection task by applying it to a corpus of 10000 texts (5000 human-written and 5000 AI-generated), utilizing eight general-purpose instruction-tuned language models across four scaling configurations (3, 6, 7, and 8 models). We find that PEG does not reliably improve bot detection accuracy above the random baseline in any configuration. Majority vote accuracy ranges between 46.47% to 50.16%. Through this study, we identify main failure modes in this study that led to the inability to apply PEG to this particular bot-detection study: degenerate initial policies, homogeneous responses, uninformative DMI payments, and task mismatches between pretraining and evaluation. These findings characterize the conditions in which PEG can fail, offering alternatives and points to be wary of when applying PEG to other domains: one must ensure a sufficient label space, content-dependent response heterogeneity, and informative initial policies. Thus, it is crucial to recognize that this study did not report positive results, not because of a failure of PEG’s theoretical guarantees, but because PEG was applied in a context where it was unlikely to succeed.StatisticsArtificial intelligenceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kj73711https://escholarship.org/content/qt7kj73711/qt7kj73711.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1tp6s6kt2026-06-18T05:01:32Zqt1tp6s6ktThe Allegory of Alexander the Great and Pope Alexander VII (1666): Making and Mountains in Early Modern Roman Thesis Print ImageryOstlander, EmilyWilson, Bronwen2024-01-01This thesis explores the engraving known as The Allegory of Alexander the Great and Pope Alexander VII (1666). The image was designed by the Italian artist Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669) and engraved by François Spierre (1639-1681), a printmaker from Lorraine. It was commissioned by the Spanish theologian, Cristoforo Lozano, for his thesis defenses at the Sapienza in Rome. Using the classical story of Mount Athos, the artists elaborated a panegyrical allegory in honor of Pope Alexander VII Chigi (1599-1667) and his building projects in Rome. Easily mass-produced and distributed, print facilitated the circulation of images publicly at the event and privately as a souvenir. The academic context of Lozano’s thesis defense and the subject matter, which was intended to promote the Chigi family, prompts questions about papal and familial power. The image of Mount Athos produced for the defense, and following it, has been tied to the heraldic monti and the star of the Chigi family in past scholarship; this thesis argues that the engraving is a reproducible image that can be appropriated by various figures of power.Art historyChigiMountainPope Alexander VIIRomeSeventeenth CenturyThesis Printenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tp6s6kthttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1tp6s6kt/qt1tp6s6kt.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6dg4n2612026-06-17T06:34:17Zqt6dg4n261Establishing Form: Evidence for Constant Curvature Primitives as the Basis of Contour Encoding and Shape Representation in Human VisionPhillips, AustinKellman, Philip2026-06-12A deep and pervasive mystery in vision science is how the visual system constructs enduring symbolic representations of object shape from transient and sub-symbolic registers of local contrast energy. Here, I focus on investigating the issue as it bears on the perception of smooth, 2D contour shape. A growing body of evidence suggests that smooth contours may be encoded using constant-curvature approximations that efficiently capture their essential geometry. In this dissertation, I investigate the possibility of specialized operators that could implement such encoding, along with the spatial properties that govern their operation, using a combination of computational modeling and psychophysical experimentation. Chapter 1 reviews evidence from several lines of research supporting the hypothesis that constant curvature serves as a fundamental primitive of smooth 2D contour representation. Chapter 2 details the implementation and evaluation of the Arclet Model: a biologically plausible neural model in which groups of orientation-selective units linked by a uniform turning angle encode local contour segments as regions of constant curvature. The model generates highly compressed contour representations that closely approximate the original input, and which exhibit approximate scale invariance without explicit normalization. Chapters 3 and 4 report four psychophysical experiments to investigate the spatial parameters of constant curvature encoding by examining the detection of curvature signals embedded in noise. Experiment 1 showed that minimal constant curvature signals are detected more reliably than configurations that violate curvature consistency but preserve other relevant geometric relations. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the spatial range of curvature encoding, revealing a systematic decline in sensitivity as signal elements became more widely separated, thus providing an estimate of the spatial extent of the underlying mechanisms. Experiment 4 examined long-range interactions among spatially separated curvature signals. Heightened sensitivity to co-circular configurations remained stable across distances, whereas sensitivity to merely relatable configurations declined to baseline levels. This dissociation suggests that long-range interactions between curvature signals interact based on a shared co-circular structure. Together, these findings support the view that constant curvature is a privileged primitive of contour representation in human vision, encoded by mechanisms that exhibit similar geometric principles at both local and global scales.Cognitive psychologyPsychologyComputer scienceInformation scienceContour PerceptionMiddle VisionNeural ModelPerceptual OrganizationShape Perceptionapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dg4n261https://escholarship.org/content/qt6dg4n261/qt6dg4n261.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4122w5hc2026-06-17T06:34:13Zqt4122w5hc(In)Authentic (Un)Veiling: Hair and Hijab in Life, Revolution, and Coup in EgyptAli Ramadan, NadaOrtiz, Vilma2026-06-12Despite the increasing numbers of women who have taken off the hijab since the “so-called” Arab Spring and its aftermath in Egypt and other SWANA countries, their motivations, transformations, and consequences for their identities and lives remain to be adequately studied. My dissertation centers on marginalized narratives and the politics surrounding Egyptian women who remove the hijab in post-Arab Spring and “Islamist winter” Egypt, situating the variety of experiences within broader discussions about the fate of Muslim women living through revolution, coup, and genocide in the region. My research foregrounds women’s stories that move beyond simplistic questions posed by Western feminism—such as being “free” or fighting patriarchy—to explore more complex motivations, including societal beauty standards, iii differing interpretations of religious practice, and the intersecting forces of classism and Islamophobia that influence decisions to unveil.I also found that the revolution and counterrevolution were inextricably linked to the conversation of women’s bodies, and most visibly to wearing or removing the hijab. By tracing dominant narratives of unveiling in Egyptian popular history and media, particularly after the revolution and coup, I show how pro-army propaganda claims to have “saved” Egypt (and its women) from a future of imposed face-veils, child marriage, and regression to "barbarity" had the Muslim Brotherhood remained in power after being elected in the wake of the revolution. These discourses have not only been used to justify the military regime’s increasing authoritarianism and the US-funded War on Terror but have also contributed to a growing Islamophobic climate that makes it difficult to wear the hijab in Egypt.Like the revolution, unveiling is not a punctual or linear act, or the beginning or end of the story. This dissertation makes a temporal intervention in resisting fixed beginnings and endings, or linear historical narratives, whether as they apply to demarking the temporality of the revolution or hijab narratives, to incorporate times of rebellion past, present, and future.Middle Eastern studiesGender studiesReligionSociologyArab SpringEgypthijabrevolutionunveilingpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4122w5hcetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4nc3w64p2026-06-17T06:34:08Zqt4nc3w64pA re-writable Analog Compute-in-Memory Architecture Incorporating a Charge-Trap-Transistor Based Digital-to-Analog Converter Per CellChakrabarty, SamyakPamarti, Sudhakar2026-06-12Artificial-intelligence workloads are increasingly limited by the energy and latency cost of moving data between memory and compute units. Compute-in-memory (CiM) accelerators reduce this data movement by performing matrix-vector multiplications directly inside memory arrays. However, practical multi-bit CiM designs face a tradeoff among accuracy, energy efficiency, density, and re-write ability. This thesis presents an accurate, energy-efficient, and flexible architecture for multi-bit analog CiM using per-cell digital-to-analog converters (DACs). Rather than storing weights in charge-trap transistors (CTTs), CTTs calibrate compact per-cell DACs, enabling low-power multi-bit activation generation. Weights are stored in embedded dynamic random-access memory, allowing straightforward rewriting and flexible updates. An in-situ write-verify-write loop compensates for device mismatch and read-out-path non-idealities, enabling accurate current-mode computation. Circuit simulations and system-level evaluations demonstrate high energy efficiency and compute density while maintaining near-digital inference accuracy without hardware-aware training.EngineeringComputer engineeringElectrical engineeringAnalog ComputingCharge Trap TransistorCIMCompute in MemoryCTTNon-volatile Memoryapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nc3w64phttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4nc3w64p/qt4nc3w64p.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9gc5k9b42026-06-17T06:34:02Zqt9gc5k9b4Machine-Learning-Assisted Kinetics Modeling of CF3–X Plasmas for Sustainable Semiconductor ManufacturingLin, Chi-YunChang, Jane P2026-06-12Hydrofluorocarbon-based plasmas are widely used in semiconductor manufacturing for SiO2 etching and chamber cleaning; however, many of these chemistries have high global warming potential (GWP) and long atmospheric lifetimes, leading to regulatory phasedown by the Environmental Protection Agency. This work investigates CF3–X plasmas (X = H, F, I) with the goal of reducing, abating, or replacing high-GWP hydrofluorocarbon chemistries. Reduction was studied through adding secondary gases such as O2 and Ar. Abatement was evaluated using downstream O2 plasma for decomposing reactive species in the exhaust. Replacement examines lower-GWP CF3I plasma, where its limited kinetics data prompted the use of Machine Learning (ML)-assisted automatic differentiation (AD) inverse modeling to determine unknown iodine-related surface kinetics, leveraging halogen descriptors such as C–X bond dissociation energy, Si–X bond energy, and electronegativity (χ).
CHF3/O2/Ar plasma was evaluated for process-gas reduction and abatement. For reduction, O2 and Ar were added to CHF3 plasma to reduce CHF3 usage while maintaining SiO2 etch performance. HF dissociation was required to model the SiO2 etch rate. Moderate O2 addition improved SiO2 etching by reducing CFx passivation while generating atomic fluorine, whereas excessive O2 addition decreased the SiO2 etch rates. The etch rate trend was corroborated by the measured etch product concentration (SiF4 kg-CO2-eq) and correlated with the modeled fluorine-to-oxygen atomic flux ratio. At medium-to-high source power with 9–36% O2 addition, SiO2 etch rates reached benchmark, > 100 nm/min, with less emissions. For abatement, measured CHF3 and CF4 emissions were 10-11 to 10-10 MMTCO2e per experimental run, while their concentrations were reduced by 4–5 orders of magnitude with downstream O2 treatment in the model.
CF3I/O2/Ar was evaluated as a lower-GWP replacement chemistry. A differentiable ML surface-kinetic model was developed to infer the unknown iodine adsorption (SI,ads) and abstraction (SI,abs) surface reaction probabilities, which control iodine surface coverage and iodine-assisted SiO2 removal. Experimental SiO2 etch rates served as the ground truth. Descriptors (C–X, Si–X, χ) were used to define physically reasonable ranges for SI,ads and SI,abs, while two rounds of ML iterations reduced the average absolute percent error relative to experimental etch rate from 23% to 12.5%. With the improved surface kinetics model, selected CF3I/O2/Ar conditions maintained 70-80% of SiO2 etch rates in comparison to the conventional CHF3/O2/Ar while the estimated greenhouse-gas-equivalent emissions were reduced by one order of magnitude without downstream abatement.
This work establishes a ML-assisted framework to attain surface kinetics necessary for modeling CF3–X plasmas, by integrating experimental data, plasma kinetic simulation, AD inverse modeling, and emission to address sustainable semiconductor manufacturing.Chemical engineeringPlasma physicsElectrical engineeringapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gc5k9b4https://escholarship.org/content/qt9gc5k9b4/qt9gc5k9b4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1vk355v52026-06-17T06:33:57Zqt1vk355v5Associations Between Vaping Behaviors, Harm Perception, and Oral Health Outcomes Among Adolescents and Young AdultsJackson, RachelLux, Renate2026-06-12Electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), including nicotine- and cannabis-based vaping products, have become increasingly popular among adolescents and young adults. Although vaping is often perceived as a safer alternative to combustible tobacco use, growing evidence suggests potential adverse effects on oral health. Dental caries remains one of the most common chronic diseases worldwide and is influenced by a complex interaction of behavioral, psychosocial, environmental, and biological factors. Despite increasing rates of vaping among younger populations, limited research has integrated self-reported behavioral data with clinical oral health findings and salivary parameters in a public health context.The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between vaping-related behaviors, harm perception, and oral health outcomes, with a specific focus on cariogenic risk indicators, salivary parameters, and microbial species associated with dental caries. This cross-sectional clinical study includes adolescents and young adults between the ages of 16 and 25 years and incorporates a custom-developed health questionnaire designed to assess vaping behaviors, oral hygiene practices, psychosocial influences, and self-reported oral health perceptions. Clinical assessments consist of modified DMFT scoring, plaque index, and gingival index, while salivary analysis, includes salivary flow, pH, and buffering capacity, in addition to microbial characterization of total bacterial load as well as specific Streptococcus and Candida counts. At the time of manuscript preparation, 113 participants have completed the behavioral questionnaire, including 28 controls, 24 nicotine vape users, 28 THC vape users, 17 vape users who consume both nicotine and THC, as well as 11 participants who report low level use of either substance (less than once per week). Biological sample collection and clinical assessment are ongoing, with approximately 10 participants per exposure group having completed salivary and clinical data collection. Preliminary analyses are focused on identifying trends and correlations between behavioral variables, self-reported oral health perceptions, clinical oral health findings, and salivary parameters. This study provides a public health–oriented approach to understanding vaping-related oral health risks by integrating behavioral, clinical, and salivary findings within a real-world dental setting. Findings from this study may contribute to improved patient education, risk assessment, preventive strategies, and future research investigating vaping-related oral health outcomes in young adult populations.DentistryPublic healthHealth care managementDental CariesHarm perceptionOral HealthSalivary ParametersVapingYoung AdultspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1vk355v5etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4n3025gr2026-06-17T06:33:52Zqt4n3025grEffect of Scheduled Feeding on the Deposition and Formation of Mutant Huntingtin Aggregates in a Mouse Model of Huntington’s DiseaseBalu, VedantBlock, Gene D2026-06-12Huntington’s disease (HD) is a rare neurodegenerative disorder caused by a mutation in the gene that encodes for huntingtin (HTT), resulting in misfolding and aggregation of the protein product. Mutant huntingtin misfolding and aggregation are key histopathological features of HD and are associated with progressive cortico-striatal dysfunction. Circadian-based interventions may offer a novel strategy to modify disease progression. Previous studies have shown improved sleep quality and activity rhythms by the circadian-based intervention time-restricted feeding (TRF) in a mouse model of HD, the bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC)-mediated transgenic mouse HD (BACHD), as well as behavioral ameliorations and a reduction in the deposits of beta-amyloid protein in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s Disease. Together, these findings suggest that TRF may influence pathological protein accumulation, including mutant huntingtin (mHtt). Therefore, we sought to investigate the effects of TRF on mHtt expression and formation of aggregates in BACHD mice, hypothesizing that scheduled feeding would lead to a delay in the formation of such aggregates and improve HD histopathology in the cerebral cortex and striatum. Wild-type (WT) and BACHD mice were maintained on TRF from three months and 15 days to seven months of age; they were then perfused and the expression of mHtt and the size of the aggregates assessed in coronal brain sections containing the cerebral cortex and striatum using an antibody that recognizes both normal and mutant huntingtin, together with markers for neurons, oligodendrocytes, and astrocytes.Our data suggests that TRF may counteract changes in mHtt immunoreactivity and formation of aggregates in the cerebral cortex of BACHD mice. In contrast, limited mHtt deposition was observed in the striatum at this age. These early findings also suggest sex-dependent effects of both the mutation and TRF, highlighting the importance of considering biological sex in evaluating circadian-based interventions for HD. Overall, these results provide an important step toward characterizing the mechanisms underlying the effects of HD and TRF on the histopathology of HD and support further investigation of circadian-based strategies as potential interventions for this currently incurable disorder.BiologyPhysiologyPsychologyNeurosciencesAggregatesHuntington's diseaseTime-restricted feedingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n3025grhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4n3025gr/qt4n3025gr.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8074k84r2026-06-17T06:33:45Zqt8074k84rA Festival of LightFogelman, Yoni BKrouse, Ian2026-06-12A Festival of Light is a new musical drama that reimagines the Chanukah story through a contemporary lens while remaining rooted in Jewish history, liturgy, and tradition. The drama opens amid the turbulent world of the Jewish people living under Greek rule, setting the stage for the cultural and religious pressures that would ultimately spark the Maccabean revolt. It then turns toward the profound grief of a people confronted with the desecration of their Holy Temple, a moment rendered in music of mourning and longing. From this darkness emerges the priestly Maccabee family, who lead the Jewish people in battle against their Greek occupiers. When they return victorious to the Holy Temple, they witness the miracle of light itself: the sacred Menorah burning against all odds, a symbol of hope that has endured for millennia. The work concludes with a jubilant finale celebrating the modern holiday of Chanukah and the enduring relevance of its themes for contemporary Jewish life. In this retelling, a lesser-known figure from Jewish tradition—Chanah, a sister of the Maccabees —steps forward as a solo voice, adding a new emotional and narrative dimension to the story. Scored for treble choir, harp, narrator, soloist, and percussion, A Festival of Light expands the possibilities of the treble-choir repertoire, a body of literature that remains relatively small and even more so in Hebrew. The narrator tells the story in English while the trebles sing Hebrew texts, intertwining spoken and sung traditions to illuminate one of Judaism’s most enduring narratives.Musical compositionMusicapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8074k84rhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8074k84r/qt8074k84r.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6bf7x4zj2026-06-17T06:33:30Zqt6bf7x4zjSleep Regulates DNA Repair and Retrotransposons in Stable Neuronal Genomes.Rajhans, AbhasPaul, Ketema NGlanzman, David L2026-06-12Sleep and circadian disruptions have been linked to neuronal genome instability, aberrant retrotransposon activity, and cognitive deficits. Recent studies have demonstrated increases in double stranded DNA breaks (DSBs) after learning, along with an uptick in LINE-1 retrotransposon activity; but how sleep loss influences DNA damage, LINE-1 retrotransposon behavior, and memory remains unclear. We tested the performance of wild-type (WT) and Bmal1 muscle‑overexpressing (Bmal1 mOE) mutant male mice on a hippocampal‑dependent novel object location recognition (NOLR) task after 12 hours of sleep deprivation (SD). We then compared how SD and/or SD+NOLR affected the expression of c‑Fos, a marker of neural activity, γ‑H2AX - a phosphorylated histone variant that localizes at DSB sites, and LINE‑1 ORF1p - the nucleic acid chaperone protein of retrotransposon LINE-1 in the hippocampal regions: dentate gyrus (DG) and CA3. WT mice exposed to SD had impaired NOLR performance, whereas both sleep and SD Bmal1 mOE mice maintained positive preference scores, indicating preserved location memory after sleep loss. SD alone had minimal effects on γ‑H2AX positive cell number while SD+NOLR produced strong increases in the number of c‑Fos positive and γ‑H2AX positive cells in the CA3, with WT mice showing higher c-Fos and γ‑H2AX expression than Bmal1 mOE mice. LINE‑1 ORF1p expression was selectively elevated by SD in Bmal1 mOE mice and increased in both genotypes after NOLR, particularly in both Bmal1 mOE experimental groups. Interestingly, SD+NOLR produced similar γ‑H2AX and LINE-1 expression profiles in WT and Bmal1 mOE mice, but opposite location memory performances. These findings support a model in which wake–state behavior and retrotransposon activity may influence whether learned location memory is maintained or degraded under disrupted sleep conditions and that peripheral Bmal1 gene overexpression may have distinct impacts on hippocampus function, DNA damage signaling, and retrotransposon responses to wake state synaptic load and sleep debt accrued via SD.PhysiologyNeurosciencesBiologyCellular biologyGeneticsDNA DamageLearningLINE1MemoryRetrotransposonSleepapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6bf7x4zjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6bf7x4zj/qt6bf7x4zj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7zd794cg2026-06-17T06:33:26Zqt7zd794cgAccelerating Polymerization Catalyst Discovery with Data and Network ScienceWong, Yin PokDiaconescu, Paula L.2026-06-12Machine learning and link prediction techniques are promising tools that enable chemists to accelerate catalyst discoveries in polymerization. This work aims to demonstrate how artificial intelligence can be applied to predict potential candidates within reactions catalyzed by transition metal complexes. A binary classifier has been designed to successfully predict new ligands for palladium-catalyzed non-alternating polyketone synthesis, with experimental validation carried out for two new classes of ligands. In addition, inspired by drug repurposing efforts in identifying known drug compounds for novel protein targets, we studied a link prediction strategy to repurpose known catalysts in the literature space for catalyzing the coupling of CO2 with ethylene, and for the copolymerization of CO with ethylene, thereby highlighting the possibility to predict catalyst performance across reactions with different underlying reaction mechanisms. Furthermore, we have used network science and link prediction techniques to construct a digital discovery workflow for the prediction of redox switchable catalysts in ring-opening polymerization across a range of untested monomers and catalyst designs.Polymer chemistryAnalytical chemistryComputational chemistryOrganic chemistrypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zd794cgetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6883q6s72026-06-17T06:33:20Zqt6883q6s7Reducing Code Greens and Enhancing Nurse Confidence Through Behavioral Health TrainingAgiba, AbrahamChoi, Kristen R2026-06-12Background: Workplace violence (WPV) is a significant threat to nurse safety, particularly in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) medical-surgical settings where patients often present with complex psychiatric, medical, and social comorbidities. Although behavioral emergency responses (“Code Green” activations) are intended for true crises, anecdotal and unit-level data suggest many are initiated prematurely due to limited staff confidence in managing escalating patient behavior.Objectives: The purpose of this quality improvement project was to evaluate whether advanced de-escalation training modeled after Prevention and Management of Disruptive Behavior (PMDB) Level IV content could improve nurse confidence in managing aggressive patient behavior and reduce Code Green activations on a high-risk medical-surgical unit.Methods: This Doctor of Nursing Practice quality improvement project used a pre-test/post-test design at a Southern California VA Medical Center. Seventeen staff members participated in advanced de-escalation training, with 15 completing both pre- and post-intervention assessments. The intervention included a pre-training educational module and a live simulation session with therapeutic containment practice. Nurse confidence was measured using Thackrey’s Confidence in Coping with Patient Aggression (CCPA) instrument, and monthly Code Green activation rates were compared before and after the intervention.Results: Median CCPA scores increased from 62 pre-intervention to 91 post-intervention, indicating improved nurse confidence in managing aggressive patient behavior, though the overall change did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.065). Item-level analysis demonstrated improvement across several targeted domains, with the largest gains in perceived adequacy of training for physical aggression and confidence in safely responding to escalating behaviors. Monthly Code Green activations also declined during the intervention period, decreasing from 11 in February to 10 in March and 3 in April, suggesting reduced reliance on behavioral emergency responses following the training.Conclusion: PMDB Level IV de-escalation training may improve nurse confidence and contribute to reduced preventable Code Green activations in non-psychiatric inpatient settings. Although statistical significance was limited by the small pilot sample, consistent improvement across confidence domains and favorable trends in Code Green utilization support the clinical value of the intervention. This scalable approach addresses a meaningful practice gap in medical-surgical nursing and may strengthen workplace safety, reduce escalation-related harms, and promote a more confident and proactive culture of care.NursingHealth sciencesHealth care managementapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6883q6s7https://escholarship.org/content/qt6883q6s7/qt6883q6s7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt66c5583p2026-06-17T06:33:14Zqt66c5583p"We Are Joined, But We Are Not Blend": Non-Western International Students' Construction of Global Citizenship and Heritage Values in a Western-Oriented GCED ContextYoon, Chung MinTorres, Carlos Alberto2026-06-12This qualitative study examines how ten non-Western international students at Handong Global University (HGU), South Korea, construct and enact global citizenship within a Western-oriented Global Citizenship Education (GCED) framework. Using a phenomenological orientation, data were collected through in-depth interviews with participants from ten non-Western countries across Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Five findings emerged. First, participants grounded global citizenship in relational, moral, and identity-based orientations, particularly empathy, hospitality, care, and accountability, aligning more closely with critical than soft GCED. Second, participants' issue priorities and civic aspirations were inseparable from their biographical and national contexts, with lived experiences of injustice, structural inequality, and political constraint shaping their engagement with global issues. Third, they drew on non-Western philosophical traditions, including Mamata and Atithi Devo Bhava (Nepal), Besa (Albania), Kranjai (Thailand), Hòa nhập nhưng không hòa tan (Vietnam), Bò bènh nhằng (Laos), and гостеприимность (Kyrgyzstan), as foundational contributions to global citizenship rather than mere cultural illustrations of Western principles. Fourth, structurally constrained agency, genuine civic commitment blocked by political repression, corruption, or social silencing, emerged as a previously undertheorized dimension of participants' civic lives. Fifth, participants engaged GCED through active negotiation, a form of principled intellectual labor constituting a sophisticated mode of global citizenship practice.EducationHigher educationPedagogyfaith-based higher educationGlobal Citizenship EducationHandong Global Universityheritage valuesnon-Western relational philosophiesnon-Western studentsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/66c5583phttps://escholarship.org/content/qt66c5583p/qt66c5583p.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6kw094p02026-06-17T06:33:08Zqt6kw094p0Epigenetic Age Prediction in Dogs from K-mer Methylation HaplotypesWu, Alexander MingpuPellegrini, Matteo2026-06-12This study constructs a canine epigenetic age clock from buccal swab whole-genome bisulfite sequencing using a k-mer haplotype encoding framework. A three-level hierarchical ensemble was applied across eight genomic loci, with five model families evaluated at each level; the best-performing model achieved a mean absolute error of 1.005 years and median absolute error of 0.419 years (Pearson r = 0.946), with a k = 2 control confirming that co-methylation patterns across neighboring CpGs carry age-related information beyond single-site methylation state. Locus importance and marginal predictive rank diverged in the genome ensemble, suggesting the model exploits complementary information across loci.BioinformaticsBiologyBiochemistryAgingGeneticsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kw094p0https://escholarship.org/content/qt6kw094p0/qt6kw094p0.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt68x6n4zk2026-06-17T06:33:03Zqt68x6n4zkSemiconductor Quantum-Dot Device Modeling of Charge Stability DiagramsNodel, RonWang, Kang Lung2026-06-12The rapid simulation and characterization of solid-state semiconductor quantum dot devices and architectures has been a challenging problem of growing interest as quantum technology scales. Fundamentally, quantum mechanics allows for information to be encoded through quantum superpositions and entanglement, procedures with no classical counterpart. For a certain class of problems, this enables exponential speedup, and lets us tackle problems that are inaccessible to a classical computer. Existing modalities (e.g. trapped ions, superconductors, semiconductor quantum dots, etc.) each boast distinct advantages and drawbacks, with no single platform exceptionally dominant. The mature silicon-based semiconductor industry that underpins modern technology comes from decades of accumulated fabrication expertise and infrastructure. As a result, semiconductor quantum dots based on these Group IV materials have an advantage through their compatibility with the existing chip fabrication industry.Approaches to quantum dot device simulation often rely on analytic model potentials or idealized, symmetric device configurations. While computationally inexpensive, such methods fail to properly capture realistic electrostatics of fabricated devices. Notably, a self-consistent Schrödinger–Poisson code allows for realistic device potentials that capture cross-device interaction with reservoirs, cross-talk between gates and dots, and exchange coupling between dots. As device architectures continue to scale up, these interactions only become more prominent, necessitating realistic, device-level simulation methods. In addition, tuning devices manually has become increasingly impractical. Using self-consistent Schrödinger– Poisson models with a Multi-Domain Multi-Model (MDMM) approach allows for the specification of charge within chosen regions of the device. A useful way to analyze these regions is through charge stability diagrams, which map the stable charge occupation of a device to its gate voltages and serve as a standard experimental benchmark of device viability. These diagrams can be generated rapidly through the Hubbard model, a simplified picture which captures the physics of coupled quantum dots through a small set of parameters.This thesis details how a self-consistent Schrödinger–Poisson MDMM approach can rapidly generate charge stability diagrams in semiconductor quantum dot devices. By identifying the gate voltages that realize selected charge configurations and pairing them with lever-arms that relate those voltages to dot energies, we extract the effective Hubbard parameters governing a double-dot system, enabling the construction of charge stability diagrams from significantly fewer self-consistent simulations than a full bias sweep. We validate this approach on experimental data from both an Intel Tunnel Falls Si/SiGe device and a novel double-dot device geometry. In both cases, the Hubbard-model diagrams show strong quantitative agreement with fully self-consistent bias-sweep simulations, and for the experimentally realized Intel device, the simulated diagrams agree qualitatively with measurement. For the experimentally realized novel device, lever arm calculations provided a guide before fabrication, and are seen to show reasonable agreement with experiments, validating our calculations. The framework substantially reduces the computational cost of device-level modeling while retaining essential physics, providing a practical tool for rapid exploration of device operating regimes, interpretation of experimental data, and pre-fabrication design of quantum dot architectures.Quantum physicsComputational physicsElectrical engineeringComputer engineeringDevice ModelingDigital TwinHubbard ModelQuantum ComputingSemiconductor Quantum DotsSpin Qubitsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/68x6n4zkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt68x6n4zk/qt68x6n4zk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5p46d8892026-06-17T06:32:57Zqt5p46d889Impact of a Nurse Practitioner–Led Hypertension Telemonitoring on Adherence and Blood Pressure Control in Primary Care: A Quasi-Experimental DesignAmjadi, RoyaRobbins, Wendie A2026-06-12Background: Hypertension (HTN) is a leading cause of cardiovascular disease, morbidity, and mortality in patients with uncontrolled blood pressure (BP). Lack of knowledge, inadequate self-care behaviors, and poor medication adherence contribute to suboptimal BP control despite available treatments. Nurse practitioners (NPs) can lead telehealth-supported interventions that promote self-management and improve BP outcomes. In primary care settings, a substantial number of adult patients present with uncontrolled BP with routine clinic visits. Literature reviews of randomized control trials (RCT) indicate that telehealth and patient-centered interventions address challenges such as health literacy, access, time, transportation, and financial constraints, especially in underserved populations. Objectives: The quality improvement project aimed to evaluate the effects of NP-led home BP telemonitoring (HBPT), education and lifestyle modification on BP control, adherence and self-management behaviors among hypertensive patients with uncontrolled BP ≥ 140/90 in primary care over three months. Methods: The Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) student who was the project lead, implemented a quality improvement pilot study in two clinical settings, the University of California (UCLA) Department of Medicine (DOM) Redondo Beach clinic, and an Internal Medicine private practice in Orange County (OC), California. The project lead in collaboration with a physician at each site, led a quasi-experimental, pre–post study design to evaluate an NP-led HBPT program among adults with uncontrolled hypertension. Data collection included baseline, daily and post-intervention BP readings, pre and post patient-reported BP self-management and adherence measurement and post-intervention satisfaction survey. The intervention consisted of daily home BP monitoring by patients, and bi-weekly NP telehealth visits. Patients received phone and electronic guidance on proper BP measurement techniques, medication management, and lifestyle modifications based on the American Heart Association (AHA) and American College of Cardiology (ACC) guidelines. The recruitment was done via electronic medical records (EMR), MyChart messaging at the UCLA DOM, and Practice Fusion and phone calls at the OC office. Participants measured their BP in the mornings and evenings. The UCLA patients reported their BP measures via email, MyChart or during phone visits every two weeks logged into the provided BP logs while the OC patients were pre-set up with the real time portal BP system with automatic transmission of the readings. The DNP student provided individualized education and counseling on BP management and health promoting behaviors. Results: The sample included a total of 12 participants with primary HTN from two clinical sites, with an average age 64.92 and diverse ethnicities: 4 Whites, 3 African Americans, 3 Latino/Hispanics, and 2 Asians. 83% of participants were female, 75% were married, and the largest proportion of participants were obese, BMI ≥30 kg/m² (5, 41.7%), and 25% were overweight BMI 25.0–29.9 kg/m², both are considered as risk factors for HTN. Paired- samples t-tests used to evaluate the effectiveness of the NP-led HTN management intervention in reducing BP. The mean SBP was 140.21 mmHg (SD = 7.98) before the intervention and 132.12 mmHg (SD = 6.32) after the intervention, representing a mean reduction of 8.09 mmHg (95% CI [3.43, 12.75]), which was statistically significant, t (11) = 3.82, p = .003. The effect size was large, Cohen's d = 1.10; Hedges's corrected effect size = 1.07. The overall DBP significantly decreased from pre-intervention 80.76 mmHg (SD 6.97) to post-intervention 6.23 mmHg (SD 3.88). The mean reduction was 4.54 mmHg, 95% CI [1.86, 7.21], t (11) = 3.73, p = .003. This was a large effect, Cohen's d = 1.08, and the Hedges-corrected effect size was 1.04. There were no differences in the improvements in BP readings between morning and evening. Morning SBP decreased significantly by 8.08 mmHg, 95% CI [2.54, 13.63], t (11) = 3.21, p = .008, Cohen's d = 0.93. Evening SBP decreased by 8.10 mmHg, 95% CI [3.22, 12.97], t (11) = 3.66, p = .004, Cohen's d = 1.06. The two results indicate significant intervention effects during morning and evening measurements. Significant improvements were also seen with DBP. Morning DBP decreased by 3.98 mmHg, 95% CI [0.86, 7.09], t (11) = 2.81, p = .017, Cohen's d = 0.81. Evening DBP decreased by 5.10 mmHg, 95% CI [1.88, 8.32], t (11) = 3.48, p = .005, Cohen's d = 1.01. These findings show statistically significant and clinically relevant decreases in systolic and diastolic BP following NP-Led HBPT HTN management intervention. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests demonstrated statistically significant improvements in overall HTN self-care behaviors measured by the Hill-Bone Compliance Scale, Z = –2.953, p = .003. Significant improvements were identified in the medication-taking subscale Z = −2.947, p = .003, and sodium intake subscales Z = −2.124, p =.034, while appointment-keeping behaviors did not significantly change Z = -0.378, p = .705. Descriptive statistics showed that average scores for the items measuring satisfaction with NP-led HBPT was high, ranged from 1.33 to 1.67 on a scale from –2 to 2. Q 4 reported participants’ high levels of comfort engaging with the provider virtually or by phone (M = 1.67, SD = 0.89), and Q 8 expressed willingness to recommend the program to others with HTN (M = 1.58, SD = 0.90). Overall findings indicate that the NP-led HBPT intervention was associated with significant improvements in BP control, medication adherence, self-care behaviors, and participant satisfaction. Conclusion: The findings of the NP-led home blood pressure telemonitoring intervention demonstrated statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in systolic and diastolic BP, medication adherence, and overall self-care behaviors among adults with uncontrolled HTN. Medication-taking behavior showed the strongest association with overall self-care improvement, reinforcing the importance of medication compliance on HTN management. The findings combined with high participant satisfaction with the intervention including provider support, virtual communication, and overall program experience supports the effectiveness of NP-led HBPT as a patient-centered and technology-supported approach for improving HTN management. An NP-led HBPT intervention improves systolic and diastolic BP and medication adherence in primary care. This model supports NP leadership in chronic disease management and offers a feasible and scalable approach to improving HTN. Evidence-based strategies are essential for NPs aiming to reduce disparities, enhance chronic disease self-management, and optimize care delivery in underserved communities.NursingHealth sciencesHealth care managementAdherenceBlood pressureHypertensionNurse PractitionerPrimary CareTelemedicine or virtualapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5p46d889https://escholarship.org/content/qt5p46d889/qt5p46d889.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt72t3162k2026-06-17T06:32:52Zqt72t3162kControlling Polymer Network Dissipation Through Microstructural DesignJazzar, AbdullatifHe, Ximin2026-06-12With an ever-growing demand for data, increasingly faster wireless data services will need to be developed. With the deployment of 6G technology projected to begin in 2030, device designs and by extension, the materials which enable them will have to advance as well. In parallel, as the next generation wireless technologies develop, city infrastructure will also have to support a highly interconnected web of wireless signals as well as a ballooning demand for computation, leading to more data towers, server rooms, and data centers in urban society. Unfortunately, this drive for technological development may exacerbate a problem that already exists within cities: The Urban Heat Island Effect. Already, cities contain sources of heat that we may heavily rely on such as automotive vehicles, air conditioning units, and server rooms. Paired with the absorptive nature of common building materials such as concrete and asphalt towards sunlight, urban environments may only be getting hotter in the future, creating a demand for effective passive cooling. At the heart of both demands is a need for more sophisticated control of dissipation within materials, where we design and investigate a porous and hydrophobic dielectric with enhanced signal fidelity as well as a tough, highly hydrated double network passive cooler.In Chapter 1, the fundamentals of energy dissipation within materials will be explained, focusing on the possibilities that porous polymer networks enable. In Chapter 2, a hydrogel evaporator system is explored where both cooling power and strength were improved. In Chapter 3, a novel photo-definable polymer is made into ultra-low dielectric constant and loss devices whose performance is further probed under 6G frequencies. In Chapter 4, future prospects are discussed in relation to both polymer systems in the context of the urban environment of tomorrow.Polymer chemistryMaterials scienceChemistryEngineeringcoolingdielectricdissipationevaporatorhydrogelpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/72t3162ketdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8n86x84d2026-06-17T06:32:47Zqt8n86x84dHow Atlanta Got its Arts Center: Urban Politics, Production of Space, and Arts Philanthropy in 1960s AtlantaBrunson, KerryFink, Robert W2026-06-12This dissertation tells the story of how Atlanta got its arts center. Opened in 1968 along Atlanta’s famed Peachtree Street, the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center was the culmination of a near decade-long struggle by city leaders to establish cultural roots and was the first of its kind in the US to house “all the arts under one roof.” Drawing on extensive archival research conducted at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Archive, this dissertation details the development of the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center from conception to completion, including the segregation-tinged battle over an arts center in Piedmont Park, the strategic merging of the Art Association and Symphony Guild into the Atlanta Arts Alliance, Inc., and the legal and logistical battle over the McBurney Estate, an existing Art Association property whose bequest came with strings attached.Ultimately, I position the arts center as a physical manifestation of an ideology in the Lefebvrian sense. Atlanta’s democratized spatial vision for the Memorial Arts Center—as a well-organized place built around education, access, and cultural enrichment—was in fact a product of a larger, ideological process. For while the arts center was built in one of Atlanta’s wealthiest neighborhoods, on property already owned by the Alliance, its adherence to an urban renewal ethos reveals the larger structuring process underway in Atlanta in the 1960s.Music historyUrban planningAmerican historyMusicAmerican studiesArts CentersNeoliberalismProduction of SpaceUrban political ecologyUrban Renewalapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n86x84dhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8n86x84d/qt8n86x84d.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6kg487p82026-06-17T06:32:41Zqt6kg487p8Multimodal Haptic and Refreshable Braille Systems Using Functional PolymersLiu, KedePei, Qibing2026-06-12Touch serves as one of the most fundamental pathways humans perceive, interpret, and manipulate the physical world. Yet, despite rapid advances in digital interfaces and wearable electronics, engineered haptic devices often rely on rigid and bulky actuators or mechanically complex architectures, which constrain their scalability, spatial resolution, and multimodal output. These limitations are especially apparent in two representative application areas: wearable haptic devices, which require skin-conformal delivery of multimodal thermal and mechanical feedback, and refreshable braille displays, which require dense, portable, and reliable tactile actuation. This dissertation addresses these challenges through a materials-driven strategy based on functional polymers. By exploiting coupled electrocaloric and electrostrictive responses in a relaxor ferroelectric terpolymer, and programmable stiffness modulation and topology modification in a shape memory polymer, this work translates intrinsic thermo-mechanical material responses into device-level haptic outputs. Together, the systems developed in this dissertation establish functional polymers as active platforms for compact, flexible, scalable, and human-centered haptic technologies.
Human skin perceives a complex interplay of thermal and mechanical stimuli, yet most haptic technologies remain limited to single-modal actuation, failing to replicate realistic tactile sensations. We address this by introducing a skin-integrated thermo-mechanical multimodal array transducer (TM-MAT) capable of independent, pixelated, in situ cooling, warming, and sustained indentation within a compact, flexible architecture. By leveraging a multilayer relaxor ferroelectric terpolymer film stack, we exploit the simultaneous electrocaloric and electrostrictive effects of the material. This monolithic design eliminates the need for heterogeneous integration of disparate transducers. At 60 kV/mm, the TM-MAT selectively achieves an adiabatic temperature change of 4.0 K, or an out-of-plane indentation of 1.1 mm with 0.34 N blocking force, surpassing perceptual thresholds. Human-subject evaluations confirm that integrated thermal and mechanical feedback achieves 94% perceptual accuracy and enables complex spatiotemporally encoded haptic communication. These results demonstrate a material-centric strategy for multimodal haptics, providing a foundation for high-resolution wearable interfaces in virtual environments and biomedical systems.
High-resolution tactile displays require dense, independently addressable taxels to provide robust out-of-plane displacement and mechanical stability under touch. Conventional Braille displays are confined to approximately 2.5 mm inter-dot pitch for text legibility, which spatially restricts graphical fidelity in multiline display panels. We introduce Q-Braille, a high-resolution tactile architecture that resolves this geometric disparity using topology-modified variable-stiffness polymer (TM-VSP) films. Through strain-induced topology locking, the TM-VSP film incorporates preformed micro-bulges with a 1.15 mm base diameter and a 0.31 mm height to pre-store vertical displacement. This structural design allows localized taxels to achieve an actuation stroke exceeding the standard 0.5 mm displacement within a minimized lateral boundary. This reduced footprint enables an interleaved quincunx lattice that integrates two additional taxels per standard Braille cell, compressing the nearest-neighbor pitch to 1.77 mm and nearly doubling the areal density to 206 dots/in², equivalent to 14.4 DPI. Consequently, the architecture delivers spatially resolved graphical features while preserving BANA-compatible Braille text discriminability. This material-driven strategy transitions from complex mechanical miniaturization to intrinsic topological film modification, and establishes a scalable foundation for compact, multifunctional tactile interfaces.Materials scienceEngineeringPolymer chemistryBrailleElectrocaloric polymerHapticShape memory polymerTactilepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kg487p8etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2jw6z71k2026-06-17T06:32:36Zqt2jw6z71kSalience Attribution and Sensory Over-Responsivity in Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Integrated Neuroimaging and Neuromodulation StudyThan, Amy Hong ThyGreen, Shulamite A2026-06-12The integrity of human cognition relies on a delicate neural economy: the ability to efficiently gate sensory input and reserve attentional resources for the most salient environmental cues. In Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), this economy is calibrated distinctly, in most cases leading to Sensory Over-Responsivity (SOR) and atypical social engagement. This dissertation investigates the neural mechanisms underlying salience allocation in autism across three levels of analysis: task-based social-sensory integration, intrinsic network dynamics, and causal neuromodulation. Study 1 utilized functional MRI to examine how social relevance influences the processing of aversive sensory input. Results demonstrated that while typically developing youth show robust neural differentiation between social and nonsocial aversive stimuli, autistic youth exhibit reduced discrimination, responding primarily to the sensory intensity of the stimuli regardless of social context. Study 2 probed whether these patterns reflect stable neural traits or dynamic brain states using static functional connectivity and Co-Activation Pattern (CAP) analyses. Findings revealed that autistic youth possess heightened static coupling between the right anterior insula and sensory-thalamic regions, with spatiotemporal preferences for Salience Network (SN) coactivation with the executive control network. Findings from Study 2 suggest an intrinsic neural bias toward sensory processing and salience attribution processes at rest. Study 3 tested the modifiability of these circuits using repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Targeted intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS) successfully reduced sensory-evoked neural activation and strengthened prefrontal-sensory regulatory connectivity, with the most pronounced effects observed in individuals with high SOR severity. Collectively, these studies point toward a unifying mechanism: atypical salience allocation, characterized by an over-prioritization of sensory noise at the expense of social relevance. This predisposition is driven by disrupted interactions between the salience network, sensory cortices, and prefrontal regulatory systems. Crucially, the discovery that these circuits are malleable through neuromodulation suggests that the sensory regulation mechanisms necessary for navigating a complex social world can be non-invasively reinforced, offering a promising path for clinical intervention.NeurosciencesBehavioral psychologyDisability studiesAutism Spectrum DisorderfMRIFunctional ConnectivitySalience NetworkSensory OverresponsivityTMSapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jw6z71khttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2jw6z71k/qt2jw6z71k.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6gz664jh2026-06-17T06:32:31Zqt6gz664jhBeyond Density: Examining the Relationship Between Station-Area Establishments and Rail Transit RidershipHua, MichaelManville, Michael K2026-06-12Numerous studies have explored the relationship between built environment characteristics and transit ridership. However, little research has tested whether the number or size of station-adjacent commercial establishments have an independent association with rail ridership. Using negative binomial regression, I analyze the association between rail station alightings and the number of commercial establishments in three size categories: less than 700 square feet, 701–2,000 square feet, and 2,001–5,000 square feet. I also test whether these relationships vary by distance from the rail station (within a quarter-mile and a half-mile buffers) and between weekdays and weekends. I find no statistical significance between the number of small and medium-large commercial establishments within a half-mile of a station and rail a lightings. A marginal association is observed between medium establishments and rail alightings at the half-mile on weekends, though the relationship is substantively weak and does not approach the consistency or magnitude of the small establishment finding at the quarter-mile. Within a quarter-mile rail station radius, I find a modest significant positive relationship between rail alightings and the number of commercial establishments smaller than 700 square feet. The relationship between the number of commercial establishments under 700 square feet and rail alightings strengthens further on Saturday and Sunday than on weekdays. The quarter-mile proximity and weekend ridership relationship small establishments have with rail alightings highlights avenues for future research on potential causal effects and the role of small establishments in transit-oriented development planning.Urban planningStatisticsTransportationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gz664jhhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6gz664jh/qt6gz664jh.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0000r9nq2026-06-17T06:32:25Zqt0000r9nqLiving with Deferred Risk: Suppression, Settlement, and Stories in Southern California's Wildland-Urban InterfaceBarnosky, Emma JaneHeise, Ursula K.Boyd, William C.2026-06-12This dissertation argues that the current wildfire reality in Southern California is best understood through the concept of deferred risk—an accumulation of vulnerabilities that is obscured beneath socially produced assumptions of stability, control, and growth and which culminate in catastrophic wildfire. The author uses a mixed-method approach to (1) trace the ways that settlement campaigns and historical fire management choices in Southern California have led to such accumulation of risk, (2) explore the lived experience of deferred risk becoming realized through catastrophic wildfires such as the 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, and (3) examine how experiences with wildfire are publicly narrated through analysis of newspaper coverage of the 2017 Thomas fire. Together, the chapters illustrate the ways in which historical management and settlement choices have led to an expectation of stability in the wildland-urban fringes in Southern California. In turn, this expectation of stability contributes to a lack of institutional, community, and individual preparedness and increased susceptibility to destruction and psychological trauma in the wake of a wildfire.Environmental studiesSocial researchHistorySustainabilityfiresouthern californiawildfirewildland urban interfacewuiapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0000r9nqhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0000r9nq/qt0000r9nq.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8cn964722026-06-17T06:32:20Zqt8cn96472Stimulated Raman Scattering of Lasers with Orbital Angular Momentum in the Kinetic RegimeChase, Sarah ElizabethMori, Warren B2026-06-12The nonlinear optics of plasmas (NLOP) is a fundamental topic within plasma physics. A sub-area of NLOP is laser-plasma interactions (LPI) that involve three-wave coupling. Three wave LPI processes are of interest for inertial fusion energy (IFE) and are a fundamental nonlinear plasma physics research area. Stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) is one LPI of interest where an incident pump laser decays into a scattered electromagnetic wave (EM) and an electron plasma wave (EPW). There is much interest in SRS backscatter where the direction of the scattered EM wave is opposite that of the pump. Much previous research on SRS has involved the study of how plane waves propagate in plasmas. However, in IFE the lasers are broken up into multiple finite-width and length speckles which are related to Gaussian-limited laser pulses, which can be decomposed into Laguerre-Gaussian modes. A Laguerre-Gaussian mode can have orbital angular momentum (OAM).The interaction of finite-width Gaussian laser pulses with plasmas is investigated through theory, fluid simulations, and fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations. As a starting point, the reasoning for why a finite-width laser can have orbital angular momentum in vacuum is carefully reviewed, including the conclusion that within a Laguerre-Gaussian mode defined by a spot size w0 with an angular dependence e iℓφ each photon has an angular momentum ℓℏ. This is referred to as the photon’s orbital angular momentum (OAM). The properties of Laguerre-Gaussian modes are examined in terms of the laser’s power, peak intensity, and spot size. The regimes of growth for one-dimensional SRS backscatter are also outlined and reviewed. A regime of interest for IFE is the strongly damped regime where damping of the EPW is sufficiently large that its spatio-temporal growth is altered.Starting from the coupled envelope equations for SRS in a uniform plasma within the paraxial ray approximation including a phenomenological damping term for the EPW, multidimensional conservation laws for wave action, energy, axial and transverse momentum, and angular momentum are derived. Sink terms for the otherwise conserved quantities from the EPW damping are included. The expression for OAM in SRS is shown to be the sum over the OAM expression for each of the three waves. The expression for the OAM of each of the EM waves in plasma is identical to the known expressions for an EM wave in vacuum. In normalized units the OAM of the EPW has the same form as that for the EM wave. However, for the EPW the OAM is shown to be the result of the angular momentum of the currents within the finite-width wave and not from the Poynting flux as is the case for the EM waves.It is shown that conservation of energy and momentum are equivalent to ω and k matching of the three waves because ω and k are constant properties of the carrier and not the envelope. A general wave is not a pure azimuthal harmonic so an effective or average ℓ is defined. The average ℓ number is a property of the envelope and not the carrier of the wave. It is thus argued that ℓ matching is not an absolute concept and is only true when the ℓ of each wave is constant.Simulations of SRS of a single Gaussian speckle are studied using the fluid code pF3D which solves the three coupled envelope equations for SRS and the fully kinetic particle-in-cell code OSIRIS. Results from an ensemble of pF3D simulations are presented that explore the effects of OAM, intensity, power, and spot size of the laser, as well as the temperature of the plasma which controls the dimensionless parameter, kλD, which is a key determiner of the collisionless damping of the plasma wave where k is the wavenumber of the plasma wave and λD is the Debye length. The pF3D simulations show that for both SRS growing from noise or well-defined seeds, OAM can be transferred from the pump to the decay EM and EPW waves. It is found that the degree of SRS growth is mostly determined by the peak intensity of the Laguerre-Gaussian mode indicating that for constant power and spot size, SRS is reduced for pumps with larger ℓ numbers. Conservation of the effective ℓ number arises for pumps with the highest intensities and the decay waves are not pure LaguerreGaussian modes even when the effective ℓ number is near an integer. When SRS grows from a well-defined seed and the reflectivity is low the EM mode often has no OAM.Fully kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of SRS from a single Gaussian speckle reveal a different behavior. For pumps without OAM, SRS grows more rapidly with higher peak and average reflectivity for otherwise similar parameters in the PIC simulations, and it comes in narrower and more intense bursts. However, the trend that SRS reflectivity is reduced for pumps with OAM and fixed laser power and spot size is also seen in PIC simulations. OAM is seen to be transferred from the pump to the scattered light wave and angular momentum is transferred to the particles. In cases where the pump has OAM, no obvious additional kinetic effects of the EPW are observed.PhysicsPlasma physicsQuantum physicsOpticsinertial fusion energylaser-plasma interactionsnonlinear optics of plasmasorbital angular momentumparticle-in-cell simulationsstimulated raman scatteringapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cn96472https://escholarship.org/content/qt8cn96472/qt8cn96472.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8nk6c6822026-06-17T06:32:16Zqt8nk6c682Characterization of Sleep Architecture and Homeostatic Dysregulation in a Murine Mbnl2 Knockout Model of Myotonic Dystrophy Type OneCapuno, ChristianPaul, Ketema N2026-06-12Sleep is a fundamental process to biological life, with extant organisms demonstrating functionally comparable forms of sleep across the entire tree of life; its ubiquity underpins its necessity, having emerged several hundred million years prior and remaining conserved into present day. Despite being a core component of our physiology, sleep is often disregarded—both in daily life, but especially within human health and disease, and particularly in Myotonic Dystrophy Type 1 (DM1), for which sleep and cognitive disruptions remain both the most severe reported symptoms and the least understood. In this study, we characterize changes to sleep architecture and sleep recovery resultant from knockout of Muscleblind-like protein 2 (Mbnl2), an alternative splicing regulator implicated in the etiology DM1. We report light phase-specific increases to REM proportions, REM sleep fragmentation, aberrant reductions in alpha and theta power spectra consistent with clinical symptoms, and disrupted ability to compensate for sleep loss. Our findings suggest these phenotypic differences may be driven by improper activation of sleep recovery mechanisms, and offer insight into the pathophysiology of DM1.NeurosciencesMedicinePhysiologyClinical psychologyelectrocorticographymbnl2murinemyotonic dystrophypolysomnographysleepapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nk6c682https://escholarship.org/content/qt8nk6c682/qt8nk6c682.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8w6453302026-06-17T06:32:10Zqt8w645330Native and Top-Down Mass Spectrometry of Small Amyloid Oligomers Elucidates Early Aggregation and Interactions with Homologous ProteinsHeidersbach, Zoe JacquelineLoo, Joseph A2026-06-12Amyloid proteins play a role in the pathology of numerous diseases, from dementias including Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease to Type 2 Diabetes. Amyloid proteins are characterized by a propensity to misfold into highly ordered β-sheet fibril structures. However, the early-stage oligomers of amyloid proteins have recently gained support for being the toxic species in amyloid pathology. Despite decades of research, no robust description of the early stages of oligomerization has been defined for any amyloid. α-synuclein, involved in Parkinson’s Disease, and islet amyloid polypeptide (amylin), implicated in Type 2 Diabetes, form two case studies demonstrating the utility of native and top-down mass spectrometry for elucidating early-stage oligomerization pathways and how the interactions of amyloids with homologous proteins impact aggregation. α-synuclein is a synaptic vesicle-associated protein whose homolog, β-synuclein, has been implicated in modulating α-synuclein function. Islet amyloid polypeptide is highly conserved across mammals, and interactions between different orthologs have been demonstrated to inhibit amyloid fibrillation. Native electrospray ionization mass spectrometry was applied to oligomers of both amyloid systems to elucidate aggregation pathways and homolog interactions. To simplify complex spectra of heterogeneous overlapping charge state distributions, electron-capture charge reduction was utilized. Top-down fragmentation was used to interrogate the binding interface between amylin heterodimers. Early-stage oligomers of up to a 12-mer were identified for α-synuclein, and up to a 9-mer for β-synuclein. Multiple hetero-oligomers were identified for each amyloid system studied. The elucidation of early amyloid aggregation provided by these studies demonstrates the need for native and top-down mass spectrometry in the search to understand, and ultimately therapeutically address, amyloid diseases.BiochemistryAgingNutritionAlpha-synucleinAmyloidElectron-capture charge reductionIslet amyloid polypeptideNative mass spectrometryOligomersapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8w645330https://escholarship.org/content/qt8w645330/qt8w645330.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5q32n5zd2026-06-17T06:32:05Zqt5q32n5zdInvestigating the Role of Mu Opioid Receptors on Indirect Pathway Medium Spiny Neurons in the Nucleus Accumbens on Opioid Reward in a Chronic Pain ModelOhanian, Lilit AzatuiCahill, Catherine2026-06-12While the role of the mu opioid receptor (MOR) in mesolimbic circuits has been widely studied for its role in opioid reward and addiction, its role on indirect pathway medium spiny neurons (MSNs) in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is not fully understood. This study sought to understand the role of these neurons, using adenosine 2a receptors (A2aR) as a protein marker, in opioid reward under a chronic neuropathic pain mouse model. Whole-brain MOR ablation was carried out using the genetic paradigm A2a-Cre crossed with MORloxP/loxP mice. Following oxycodone conditioning, animals with MORs knocked out exhibited significantly greater oxycodone preference regardless of pain state compared to wildtype littermates Subsequently, a conditional MOR ablation from MSNs in the medial shell of the NAc was carried out using a
novel CRISPR-Cas9 viral construct. Animals with bilateral MOR knock-out exhibited significantly greater oxycodone preference when compared to control unilateral or control virus
injected animals. Finally, to understand the generalizability of these findings, animals with whole-brain MOR ablation underwent morphine conditioning. Similar to oxycodone trials, results showed that MOR ablation resulted in greater morphine preference compared to wildtype mice, suggesting a generalizability of opioid action within this behavior. In conclusion, these findings suggest that MORs on indirect pathway A2aR-expressing MSNs in the medial shell of the NAc play an important role under normal physiological conditions in suppressing opioid reward, where loss of MOR signaling shifts opioid responses towards enhanced preferences. Broadly, these results contribute to a deeper understanding of the circuit-specific mechanisms underlying opioid reward and addiction, while also highlighting these receptors as a potential target for developing safer opioid therapeutics that preserve analgesia while reducing abuse liability.PhysiologyBehavioral sciencesNeurosciencesClinical psychologyChronic neuropathic painIndirect pathway medium spiny neuronsMu opioid receptorNucleus accumbensOpioid rewardapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q32n5zdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5q32n5zd/qt5q32n5zd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt74z5m1pc2026-06-17T06:32:00Zqt74z5m1pcCritical Code: Information Tools for Media Library Preservation and Access at Critical Role ProductionsChapuis, AbigailFurner, Jonathan2026-06-12What information science methods and tools support media preservation and information access methods in independent and creator-owned studios? How might these tools be made to align with the ethos and ideals behind the management and longevity of these studios? How does Critical Role as a case study lend itself to critiques of existing IS tools and methods? In my work, I survey existing literature to answer questions of how library and information studies might contribute to the sustainability and future of creator-owned, independent studios. Using Critical Role as a case study, I explored Critical Role’s media production work and formulated ideas on how to address the information resource gap regarding long-term preservation efforts for their media assets with Linear Tape-Open, and structuring records in a formal content library with Critical Code Studies and Object-Oriented Programming ontologies.Library scienceComputer scienceInformation scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/74z5m1pchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt74z5m1pc/qt74z5m1pc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8mz348dc2026-06-17T06:31:40Zqt8mz348dcDetecting Burnout in Healthcare Reddit Discourse: A Comparative Study of Traditional and Neural Text Classifcation ModelsNusratty, SetaraWu, Yingnian2026-06-12Burnout among healthcare workers has important implications for well-being, stability, and quality of care, yet large-scale measurement remains difficult using traditional survey-based methods. This thesis investigates the use of natural language processing and machine learning to identify burnout-related language in Reddit comments from healthcare- related communities. Reddit data from 2016 to 2024 were collected from multiple subreddits and labeled as burnout or control using a rule-based framework.The study evaluates Logistic Regression with TF-IDF features, a Simple Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network (BiLSTM), and fine-tuned BERT models. To address class imbalance, models were assessed under both a full imbalanced setting with class-weighted learning and an undersampled 3:1 control-to-burnout setting. Logistic Regression provided a strong baseline, the Simple RNN showed limited performance, and the BiLSTM and BERT produced the strongest results.These findings show that contextual and bidirectional models are effective for detecting burnout-related language in social media text, while simpler models remain useful for interpretability and computational efficiency. Temporal analysis further reveals that burnout-related language peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021).StatisticsPsychologyMedicineNursingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mz348dchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8mz348dc/qt8mz348dc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3bv252s72026-06-17T06:31:35Zqt3bv252s7Exploring the Interpretability of OthelloGPTCai, Xintong JessicaWu, Yingnian W2026-06-12Large language models trained on sequential data have demonstrated surprising emergent capabilities, yet their internal computations remain poorly understood. This thesis investigates the mechanistic interpretability of OthelloGPT, a decoder-only transformer trained solely to predict legal moves in the board game Othello on a reduced 6 × 6 board.We apply two complementary interpretability techniques. First, we train linear and nonlinear probing classifiers on the model’s residual stream activations to test whether board state is encoded in a linearly accessible form. We used the probing classifiers to test whether board cell ownership (empty, mine, opponent) can be decoded from intermediate activations. We made a comparison with an 8-head Transformer variant of OthelloGPT. We find that board state is moderately readable but significantly less so than in a wider 8-head architecture, despite the 2-head model achieving higher task performance—a finding that challenges the assumption that better performance implies more interpretable representations.Second, we train JumpReLU transcoders—sparse dictionary learning modules that replace each MLP layer—and analyze the learned features using decision tree classifiers. Our model has 6 layers, and in the first two layers, 90–100% of transcoder neurons achieve decision tree F1 scores above 0.95. As the layer deepens, the interpretability decreases, and by Layer 5, only 22% of transcoder neurons achieve F1 scores above 0.95. Hoewever, we do identify a clear hierarchy of computational roles: from step counter to legality computation.These findings provide a complete layer-by-layer record of how a small transformer learns to play Othello, contributing to the growing understanding of world model formation as a testbed.StatisticsApplied mathematicsArtificial intelligenceAIExplanabilityLarge Language ModelsOthelloGPTProbingSparse Dictionary Learningapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bv252s7https://escholarship.org/content/qt3bv252s7/qt3bv252s7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8zq0952f2026-06-17T06:31:30Zqt8zq0952fEvaluating Mitigation Strategies Against Indirect Prompt Injection in Tool-Using RAG AgentsWANG, ZHIXIANWu, Yingnian2026-06-12Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that invoke external tools introduce a new attack surface: indirect prompt injection, where malicious instructions are embedded in retrieved documents rather than the user’s input. This thesis empirically evaluates four mitigation strategies—prompt-level defense, rule-based sanitization, tool-use restriction, and attribution gating—applied individually and as a full stack, against five attack types across three large language models (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-turbo) in a controlled 17,278-run experiment.The full mitigation stack reduces the attack success rate from 40.6% to 0.2% while preserving benign utility (90.6% to 90.2%) and improving latency. Among individual layers, rule-based sanitization is the strongest (3.2% ASR) while attribution gating provides negligible protection (40.9%). We introduce a novel attack category, information pollution (A5), in which the sentinel value is embedded as factual domain data rather than an imperative instruction. A5 achieves 77.5% ASR at baseline and is the hardest attack to block. Paradoxically, Claude Sonnet—the most resistant model to instruction-based attacks (as low as 0% on A3/A4)—is the most vulnerable to A5 (approximately 95%), revealing a systematic blind spot in safety training. Adaptive attacks provide only marginal uplift (≤3.7 percentage points) over naive variants across all configurations.Computer scienceArtificial intelligenceInformation scienceIndirect prompt injectionInformation pollutionLarge language modelsMitigation strategiesRetrieval-Augmented GenerationTool-using agentsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zq0952fhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8zq0952f/qt8zq0952f.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2c57390s2026-06-17T05:37:25Zqt2c57390sSpatial quantum beating in a cavity-filtered biphoton frequency combChen, YujieWong, Cheewei2024-01-01The Biphoton Frequency Comb (BFC) is a widely adopted platform for feasibly generating high-dimensional entanglement, with established methods for assessing the temporal and frequency domain properties. While the Spatial Quantum Beat (SQB) is a prevalent tool for verifying entanglement, providing detailed information on the entangled parties among many phase-coherent correlated bin pairs, this characterization technique remains underexplored in the field. In this thesis, we will demonstrate this interference using our cavity-filtered BFC platform in both singly and doubly filtered configurations. Additionally, we will discuss the relationship between the commonly observed Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) revival interference pattern and the measured SQB pattern on the BFC platform.Electrical engineeringCavity filteredFrequency entanglementQuantum interferenceSpatial quantum beatingenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2c57390shttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2c57390s/qt2c57390s.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt00n1255q2026-06-17T05:37:23Zqt00n1255qThe Emission and Physicochemical Properties of Airborne Microplastics and Nanoplastics Generated during Plastic ShreddingSwinnerton, Sarah OliviaTsai, Candace S2024-01-01This study examined the emission and physicochemical properties of microplastics and nanoplastics (MPs/NPs) generated during shredding, which is regularly used in mechanical recycling. Waste and new polyethylene terephthalate, polypropylene, and high-density polyethylene were investigated herein for a total of six categories. This study found that particle number concentrations in both submicron and micron sizes of respirable particles were significantly higher during periods of shredding plastics compared to pre- and post-shredding background concentrations. Maximum concentrations of particles within 10 to 420 nm, across all six categories, ranged from 22,000- to 1,300,000-particles/cm3. Maximum concentrations of particles within 0.3 to 10 μm, across all six categories, ranged from 24- to 2,000-particles/cm3. Waste plastics consistently generated higher emissions than their new counterparts, which is attributed to the labels, adhesives, and increased additives incorporated into the waste plastic. Morphology varied drastically between particles and an elemental composition analysis found that the samples consisted primarily of C and O, representing the polymer material, as well as Na, Mg, Al, Si, Cu, Cl, K, Ca, Ti, Fe, Rb, and Br. The shredding of plastic has the potential to expose workers to elevated concentrations of airborne MPs/NPs, especially those between 10 to 100 nm.Occupational safetyEnvironmental healthenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/00n1255qhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt00n1255q/qt00n1255q.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt62d6h0xf2026-06-17T05:02:39Zqt62d6h0xfInnovative Approaches to Electrochemical Energy Storage: Advancements in Microelectrodes and Vanadium Oxide CathodesXie, ZhangdiLi, Yuzhang2024-01-01 Electrochemical energy storage plays a vital role in facilitating the integration of renewable energy sources, improving the efficiency of portable electronic gadgets and electric vehicles. This thesis explores innovative advancements in electrochemical energy storage, focusing on two main areas: microelectrodes and vanadium oxide cathodes. The first chapter elaborates on the distinctive features and manufacturing techniques of microelectrode needles and arrays, highlighting their exceptional accuracy in tackling unresolved scientific questions in energy storage. By enabling ultrafast electrodeposition kinetics and localized electrochemical measurements, they provide critical insights into the behavior of various energy storage materials, demonstrating their potential to challenge the initial understanding of fundamental energy storage mechanism. Future opportunities in electrodeposition morphology, in situ characterization and high-throughput experimenting have been identified, to further advance microelectrode technology. The second chapter delves into the structural and electrochemical advantages of vanadium oxide cathodes for aqueous zinc ion batteries (AZIBs). These cathodes are pivotal due to their potential for high energy density and extended cycle life, addressing critical obstacles in existing energy storage systems. AZIBs, equipped with their ecologically sound aqueous electrolytes, present safer options compared to lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), rendering them appropriate for extensive energy storage purposes. The chapter discusses innovative strategies to overcome current constrains, including the development of laser-scribed VOx-rGO heterostructures that exhibits exceptional pseudocapacitive Zn²⁺ storage and remarkable electrochemical performance. This research not only improves the calendar life of AZIBs, but also paves the way for future progress in cathodic engineering, electrolyte chemistry, and large-scale implementation. By enhancing the efficiency and durability of energy storage systems, these research topics have significant implications for supporting the global transition to cleaner energy solutions.Engineeringenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/62d6h0xfhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt62d6h0xf/qt62d6h0xf.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1wr5v3vt2026-06-17T05:01:34Zqt1wr5v3vtAnalysis of Subgingival Levels of Immune Biomarkers in Patients with Periodontal Disease and Type 2 Diabetes MellitusWall, BrittanyLux, Renate2024-01-01Background: Diabetes mellitus and periodontitis are two prevalent inflammatory diseases affecting 9.3% and 46% of the US adult population, so it is essential to understand their pathophysiologic relation to each other. Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2D) is a known risk factor for periodontal disease due to an overactive inflammatory response and an impaired wound healing response. Additionally, inflammatory mediators present in periodontitis increase systemic inflammation and contribute to decreased insulin sensitivity, indicating the bidirectional relationship between periodontal disease and T2D. Non-surgical periodontal therapy (NSPT) may contribute to improved glycemic control, which in turn promotes improved healing mechanisms and enhanced resolution of periodontitis. A better understanding of these relationships provides practitioners the opportunity to further improve their patients’ quality of life. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyze changes in host immune biomarkers present in gingival crevicular fluid (GCF) in patients with T2D and periodontitis, before and after NSPT, in correlation with local treatment outcomes. Patients were further categorized based on their level of glycemic control to evaluate its effect on the host response.
Materials and Methods: Patients with T2D and periodontitis were tested for their HbA1c levels, then GCF was collected from 4 diseased and 2 non-diseased sites prior to initiating NSPT. Four months after NSPT, a second sample collection and HbA1c test were performed. Control patients with periodontitis and no T2D underwent the same sample collection protocol. Cytokines levels were determined through a 38-plex cytokine panel.
Results: Overall, T2D and ND patients had favorable changes in PD after the treatment. T2D patients had a significantly greater number of sites with more attachment loss following NSPT, compared to ND patients. Changes in BOP were similar amongst T2D and ND patients, but there were more initially healthy sites in T2D patients that presented with BOP at the four month visit. In diseased sites, T2D patients had increased levels of cytokines that affect neutrophil activation such as granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (GCSF) and interleukin (IL)-8, before and after NSPT. Interferon Alpha 2 (IFN-a2) increased in resolved sites in the T2D group, while IL-1b was increased in healthy sites of the T2D group. Compared to ND patients, T2D patients had higher levels of monocyte chemoattractant protein-1(MCP-1) in healthy sites, an increase in monokine induced gamma interferon (MIG) in all sites, and higher levels of macrophage inflammatory protein 1-beta (MIP-1b) in all sites after NSPT.
Conclusions: The higher concentrations of chemoattractant molecules involved in the recruitment of neutrophils, macrophages, and T cells present in T2D patients even after NSPT indicate a prolonged period of inflammation. An IL-1 increase has been linked to periodontitis and T2D which is also observed in our study. Overall, the results indicate that patients with T2D maintain exacerbated inflammatory responses and limited clinical improvement after NSPT.
DentistryImmunologyenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wr5v3vthttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1wr5v3vt/qt1wr5v3vt.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3r6370r12026-06-16T06:46:46Zqt3r6370r1Development of a Cell-Based High-Throughput Screening Assay for Sodium Channel Modulators Using a Constitutively Active Bacterial Sodium ChannelMann, GavenAbderemane Ali, Fayal2026-06-12Voltage-gated sodium (NaV) channels are essential membrane proteins responsible for the initiation and propagation of electrical signals in excitable tissues including neurons, cardiac muscle, and skeletal muscle. These channels mediate rapid sodium influx following membrane depolarization and are critical for generating action potentials that enable communication between cells, and a variety of other cell processes. Dysregulation or mutation of sodium channels has been implicated in numerous diseases, including epilepsy, cardiac arrhythmias, neuropathic pain syndromes, and skeletal muscle disorders. Because of their central role in electrical signaling, sodium channels represent important therapeutic targets for pharmacological intervention.Despite their importance, the discovery of selective sodium channel modulators remains challenging. Many currently available sodium channel inhibitors interact with highly conserved regions of the channel pore, limiting subtype specificity and increasing the likelihood of off-target effects. In addition, traditional electrophysiological techniques used to measure ion channel activity, such as patch clamp recording, are technically demanding and relatively low throughput. These limitations present significant challenges for screening large chemical libraries during early-stage drug discovery. In this study, a cell-based high-throughput screening assay was developed to identify potential sodium channel inhibitors. The assay utilizes mammalian cells (HEK 293) expressing a constitutively active mutant of the bacterial sodium channel NavAe from the arsenite oxidizer Alkalilimnicola ehrlichei found in Mono Lake, California.16 In this system, increased sodium permeability sensitizes cells to depolarization-induced toxicity. Elevation of extracellular potassium chloride (KCl) depolarizes the membrane potential and promotes ion influx through the open channel, leading to reduced cell viability. Compounds that inhibit sodium channel activity prevent excessive ion influx and restore cell survival. Sodium channel inhibition can therefore be detected indirectly through a fluorescence-based viability readout. The assay was optimized and adapted to a 384-well plate format in collaboration with the UCLA Molecular Screening Shared Resource (MSSR). Lidocaine, a well-characterized sodium channel blocker, served as a positive control to validate assay performance. The Z′-factor was calculated prior to library screening to confirm adequate signal separation between positive and negative controls and to verify assay robustness for high-throughput use. During screening, Z-scores were then computed for each compound to identify those producing rescue of cell viability significantly above the negative control distribution. Following optimization and validation, the assay was used to screen the Library of Pharmacologically Active Compounds (LOPAC), resulting in identification of a preliminary candidate inhibitor. Additional compound libraries are currently being screened to identify further sodium channel modulators. This work establishes a scalable cell-based platform for sodium channel drug discovery and demonstrates the feasibility of using bacterial sodium channels as experimental models for identifying candidate ion channel inhibitors.NeurosciencesPhysiologyCellular biologyinhibitormodulatorsodium channelpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3r6370r1etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0230c7hx2026-06-16T06:46:41Zqt0230c7hxMaterials for Next-Generation Electrochemical Energy Storage DevicesChen, RandyDunn, Bruce2026-06-12With the rapidly increasing demand of energy storage systems due to the prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and desire for more grid level storage, it is imperative that
lithium-ion batteries be improved to meet societal needs. Currently, commercialized cells
typically consist of an organic liquid electrolyte paired with a transition metal oxide cathode and
graphite anode. While functional, these systems can only undergo one electron redox per lithium
ion intercalated, placing a limit on the maximum energy density attainable. There has been a
recent push to design multi-electron redox cathodes that can achieve higher capacities and
therefore high energy densities. Additionally, solid-state systems have been heavily explored to
further increase energy density by enabling lithium metal anodes.
The first part of this thesis is centered around the development and characterization of nanocrystalline transition metal trisulfides, specifically MoS3 and WS3, that demonstrate multi
electron redox capabilities upon cycling in a lithium-ion battery system. Through
mechanochemical synthesis, these two materials possessed a unique structure that enabled high
capacity through multi-electron redox. An array of characterization methods such as x-ray
photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) revealed the
structure of the pristine materials, detailed the structural evolution of the materials upon
accepting lithium, and gave insight into how its structure gives rise to multi-electron redox.
The second part of this thesis explored a specific transition metal sulfide TaS2, which has been explored for its electronic properties but has not been studied in depth for its viability as an
electrode material for batteries. Mechanochemical synthesis was used to create nanocrystalline
TaS2, which demonstrated stable cycling with exceptional rate performance. XPS was employed
to gain insight into the lithiation mechanism of the material and understand why it displays
exceptional electrochemical behavior.
The third part of this thesis demonstrates the successful creation of a quasi-solid-state electrolyte that can enable lithium metal anodes. Using sol-gel synthesis, nonflammable ionogel
electrolytes were created and successfully incorporated into coin cells with transition metal
sulfide cathodes. With these ionogel electrolytes, MoS3 cathodes still undergo reversible and
stable multi-electron redox while TaS2 cathodes also cycle stably. Therefore, this section of the
thesis demonstrates proof of concept that transition metal sulfides can be integrated into fully
solid-state systems while retaining their high capacity.
Overall, the summation of all the projects in this dissertation demonstrates the feasibility of achieving high energy density batteries by combining novel transition metal sulfide cathode
materials with quasi solid-state ionogel electrolytes. Multiple transition metal sulfides
demonstrate multi-electron redox upon lithiation due to their unique structure formed upon
mechanochemical synthesis. Ionogel electrolytes can be successfully integrated into a cell with
these transition metal sulfides as cathodes and cycle stably, therefore enabling lithium metal
anodes. This work reveals that creating higher energy density batteries using solid-state
electrolytes paired with transition metal sulfide cathodes is a possible and viable alternative to
the current commercialized technologies.Materials scienceEngineeringEnergyEnvironmental sciencepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0230c7hxetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt20b8w6942026-06-16T06:46:36Zqt20b8w694Anticolonial Struggle and Collective FormShahbaz, Syed HaiderMufti, Aamir2026-06-12I explore configurations of politics and aesthetics in the Global South, with a focus on the politics of anticolonial internationalism and the aesthetic forms that emerge in complex engagements with concrete histories of struggles. I trace attempts made by South Asian, African, and Afrodiasporic writers to create shared political commitments in the Global South through aesthetic forms that were employed to transmit radical struggles and literatures across geographical and cultural divisions. These writers wielded literary expression, particularly certain forms such as metaphor, pronoun, and translation, as tools against frontiers structured by colonialism and capitalism. Their attempts at transmitting—we might say, translating—revolutionary movements and messages from one geographical site to another gave rise to a commons of people in the Global South that were connected to each other’s struggles.Comparative literatureSouth Asian studiesAestheticspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/20b8w694etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0kx497qj2026-06-16T06:46:32Zqt0kx497qjFundamental Study of Nano-Treating Enabled Solidification Control in High-Strength Aluminum AlloysChi, YitianLi, Xiaochun2026-06-12High-strength aluminum alloys such as AA7075, AA2024, and AA6061 are widely used because they offer high strength-to-weight ratio, heat-treatability, fatigue resistance, and good corrosion resistance. However, these same alloys are difficult to process by solidification-based manufacturing. During wire arc additive manufacturing and rapid investment casting, they are prone to hot cracking, coarse grain growth, shrinkage porosity, limited fluidity, and nonuniform mechanical properties. These problems come from their complex alloy chemistry and unstable solidification behavior.This dissertation studies how TiC nanoparticle addition can improve the solidification control and manufacturability of high-strength aluminum alloys. The work focuses on two manufacturing routes: wire arc additive manufacturing and rapid investment casting. These processes have very different cooling conditions, but both require control of grain nucleation, grain growth, liquid feeding, and defect formation. TiC nanoparticles were used as a material-level strategy to change the way the alloys solidify, instead of relying only on process parameter adjustment. In wire arc additive manufacturing, TiC nano-treatment promoted refined equiaxed grains, reduced hot cracking, and improved microstructural uniformity in AA7075, AA2024, and AA6061. The nano-treated deposits showed strong mechanical performance after heat treatment. For example, nano-treated AA7075 after heat treatment reached an average yield strength of about 506.8 MPa, ultimate tensile strength of about 601.2 MPa, and elongation of about 11.1%. These results show that nano-treatment can improve both printability and final mechanical performance in high-strength aluminum WAAM.In rapid investment casting, TiC nanoparticles helped overcome the low castability of wrought aluminum alloys under slow cooling conditions. The nano-treated alloys showed finer grains, fewer shrinkage defects, better surface quality, and improved casting success. In AA7075, the average grain size decreased from 714.8 ± 131.5 µm in the untreated alloy to 47.1 ± 5.3 µm after nano-treatment. Nano-treatment also increased fluidity length by 30.6% for AA7075, 57.1% for AA2024, and 40.2% for AA6061. Micro-CT results showed that shrinkage defects were sharply reduced because the nano-treated alloys retained more terminal eutectic liquid and maintained better backfeeding during the final stage of solidification. The dissertation also connects these experimental results to grain refinement theory. The results suggest that TiC nanoparticles do more than provide heterogeneous nucleation sites. They also restrict grain growth, delay grain coherency, reduce early flow blockage, and improve terminal liquid feeding. Beyond demonstrating nano-treatment in WAAM and rapid investment casting, this dissertation also proposes a hybrid grain refinement framework for solidification with a low cooling rate. In this framework, Al–5Ti–B supplies potent nucleation sites, while TiC nanoparticles restrict grain growth and shrink the nucleation-free zone. This combination allows more nucleant particles to become active, improves nucleation efficiency, and reduces the amount of nanoparticles needed for grain refinement. This is especially important for solidification process under slow cooling, where conventionally the slow cooling produces a large nucleation-free zone and normally leads to coarse grains. Overall, this work shows that TiC nano-treatment can help bridge the gap between high-strength wrought aluminum alloys and scalable solidification-based manufacturing. It provides a solidification-based route for producing strong, near-net-shape aluminum components by WAAM and rapid investment casting.Mechanical engineeringEnergyMaterials scienceNanotechnologypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kx497qjetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt54p876dd2026-06-16T06:46:26Zqt54p876ddUncovering the Intricacies of the Shortwave Infrared Region to Transform Optical Tools and Clinical ApplicationsLin, Eric YuSletten, Ellen MAraujo, Jesus A2026-06-12Shortwave infrared (SWIR, 1000–2000 nm) fluorescence imaging has emerged as a powerful modality for non-invasive biological imaging due to reduced tissue scattering, diminished autofluorescence, and improved spatial resolution relative to conventional visible (Vis, 400–700 nm) and near-infrared (NIR, 700–1000 nm) fluorescence imaging. Despite the rapid progression of the field, major challenges remain in understanding the fundamental imaging parameters governing high-resolution, deep-tissue SWIR imaging, translating these principles into fluorophore design, enabling longitudinal biological studies, and developing clinically translatable imaging agents. This dissertation investigates and attempts to solve some of the challenges in each of these areas. Chapter One provides a perspective on the state of SWIR imaging in vivo as of 2021, establishing the major advances, opportunities, and unresolved challenges that motivated this dissertation. Chapter Two details the examination of the optimal tissue imaging parameters for high-resolution, deep-tissue imaging through systematic evaluation of imaging parameters using a modular, tissue phantom assay. Our findings challenge prevailing assumptions regarding optimal SWIR imaging conditions and establish revised parameters for high-resolution, deep-tissue imaging, which are subsequently validated through a novel fluorophore design strategy. Building upon the framework established in Chapter Two, Chapter Three explores additional fluorophore design strategies intended to achieve these imaging conditions and evaluates their effectiveness through the synthesis and characterization of new SWIR fluorophores. Chapter Four covers the unexpected discovery of a fluorophore initially intended to fulfill the deep-tissue imaging parameters in Chapter Two and Chapter Three. This fluorophore exhibits approximately seven-fold longer vascular half-life relative to the current clinical standard, Indocyanine Green. We demonstrate its superiority in applications relevant to vascular imaging and illustrate its promise for potential translation to the clinic. Chapter Five sees the establishment of a platform for longitudinal SWIR cell tracking in vivo across multiple months with high sensitivity and capability for quantitative assessment. Using two modes of transplantations, we show how the localization of different populations of macrophages can be monitored at baseline and in the context of an inflammatory liver disease. Chapter Six reexamines the state of shortwave infrared imaging in vivo as of 2026, five years later. We not only contextualize how the findings of Chapter Two through Five have contributed to the field, but also highlight additional advances arising from this doctoral work, including fluorophore design, formulation development, excitation-multiplexed imaging, and clinical translation. Together, these studies provide new insights into optimal SWIR imaging conditions, fluorophore design, longitudinal cell tracking, and clinical translation, advancing the development of SWIR fluorescence imaging as a platform for biological discovery and medicine.ChemistryBiochemistryCellular biologyBiomedical engineeringMedical imagingChemical BiologyChemistryFluorescence ImagingOptical ToolsShortwave InfraredpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/54p876ddetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4n00b9d22026-06-16T06:46:20Zqt4n00b9d2Essays in Private Capital MarketsSystla, Venkat AnandPanageas, StavrosKorteweg, Arthur G2026-06-12In chapter 1, I show that U.S. public pension plans strategically invest in private equity to exploit the appearance of stability created by smoothed net asset value reporting. Using the 2012 GASB 67 and 68 accounting reform as a quasi-exogenous shock to the visibility of pension underfunding, I find that underfunded pensions increased their allocation to private equity and were 19% more likely to select fund managers with a history of stronger return smoothing within four years of the reform. While smoothing offers short-term accounting benefits, it amplifies portfolio allocation risks during market downturns through the “Denominator Effect.” When public asset values decline, the relative weight of smoothed private equity holdings becomes mechanically inflated, causing overallocation for plans that must maintain portfolio weights within specified bands. This imbalance often forces pensions to liquidate private equity holdings in the secondary market at substantial discounts, locking in losses during periods of stress.In chapter 2 (with Arthur Korteweg and Stavros Panageas), we evaluate private equity performance using investor-specific stochastic discount factors, and examine whether public pension plans could benefit from changing their allocation to private equity. Plans invest in private equity funds with higher than average risk-adjusted performance, driven mainly by preferential access to successful managers rather than superior selection skill. Decomposing returns into risk-compensation and alpha components, we find that some plans obtain higher private equity returns by taking more risk without earning higher, and in some cases earning lower, risk-adjusted returns. This pattern is broadly consistent with agency problems within pension plans, including gambling for resurrection by underfunded plans and political influence on investment decisions by board members appointed by government officials.FinanceMarketingEconomicsPrivate Capital MarketsPrivate EquityPublic Pensionsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4n00b9d2https://escholarship.org/content/qt4n00b9d2/qt4n00b9d2.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt03t9b4bh2026-06-16T06:46:16Zqt03t9b4bhPerformance Analysis of Infrastructure for Distributed Large Language Model Training and InferenceChen, BingluGupta, Puneet2026-06-12This thesis presents a hardware aware performance modeling framework for distributed large language model training and inference. The framework takes model, workload, hardware, and parallelism configurations as inputs, constructs operator level computation graphs, models computation and communication, and estimates runtime under hybrid parallelism. It also includes memory estimation to prune configurations that exceed device memory capacity. The framework is validated using published results and local A100 measurements, showing useful accuracy for both training and inference workloads. Case studies demonstrate its use for design space exploration, including a Llama 3.1 405B training parallelism sweep and inference studies comparing A100 with a configuration inspired by Groq LPU. Overall, this work shows that fast hardware aware modeling can help evaluate existing systems and explore future hardware and software designs for large language model workloads.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/03t9b4bhhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt03t9b4bh/qt03t9b4bh.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1862t7pt2026-06-16T06:46:11Zqt1862t7ptSex-dependent effects of early life adversity on avoidance behavior, nucleus accumbens spine development, and microglial maturationBlagburn Blanco, Sara VictoriaWilke, Laura A2026-06-12Exposure to early life adversity (ELA), such as neglect, maltreatment, poverty, and discrimination, is one of the largest known risk factors for developing mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders during childhood and later in life. Evidence from human studies and animal models suggests that ELA disrupts the development of key emotion centers within the brain, such as the nucleus accumbens (NAc). By derailing typical developmental trajectories, ELA alters neural circuitry and activity within the NAc, leading to dysfunctional reward processing, threat-sensitization, and maladaptive behavioral patterns. However, the mechanisms underlying ELA's impact on maturing cells and circuits within the NAc remain poorly understood. Using an established limited bedding and nesting (LBN) mouse model of ELA, we identified a sex-dependent enhancement of avoidance behaviors and a corresponding reduction in reward-approach in LBN adult males. Additionally, LBN males displayed a significant increase in neural activity within the NAc in response to the initiation of risky exploration relative to age- and sex-matched standard reared (SR) controls. We also identified a sexually dimorphic, LBN-induced reduction in the dendritic spine densities of medium spiny neurons (MSNs) within the NAc. In a second set of studies investigating the impacts of ELA on developing microglia, brain-resident immune cells that help refine neural circuits, we discovered profound LBN-induced alterations to NAc microglial morphology and transcriptional profiles. Microglial density in the NAc was transiently elevated in LBN mice during postnatal development, accompanied by longer-lasting increases in microglial branching complexity spanning from the 2nd postnatal week through adolescence. Using bulk RNA sequencing on FACS-isolated microglia, we found significant differences in gene expression between LBN and SR animals across development. Differentially expressed genes peaked during adulthood, suggesting that microglial transcriptional profiles continue to diverge from those of SR animals well past the initial LBN exposure. Weighted gene co-expression analysis (WGCNA) identified gene modules correlated with LBN, age, and specific combinations of age and rearing group. Together, these studies elucidate molecular, cellular, and circuit-level pathways through which ELA reshapes NAc development and behavior, providing a foundation for identifying targeted, biologically informed interventions to mitigate ELA's long-term impacts.NeurosciencesGeneticsImmunologyavoidancedevelopmentearly life adversitymicroglianucleus accumbenssex differencespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1862t7ptetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt89k3k9212026-06-16T06:46:05Zqt89k3k921Assessing the reduction in cancer risk from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons among wildland firefighters utilizing air purifying respiratorsRamirez, Nicholas MaximusJones, Rachael M2026-06-12Wildland urban interface (WUI) fires produce complex inhalation exposures in their smoke, one of those hazardous exposures are particulate bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). This study characterized the composition and size distribution of particulate bound PAHs measured in WUI simulated smoke generated in a chamber system. A filtration model was utilized to examine the filtration efficiency of a high performance respirator filter against particle bound PAHs in the generated smoke. Four combustion trials were performed containing biogenic and synthetic fuels to represent WUI combustion conditions. Samples were collected by a cascade impactor and analyzed via GC-MS, which allowed for speciation and calculation of toxic equivalency to determine the lifetime average daily dose and incremental lifetime cancer rick (ILCR). The study found that the particulate bound PAHs were predominately in the thoracic and respirable size ranges which indicated potential deposition in toxicologically relevant regions of the respiratory tract. The filtration model predicted near complete removal of particle sizes measured and with an assigned protection factor of ten for an elastomeric half mask the ILCR may be reduced by up to 90%.Environmental healthForestryEnvironmental scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/89k3k921https://escholarship.org/content/qt89k3k921/qt89k3k921.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt11m1b6342026-06-16T06:46:01Zqt11m1b634Belonging Through the Middle School Transition: A Youth Participatory Action Research Study of Black and Latinx Students in a Predominantly White Independent SchoolArriarán, JonathanGomez, Kimberley2026-06-12Middle school is an important transition as students navigate new academic, social, and personal challenges while trying to develop a sense of belonging. For Black and Latinx students entering predominantly White independent schools (PWIS), this transition often carries additional racial and cultural pressures that shape how they experience school, relationships, and connection. This youth participatory action research (YPAR) study explored how Black and Latinx middle school students at an elite PWIS understood belonging, experienced unbelonging, and imagined how schools could better support them.Through interviews, surveys, group discussions, and collaborative design work, students served as co-researchers who investigated the experiences of Black and Latinx students and developed ideas to strengthen belonging within their school community. The findings showed that students experienced the strongest sense of belonging through cultural representation reflected in their teachers and through their genuine relationships with them. Students also felt belonging in affinity spaces and through visible institutional efforts that intentionally recognized and affirmed their identities. Belonging also emerged through allyship and connections beyond race-ethnicity, including shared interests and experiences with peers, as well as through students’ ability to endure expected challenges to belonging. At the same time, the study found that feelings of unbelonging stemmed from a growing distrust of the school. Students described carrying an added burden to belong, including limited access, experiences across a spectrum of othering, and a pressure to adapt parts of themselves. Inconsistent responses to racism, insufficient cultural validation, underrepresentation, and avoidance of proactive conversations about race and identity further intensified challenges to belonging. In response, the co-researchers designed an intervention centered on students’ lived experiences. They emphasized curricular and demographic representation, addressing both large and small-impact issues, and strengthening institutional accountability. Students selected professional development for teachers as the primary intervention, seeking to leverage relationships as a pathway toward greater cultural responsiveness and change. Participation in YPAR also strengthened students’ confidence, agency, critical awareness, and connection with one another. This study contributes to research on belonging and middle school experiences by centering the voices of Black and Latinx students and showing that early adolescents can identify inequities, communicate their needs, and design meaningful change within their schools.Educational leadershipMulticultural educationEducational sociologyLatin American studiesMiddle school educationEthnic studiesbelongingindependent schoolsmiddle school transitionracial identitystudent voiceyouth participatory action researchapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/11m1b634https://escholarship.org/content/qt11m1b634/qt11m1b634.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4wx3z9pv2026-06-16T06:45:56Zqt4wx3z9pvStrong equivalence via derivations and their interpretationsChang, KalenBumford, Dylan2026-06-12This dissertation presents two ways to compare grammar formalisms beyond the string or tree languages they generate, by also examining how these strings are generated. Though formalisms vary vastly in the ways they build strings or structures to produce strings, I propose that comparing their derivations themselves can yield fruitful results of equivalence between seemingly different formalisms. The first notion is count equivalence: two grammars are count equivalent if they generate the same number of derivations per string. The second considers interpretations as homomorphic functions over derivation structures. Two grammars are interpretationally equivalent if they generate the same set of string-interpretation pairs. Interpretations are not limited to semantics, but serve as a proxy for comparing the derivation structure as a whole -- how the derivation was assembled.
Although many of the formalisms I discuss are known to be weakly equivalent, I provide many examples of how to constructively transform a grammar in one formalism into a strongly equivalent grammar in another formalism: one that is able to generate the same derivational ambiguity, and the same interpretation values given a homomorphic function. Besides demonstrating how one grammar relates to another, I show how the derivations of each grammar, and how interpretations over those derivations, correspond. These transformations occur across a wide variety of formalisms and subclasses thereof, spanning both Context-Free formalisms (Context-Free Grammars and Pushdown Automata) and Mildly Context-Sensitive formalisms (Head Grammars, Linear Indexed Grammars, and linear monadic Context-Free Tree Grammars). I conclude by considering the implications this formal work has for broader linguistic research. I propose that studying these translations across formalisms reveals insights to how the recursive structure-building mechanisms of each formalism relate.LinguisticsLanguageApplied mathematicsderivationsgrammar formalismsinterpretationsstrong equivalenceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wx3z9pvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4wx3z9pv/qt4wx3z9pv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt575252w92026-06-16T06:45:51Zqt575252w9Genome Mining and Biochemical Characterization of BiNCO Enzymes in Fungal RiPPs BiosynthesisChen, Kendy GuanTang, Yi2026-06-12Ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) represent a growing class of natural products with diverse structures and biological activities. While bacterial RiPP biosynthetic pathways have been extensively studied, fungal RiPP systems remain comparatively underexplored. In particular, binuclear copper-dependent oxidative enzymes (BiNCOs), formerly annotated as members of the Domain of Unknown Function 3328 (DUF3328) family, have recently emerged as important oxidative tailoring enzyme in fungal RiPP biosynthesis. However, their biochemical functions, substrate recognition requirements, and catalytic mechanisms remain largely unresolved. This thesis investigates fungal RiPP-associated BiNCO enzymes through a combination of genome mining, bioinformatic analysis, and biochemical characterization. Initial studies focused on phomopsin A homologous biosynthetic gene cluster to establish an in vitro reconstruction platform for characterizing BiNCO-mediated peptide modification. Heterologous expression and refolding studies revealed substantial experimental challenges, including poor protein solubility and unsuccessful refolding of recombinant enzymes, highlighting common bottlenecks associated with the biochemical characterization of fungal oxidative enzymes. To further explore the diversity of fungal BiNCO systems, genome mining was performed on biosynthetic gene clusters from Trichoderma afroharzianum T22. Comparative analysis of precursor peptides suggested that additional proteolytic processing may be required to generate the authentic BiNCO substrate, although the responsible cleavage sites, processing enzymes, and timing of these events remain unclear. Continued protein refolding difficulties further limited complete pathway reconstitution in vitro. Building upon these observations, a BiNCO-containing biosynthetic pathway from C. borealis was investigated to evaluate putative substrate recognition motifs. Guided by literature reports describing conserved XAXP cleavage-site motifs, peptide substrates containing analogous sequence features were examined in vitro. Activity was observed in the presence of BiNCO-2, demonstrating that motif-guided substrate design can facilitate identification of productive peptide substrates. Collectively, these studies expand current understanding of fungal RiPP BiNCO systems and highlight the experimental challenges associated with characterizing cryptic fungal biosynthetic pathways. This work further demonstrates the utility of genome mining and motif-guided substrate design in investigating underexplored oxidative enzymes involved in fungal natural product biosynthesis.ChemistryMicrobiologyBiochemistrypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/575252w9etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3cd8h48k2026-06-16T06:45:46Zqt3cd8h48kThe Perturbative Role of Topological Surface States in Heterogeneous CatalysisLaderer, WilliamAlexandrova, Anastassia N2026-06-12Topological materials host surface states guaranteed by bulk band topology, leading to proposals that these topological surface states (TSS) could serve as robust, poison-resistant active sites for heterogeneous catalysis. This dissertation examines that hypothesis through three complementary first-principles studies, revealing that TSS are neither the indestructible electron reservoirs initially envisioned nor irrelevant spectators, but rather sensitive, perturbative contributors to catalytic binding. First, we characterize the (111) surface of the topological crystalline insulator EuAg4Sb2 using scanning tunneling microscopy and density functional theory. The surface undergoes a thermodynamically driven ( √ 3 × √ 3)R30◦ reconstruction, stabilized by 2.55 eV through Ag adatom incorporation. This reconstruction breaks the local C3v symmetry protecting the TSS, pulling the dispersive surface states below the Fermi level. TSS-derived surface states are modified but not entirely removed, indicating that the original surface-state manifold participates in the bonding rearrangement accompanying reconstruction.Second, we investigate whether TSS participate in catalysis on the topological semimetal Pt3Sn, an industrial dehydrogenation catalyst. The thermodynamically dominant (111) and (001) facets both host TSS; the non-topological (110) surface serves as a control. Hydrogen couples weakly to TSS through a momentum-dependent interaction, but the dominant binding occurs through conventional Pt d-band states. Stochastic GW calculations confirm that TSS persist beyond the one-particle approximation. The dehydrogenation profiles on topological facets diverge from the non-topological control, establishing that TSS provide a perturbation to an otherwise standard catalytic mechanism.Third, we design metal/topological-insulator heterostructures, monolayers of Pt, Au, and Ag on Bi2Te3, to decouple adsorbate binding from the topological perturbation. TSS mix with metal film states and shift binding energies in chemically specific ways: strengthening CO adsorption on Au and Ag through π ∗ back-donation, and weakening H adsorption on Pt through an occupied σ ∗ antibonding interaction. Both shifts move the corresponding adsorption descriptors toward their catalytic volcano optima. The effect attenuates beyond a single metal monolayer, setting a target for atomically precise thin-film synthesis. Together, these studies establish that TSS play a perturbative role in heterogeneous catalysis and that heterostructure engineering offers a viable route to harnessing that perturbation. Computational chemistryChemistryPhysical chemistrycatalysischemistrytopologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cd8h48khttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3cd8h48k/qt3cd8h48k.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7841t8gm2026-06-16T06:45:41Zqt7841t8gmPermanent Fluidic Magnet-Enabled Smart Cup for Non-Invasive Detection of Parkinsonian Hand TremorLi, ZihengChen, JunYang, Lin2026-06-12Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease worldwide, affecting approximately 1.51 per 1000 individuals. Hand tremor, as the most common motor manifestation, is characterized by a resting frequency of 4–6 Hz and is often among the earliest observable symptoms. Existing monitoring approaches rely on either dedicated wearable hardware that requires deliberate attachment or centralized clinical instrumentation, neither of which supports continuous, passive detection during everyday activities. This thesis presents a proof-of-concept smart drinking cup for non-invasive, passive detection of Parkinsonian hand tremor. Permanent fluidic magnets (PFM) — a fluid that retains permanent magnetization through a three-dimensional oriented and ramified magnetic nanoparticle network — are embedded within a cylindrical cavity in the cup handle. When the hand trembles, inertia-driven oscillation of the PFM generates a time-varying magnetic flux that induces a measurable electrical signal in a surrounding induction coil via Faraday’s law. A magnetoelastic generator (MEG) coaster passively restores PFM magnetization after each use, requiring no user intervention. PFM at a 25% magnetic particle mass fraction was selected through rheological characterization, balancing flowability under low-amplitude tremor excitation against the structural integrity of the magnetic network responsible for permanent magnetization. Electrical signals were recorded under simulated tremor and normal hand motion conditions, incorporating naturalistic everyday movements. After bandpass filtering (0.5–15 Hz), downsampling to 100 Hz, and sliding-window segmentation (2-second windows, 1-second step), a balanced dataset of 1,416 labeled windows was constructed. Four classifiers were evaluated, all achieving accuracies above 96% with near-perfect AUC scores. The t-SNE visualization of the extracted feature space confirmed strong geometric separation between tremor and normal classes, consistent with the spectrally distinct nature of PD-associated tremor. These results establish the feasibility of the PFM-embedded smart cup as a platform for passive tremor monitoring during daily life. Validation on real PD patient data is identified as the critical next step toward clinical translation.Electrical engineeringBioengineeringComputer scienceComputer engineeringHand tremor detectionMachine learningMagnetoelastic sensingParkinson's diseasePermanent fluidic magnetsSmart cuppubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7841t8gmetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2bb1w43x2026-06-16T06:45:36Zqt2bb1w43xIndictment on the System: Black Males Reshaping Resilience from Foster Care and High SchoolThompson, DemonteaHoward, Tyrone C.2026-06-12Black males in foster care experience some of the poorest educational outcomes in the child welfare system, yet their perspectives remain largely absent from educational research. Existing scholarship often emphasizes deficits while overlooking the strengths, strategies, and relationships that support persistence and success. This qualitative study examines how Black males formerly in foster care understood their high school experiences and how supportive adults contributed to graduation.Grounded in Critical Race Theory and Community Cultural Wealth, the study introduces Foster Care Perceptive Capital (FCP-Capital) to describe the knowledge, skills, and assets shaped through foster care experience. Data came from semi-structured interviews with seven Black males formerly in foster care who graduated from high school and four adult mentors they identified as influential. Multiple interviews supported analysis across school, home, and community contexts.Findings show that participants navigated schooling amid instability, placement disruption, surveillance, racialized expectations, and systemic inequity. Even so, they relied on agency, spirituality, adaptive survival strategies, and supportive relationships to persist. Five themes emerged: identity in and beyond school, environment and expectations, spirituality and tough love, redefined resilience, and critique of the system. Mentors, educators, coaches, foster parents, and community members provided encouragement, accountability, advocacy, and belonging often missing from formal systems.This study challenges deficit-oriented narratives about Black male youth in foster care by centering their lived-experience, insight, and aspirations. Findings suggest that educational attainment depends not only on individual determination but also on affirming relationships, culturally responsive support, and opportunities to build FCP-Capital. Implications include expanding strengths-based approaches, investing in sustained mentorship, improving educational stability, and creating schools that recognize and build on youths’ assets. By centering the voices of Black males who graduated from high school after foster care, this study offers a more nuanced understanding of resilience, educational attainment, and possibility. Los jóvenes negros que han pasado por el sistema de acogimiento familiar presentan algunos de los peores resultados educativos dentro del sistema de bienestar infantil; sin embargo, sus perspectivas siguen estando mayoritariamente ausentes de la investigación educativa. Los estudios existentes suelen centrarse en las carencias, pasando por alto las fortalezas, estrategias y relaciones que favorecen la perseverancia y el éxito. Este estudio cualitativo examina cómo jóvenes negros que estuvieron en acogimiento familiar percibieron su experiencia en la escuela secundaria y cómo los adultos que les brindaron apoyo contribuyeron a que se graduaran.Basándose en la Teoría Crítica de la Raza y en el concepto de Riqueza Cultural Comunitaria, el estudio introduce el término "Capital Perceptivo del Acogimiento Familiar" (FCP-Capital) para describir los conocimientos, habilidades y recursos desarrollados a través de la experiencia en dicho sistema. Los datos se obtuvieron mediante entrevistas semiestructuradas con siete jóvenes negros que habían estado en acogimiento familiar y se graduaron de la secundaria, así como con cuatro mentores adultos a quienes ellos identificaron como figuras influyentes. La realización de múltiples entrevistas permitió analizar sus experiencias en los ámbitos escolar, familiar y comunitario.Los resultados muestran que los participantes transitaron su etapa escolar en medio de inestabilidad, interrupciones en las ubicaciones de acogida, vigilancia constante, expectativas condicionadas por la raza y desigualdades sistémicas. A pesar de ello, recurrieron a su capacidad de agencia, a la espiritualidad, a estrategias de supervivencia adaptativas y a relaciones de apoyo para perseverar. Surgieron cinco temas clave: la identidad dentro y fuera de la escuela; el entorno y las expectativas; la espiritualidad y el "amor firme" (exigencia afectuosa); una resiliencia redefinida; y la crítica al sistema. Mentores, educadores, entrenadores, padres de acogida y miembros de la comunidad brindaron ánimo, responsabilidad, defensa de sus intereses y un sentido de pertenencia que a menudo faltaba en los sistemas formales.Este estudio cuestiona las narrativas centradas en las carencias de los jóvenes negros en acogimiento familiar, priorizando en su lugar sus experiencias vitales, sus perspectivas y sus aspiraciones.Los hallazgos sugieren que el logro educativo no depende únicamente de la determinación individual, sino también de relaciones que afirmen su identidad, de un apoyo culturalmente pertinente y de oportunidades para desarrollar el FCP-Capital. Entre las implicaciones prácticas se incluyen: ampliar los enfoques basados en fortalezas, invertir en mentorías sostenidas, mejorar la estabilidad educativa y crear escuelas que reconozcan y potencien los recursos y capacidades de estos jóvenes. Al poner en primer plano las voces de jóvenes negros que se graduaron de la secundaria tras haber pasado por el sistema de acogimiento, este estudio ofrece una comprensión más matizada de la resiliencia, el éxito educativo y las posibilidades de futuro.EducationEducational administrationHigher educationBlack MalesCritical Race TheoryEducationFoster CareFoster Care Perceptive CapitalHigh Schoolapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2bb1w43xhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2bb1w43x/qt2bb1w43x.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3zz486xf2026-06-16T06:45:31Zqt3zz486xfWeaponizing the Ballot: State-Sponsored and Party-Perpetrated Violence Against Women in East African ElectionsCoopersmith, Alexis RaeAgadjanian, Victor2026-06-12This dissertation, Weaponizing the Ballot: State-Sponsored and Party-Perpetrated Violence Against Women in East African Elections, argues that violence against women in elections is not incidental to electoral competition but is instead produced and managed by regimes as mechanisms of political control. Drawing from election cycles between 2015 and 2025 across Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania, I show that electoral violence operates through coordinated or permissive actions by state and party actors, enabled by legacies of impunity. Violence varies in form—diffuse and publicly perpetrated in Kenya, more centralized in Rwanda, and institutionally embedded in Tanzania—but is consistent in function: regulating women’s access to political participation.Chapter 1 examines violence against female aspirants within political institutions, showing how party gatekeeping, nomination processes, and internal state hierarchies regulate women’s access to formal political office. Chapter 2 argues that sexualized violence operates as one mechanism of political repression, deployed to discipline participation, enforce exclusion, and signal the costs of visibility in public life. It also shows that political institutions produce patterns of visibility and silence by regulating information and managing risk. Chapter 3 analyzes the militarization of civic space, arguing that campaigns, rallies, polling environments, and even everyday public spaces can be co-opted into volatile arenas that disproportionately constrain women’s political engagement. I call this dynamic manufactured volatility: a way of governance in which uncertainty, risk, and disruption are embedded within the political system itself, unevenly distributed across electoral space and filtering participation through unequal exposure to risk.Violence against women in elections operates both materially and symbolically. It enforces the boundaries of legitimate political actors, polices visibility, and sustains patriarchal rule within the framework of electoral competition. Together, the dissertation reconceptualizes electoral violence as a form of state-sponsored, party-perpetrated repression that uses violence against women as a strategy for governing who can safely appear, compete, and remain in political life.SociologyPolitical scienceWomens studiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3zz486xfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4xw603kc2026-06-16T06:45:25Zqt4xw603kcPracticing Asexuality in Late Imperial Chinese Literature: Abstaining from Sex as a Form of Women’s AutonomyChen, Cindy ChristinaWu, Yinghui2026-06-12This thesis examines the practices of asexuality as performed by women in late imperial Chinese literature; by abstaining from sex, I argue, these women wrested autonomy over their sexual bodies from societal norms constructed by men. By understanding asexuality as practices, rather than an identity, I present these women as deviating from typical tropes of female characters in the likeness of fox-spirit succubi or lecherous nuns. Previous works in asexuality studies have focused on Western or modern-day identity, whereas studies on Chinese fictional tales have mostly been focused on both the reader’s and author’s fascination with sex, rather than its absence. This paper seeks to highlight how the boundaries that women set for their own bodies can be interpreted as a spectrum of asexual practices in late imperial Chinese literature. Based on stories of Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi, Li Yu’s Twelve Towers and Silent Operas, and the novel Haoqiu zhuan, I argue that the women’s choices to abstain from sex may have enabled women in late imperial China to reclaim autonomy over their sexual bodies from men. This thesis explores these choices through three categories: 1) religion as an avenue through which women’s bodies are no longer defined by their ability to reproduce in their social roles as wives and mothers; 2) the metaphor of the supernatural, which presents women along a spectrum from exhibiting aggressive female desire to sexual restraint; and, 3) the changing norms of chastity when viewed through women’s social practice rather than absolute moral precepts.East Asian studiesLiteratureWomens studiesSexualityAsexualityChastityPremodern Chinese literatureWomen's bodieszhiguai storiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4xw603kchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4xw603kc/qt4xw603kc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5xc2r41w2026-06-16T06:45:20Zqt5xc2r41wImproving Patient Health Questionnaire-9 Completion Rates in Medication Management Visits: A Plan-Do-Study-Act Driven Quality Improvement Initiativeneiswender, lorenGreen, StaceyClark, Lauren2026-06-12Background: Measurement-based care (MBC) is the routine collection and use of standardized symptom measures to monitor patient progress and inform treatment decisions. Although MBC is recommended in psychiatric clinical practice, routine use of standardized symptom-monitoring tools remains inconsistent in many outpatient behavioral health settings. At the project site, Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) use was not routinely integrated into medication management appointments and lacked a standardized clinic process. Objectives: To implement and evaluate a standardized clinic workflow for administering the PHQ-9 to every patient (>12 years of age) upon arrival for a medication management visit at an outpatient behavioral health clinic. Methods: This project used a quality improvement (QI) design with a pre-/post-implementation approach and three sequential Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles over a 12-week implementation period. Lewin’s Change Theory guided implementation. The intervention included reception-based PHQ-9 distribution, provider office backup forms, provider acknowledgment of review by initials, and routing of completed forms for scanning into the electronic health record. Descriptive statistics summarized visit-level PHQ-9 completion, distribution source, provider acknowledgment of review, and form routing. Post-implementation staff and provider surveys consisted of both quantitative and qualitative responses. Results: Implementation data were collected across 102 eligible medication management visits. Of the 102 visits, 84 PHQ-9 forms were completed (82.4% response rate) with 18 instances where the form was not distributed. Completion improved across the PDSA cycles, increasing from 78.0% in Cycle 1 to 81.1% in Cycle 2 and 91.7% in Cycle 3. The most common distribution source was from reception (61/84 - 72.6%). Forms were less frequently distributed by providers (23/84 - 27.4%). Provider initials were present on 73 of the 84 distributed forms, representing 71.6% of all eligible visits and 86.9% of forms completed by patients. Post-implementation reception staff feedback indicated that PHQ-9 distribution was generally quick and low burden, and provider feedback suggested that the PHQ-9 were perceived as useful during visits. Conclusion: Implementation of a standardized MBC process improved PHQ-9 distribution and completion across the three PDSA cycles. Findings suggest that routine MBC may be supported by a clearly defined clinic process including staff roles, provider acknowledgment, and ongoing monitoring. Future QI and/or research are needed to examine how PHQ-9 results are incorporated into patient care and collaborative clinical decision-making visits and whether MBC influences treatment changes and patient outcomes over time.NursingMedicineMental healthClinical psychologymeasurement-based caremental healthPatient Health Questionnaire-9PDSApsychiatryquality improvementapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xc2r41whttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5xc2r41w/qt5xc2r41w.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt08x5c2zd2026-06-16T06:45:14Zqt08x5c2zdExploring New Methods for Reducing Global and Regional Uncertainty in Climate ProjectionsCropper, Stephen JamesHall, Alexander Dean2026-06-12Climate projections remain limited by uncertainty in how models translate external forcing into global and regional impacts. This dissertation develops emergent constraints: observationally anchored relationships between measurable climate features and uncertain future responses. It applies this framework to three targets: equilibrium climate sensitivity, interior western United States soil moisture, and western North American mountain snowpack.
First, it revisits constraints on equilibrium climate sensitivity based on global mean surface temperature variability. Extending the analysis to last-millennium simulations and PAGES 2k reconstructions shows that, after reducing volcanic influence, interannual and decadal variability support positive emergent relationships and yield central estimates of 2.5–2.7 K.
Second, it constrains surface soil moisture drying over the interior western United States. The historical amplitude of the soil-moisture seasonal cycle predicts end-of-century drying across CMIP6 and WUS-D3 ensembles. Observation-based products constrain drying to −4% rather than the raw CMIP6 estimate of −7%, reduce spread by roughly 30%, and point to land-surface model structure as a key source of uncertainty.
Third, it constrains mid-century April 1 snow water equivalent loss using 9 km WUS-D3 simulations. Historical spring positive degree-day trends measure above-freezing melt energy and explain cross-model spread. Observations constrain 2041–2070 domain-mean decline to −22.9 ± 11.0% (95% confidence interval), reducing spread by 35% and revealing important ecoregional differences.
Together, these studies show that emergent constraints are strongest when their predictors are physically tied to the projected response and evaluated at the spatial scale of the decision-relevant process.Atmospheric sciencesClimate changeHydrologic sciencesGeophysicsPaleoclimate scienceMeteorologyemergent constraintsequilibrium climate sensitivitylast millenniumpaleoclimatesnow water equivalentsoil moistureapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/08x5c2zdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt08x5c2zd/qt08x5c2zd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8db427zd2026-06-16T06:45:08Zqt8db427zdPerceiving Gender Identity: Mental Representation, Categorization, and Evaluation of Transgender TargetsStrickland, Lucas M.Johnson, Kerri L.2026-06-12Transgender individuals represent a growing share of the American population yet face disproportionate rates of violence, discrimination, and psychological adversity. Despite extensive documentation of these consequences, the cognitive and perceptual processes through which anti-transgender bias originates remain poorly understood. This dissertation blends social vision and social cognition frameworks to investigate how transgender individuals are mentally represented, visually categorized, and evaluatively penalized in social encounters.The first empirical chapter introduces a novel indirect measure of mental representations, the Group Q-Sort (GQ-Sort), applying it across four studies to examine how sexual and gender minority identities are mentally organized relative to one another and to broader gender categories. The second chapter turns to the face, examining across two studies whether transgender identity can be visually categorized from facial photographs and how that categorization shapes evaluation. The final chapter extends these questions to the body across four studies, showing how specific bodily cues, particularly the surgical scarring left by masculinizing chest surgery, drive the categorization and evaluation of transgender torsos.Two primary patterns emerge across all three chapters. First, a cisgender default: perceivers treat cisgender heterosexual identity as the prototypical standard against which other gender identities are evaluated, resolving categorical uncertainty toward cisgender classifications. Second, an LGBT–femininity default: all LGBTQ+ identities, including those of transgender men, are mentally associated with femininity relative to the cisgender norm, a pattern that replicates across mental representational, facial, and bodily measures. The dissertation further shows that post-surgical pectoral scars function as powerful transgender-identity cues with direct evaluative consequences. A more tentative pattern also emerges: ease of visual processing appears to partially explain evaluative penalties in the face domain, whereas specific visible surgical cues appear to drive bias in the body domain. These results suggest a potential face-body dissociation in visual processing and subsequent stigma, but further work is needed to definitively conclude such findings.Together, these findings trace a psychological chain from mental representation through perceptual categorization to evaluative bias, establishing the empirical foundations of a science of transgender person perception.Social psychologyCognitive psychologyGender studiesLGBTQ studiesMental healthface perceptiongender identityLGBTQ+mental representationperceptual fluencytransgenderapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8db427zdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8db427zd/qt8db427zd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1jz6d9pg2026-06-16T06:45:04Zqt1jz6d9pgA Nurse Practitioner–Led Feasibility Pilot of Strength Training for Adults with Obsessive-Compulsive DisorderKoehler, FrederickMacey, Paul M2026-06-12Background: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a chronic psychiatric condition often associated with persistent symptoms and functional impairment despite first-line treatment with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with exposure and response prevention (ERP). This persistent symptom burden supports the need for practical, scalable, non-pharmacologic adjuncts that can be integrated into outpatient psychiatric care.Aim: This Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) scholarly project evaluated the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary symptom trajectory of a 12-week nurse practitioner–led structured strength training program for adults with OCD in an outpatient psychiatric setting. Methods: A single-group longitudinal pre–post quality improvement (QI) design was used. Thirty adults aged 18–65 years with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) diagnosed OCD participated while maintaining stable psychiatric medication and psychotherapy regimens. The Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) was administered at baseline and every two weeks through week 12. Retention, attendance, adherence, and qualitative feedback were tracked. Y-BOCS outcomes were summarized using means, 95% confidence intervals, percent change from baseline, and group-mean biweekly trajectories. The association between adherence and percent Y-BOCS reduction was examined descriptively using Pearson correlation. Results: Twenty-three of 30 participants completed the 12-week program, a retention rate of 77%. Across the full enrolled sample, mean attendance was 61% of planned sessions. In the full enrolled sample of 30 participants, mean Y-BOCS scores decreased from 24 at baseline to 19 at last observation, a mean reduction of 5 points, 95% CI [4, 6], or 20%. For participants who withdrew, last observation occurred between weeks 4 and 10. Among the 23 completers, mean Y-BOCS scores decreased from 23 at baseline to 17 at week 12, a mean reduction of 6 points, 95% CI [5, 7], or 26%. Higher session attendance was associated with greater observed percent Y-BOCS reduction, with mean reductions of 29% in the high-adherence group, 24% in the moderate-adherence group, and 8% in the low-adherence group. High, moderate, and low adherence were defined as ≥75%, 50%–74%, and <50% of planned sessions completed, respectively. Participant feedback commonly attributed perceived benefit to structured routine, accountability, and clinical contact rather than to strength gain alone. Conclusion: A nurse practitioner–led structured strength training program was feasible to deliver in outpatient psychiatric care, with retention exceeding 70%; however, adherence remained below the 75% benchmark. OCD symptom scores decreased during the 12-week observation period, but improvement cannot be attributed to strength training because of the single-group design, concurrent treatment, and non-blinded outcome assessment. The project identified adherence, rather than retention, as the primary feasibility challenge. Participant feedback suggested that structured routine, accountability, and clinical contact supported engagement. Future QI iterations should test strategies to improve adherence and separate intervention delivery from outcome assessment.NursingMental healthKinesiologyExercise interventionFeasibilityNurse practitionerObsessive-compulsive disorderQuality improvementStrength trainingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1jz6d9pghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1jz6d9pg/qt1jz6d9pg.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2vg9d4h92026-06-16T06:44:59Zqt2vg9d4h9Seeing and Feeling Differently: Neurocognitive Experiences of our Racialized Social WorldMatos, Leezet MarisolLieberman, Matthew D.2026-06-12Race and racism continue to be salient features of our social world (Chae et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2019; Quinn et al., 2023). Although previous social and affective research has begun to uncover differences between the way people from different racial backgrounds, with different historical proximities to power, perceive and interpret racialized social stimuli (Reinka & Leach, 2018), research has not yet used naturalistic stimuli to compare how similarly members of racially dominant and racially marginalized groups make sense of our racialized social world. This dissertation addresses this gap by using computational linguistic and fMRI-based neural synchrony analyses to explore how people of different racial groups see and understand racialized social situations (e.g., videos showing varying levels of tension and anti-Black racism between Black and White characters). It also explores factors facilitating mutual understanding across racial groups.Chapter 1 begins with a review of race-related social and affective neuroscience that frames subsequent empirical investigations. In Chapter 2, two studies examine whether Black and White participants made sense of racialized naturalistic stimuli differently at both behavioral (by assessing interpretative similarity) and neurocognitive (by assessing neural synchrony in regions associated with sense-making) levels. Cross-race differences in interpretations were observed for videos depicting nonracist interracial conflict at the behavioral level across two online samples of Black and White participants in study 1 (N = 523); however, the most robust effects were observed at the neurocognitive level. In study 2 (N = 57), strong evidence of cross-race neural differences emerged for a clip portraying a complex historical portrayal of anti-Black systemic racism within multiple brain regions associated with meaning-making, but most notably within a region overlapping the inferior parietal lobule and temporoparietal junction. Effects also emerged for videos depicting modern microaggressive anti-Black racism (within the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) and non-racism related interracial conflict (in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). Critical Black History Knowledge (i.e., knowledge of past anti-Black racism) facilitated mutual understanding of both past systemic racism and modern anti-Black racism. Finally, Chapter 3 more closely examines the role emotions and affective processes play in generating mutual understanding of our racialized social world. Results suggest emotional experiences of witnessing racism (empathic responses, feelings of negative emotionality and, potentially, emotion regulation) are key aspects of racialized meaning-making that also promote mutual understanding of past systemic racism and modern anti-Black racism.NeurosciencesPsychologySocial psychologyBlack studiesCognitive psychologyanti-Black RacismComputational LinguisticsEmotionsMutual UnderstandingNeural SynchronyRacialized Social and Affective Neuroscienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2vg9d4h9https://escholarship.org/content/qt2vg9d4h9/qt2vg9d4h9.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt13m4821s2026-06-16T06:44:54Zqt13m4821sInvestigating Mu Opioid Receptors on Dopamine-1 Receptor Expressing Neurons in the Dorsal Peduncular Nucleus and their Role in Opioid RewardSigal, Gabriella HannahCahill, Catherine MPhelps, Patricia E2026-06-12The Mu Opioid Receptor (MOR) is well known for its role in opioid reward through the release of dopamine through the mesolimbic reward system. However, there is less information regarding the importance of MORs in opioid reward in the non-striatal regions. This study aims to investigate the necessity of MORs on Dopamine 1- receptor (D1-R) and vesicular glutamate transporter 2 (vGluT2)- expressing neurons in the Dorsal Peduncular nucleus (DPn) in facilitating opioid reward. Full body knockout of MORs from D1-R expressing neurons did not reduce opioid-induced hyperlocomotion but did block locomotor sensitization. This breeding strategy also resulted in preventing reward to oxycodone, and this loss of reward was found to be generalizable to morphine. When ablating MORs from the DPn as a whole using a cre-dependent AAV in MORloxP/loxP mice, no significant differences in conditioned place preference (CPP) score were observed between wildtype and conditional knock-out mice, although viral placement was not confirmed. Finally, the ablation of MORs from specifically D1-R expressing neurons in the DPn using a CRISPR-Cas9 viral construct did show a reduction in opioid reward relative to mice receiving the incorrect viral construct that served as controls. D1-R expressing neurons in the DPn expressed MOR and vGluT2 using fluorescent in situ hybridization. Although more data is needed to make definitive conclusions, this study shows trending information that MORs on D1-R and vGluT2 expressing neurons in the DPn play an important role in mediating opioid reward. Understanding this mechanism could contribute to the development of therapeutics that aim to minimize the addictive, rewarding properties of opioids while still providing analgesia, reducing the risk of opioid misuse and the ongoing opioid epidemic.PhysiologyBehavioral sciencesNeurosciencesExperimental psychologyAversionChronic PainDopamineDorsal Peduncular nucleusOpioidsRewardapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/13m4821shttps://escholarship.org/content/qt13m4821s/qt13m4821s.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3jn5p8qw2026-06-16T06:44:49Zqt3jn5p8qwMarine Transport of Heat Towards Ice Shelves and Sea IceFinucane, Garrett DreyfusStewart, Andrew L2026-06-12The Antarctic cryosphere is undergoing rapid change. The melt of Antarctic ice shelves is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. This acceleration is in large part due to the transport of heat to their base by relatively warm ocean waters. Offshore of these ice shelves, there has been a steep decline in the extent of sea ice that floats in the Southern Ocean. How Antarctic ice shelves and sea ice will evolve in a warming climate is still an area of active research.
This thesis leverages theory, numerical simulations, and observations to attempt to better understand the fundamental dynamics of how the ocean and cryosphere interact. The key results are as follows: (i) The net heat transport into ice shelf cavities can be predicted by the large-scale pressure gradient within ice shelf cavities, suggesting the inflow of heat is geostrophically constrained. (ii) Cavities can be broadly separated into "connected" and "disconnected" regimes, depending on whether they are filled with offshore waters, or dense waters formed by polynyas at their entrance. Their regime can be predicted by comparing the competing influences of ice shelf basal melt and sea ice formation on the buoyancy budget at the ice shelf front. (iii) Coherent vortices are ubiquitous features of the sea ice-covered Southern Ocean. In addition, anticyclones are "hotspots" of ocean-to-sea ice heat flux, and make up a significant fraction of the ocean-to-sea ice heat flux around Antarctica.
The work in this thesis represents a substantial advance in our understanding of the ocean circulation within ice shelf cavities and improves our knowledge of the pathways of heat from the ocean to sea ice. These findings could aid in the prediction of future changes to the ocean and cryosphere.Physical oceanographyMarine geologyAtmospheric sciencesIce shelvesPhysical Oceanographysea icesea level riseapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jn5p8qwhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3jn5p8qw/qt3jn5p8qw.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8nh4c10k2026-06-16T06:44:44Zqt8nh4c10kEnhancing Prescriber Readiness: An Educational Intervention on Long-Acting Injectable Antipsychotics for New Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse PractitionersByeon, Keumhee heeBrauer, Eden R2026-06-12Background: Long-acting injectable (LAI) antipsychotics improve adherence and reduce relapse risk, yet they remain underused. Early-career psychiatric–mental health nurse practitioners (PMHNPs) often report limited training and lower confidence with LAI selection, initiation, monitoring, and missed-dose management. Objectives: To evaluate whether a structured LAI education program improves early-career PMHNPs’ knowledge, confidence, and attitudes related to LAI implementation in routine practice. Design: This single-site quality improvement project used a single-group pretest and posttest design. Before participating in a 90-minute interactive education session, PMHNPs first completed a baseline survey, followed by an immediate post-session survey, and a follow-up survey 4 weeks later. Results: Of the 22 PMHNPs initially enrolled, 18 completed pre- and posttest surveys, for a retention rate of 81.8%. Mean knowledge scores increased from 7.50 (SD = 3.07) at pretest to 9.78 (SD = 0.43) immediately post-intervention (p = .006) and were maintained at 9.94 (SD = 0.24) at the 4-week follow-up. Composite confidence scores improved from 2.98 (SD = 1.08) at pre-intervention to 4.69 (SD = 0.60) at Post-1 (p < .001) and remained stable at Post-2. Composite attitude scores improved from 3.65 (SD = 0.84) at pre-intervention to 4.72 (SD = 0.63) at Post-1 (p = .001) and remained stable at 4.79 (SD = 0.43) at Post-2. Mean satisfaction scores were 4.78 out of 5.00. Conclusions: A brief, practice-focused LAI education program produces significant and sustained improvements in PMHNPs’ LAI knowledge, confidence, and attitudes and may be a useful onboarding component for strengthening patient-centered LAI implementation.NursingHealth educationMental healthHealth care managementattitudeEducationknowledgelong-acting injectableNurse PractitionerPMHNPapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nh4c10khttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8nh4c10k/qt8nh4c10k.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt10h5r4622026-06-16T06:44:39Zqt10h5r462Testing a Practical Early Assessment of Student Success in California Community College Baccalaureate ProgramsHoang, HaiRios-Aguilar, Cecilia2026-06-12California recently introduced the Community College Baccalaureate (CCB) program to expand access to bachelor’s degrees and to meet regional labor market needs. Although early CCB outcomes are promising, racial equity gaps and limited understanding of early success indicators present ongoing challenges. This study developed and evaluated the Proactive Assessment for Student Success (PASS), a brief instrument designed around the five non-cognitive constructs: belongingness, growth mindset, study skills, help-seeking attitudes, and conscientiousness. Drawing on Yeager and Bryk’s Practical Measurement framework and Productive Persistence model, the study tested whether the PASS scale could provide early insights into student success in the California CCB programs. By using existing survey data from students across the 15 pilot CCB colleges, the study examined the structure, reliability, and predictive ability of the proposed PASS. The factor analysis produced evidence for three broad factors: Institutional Integration, Academic Self-Regulation, and Regulatory Constraint. In addition, although the overall PASS scale demonstrated acceptable reliability, there were several limitations at the construct-level and item-level. Moreover, regression analyses showed that the PASS total score and the three PASS factors did not predict two-year graduation or post-program salary. At the same time, some background variables were associated with outcomes: Latine students and female students were associated with higher odds of two-year graduation, while pre-program salary and Asian student status predicted post-program salary. Overall, the findings suggest a more complex relationship between the non-cognitive factors and long-term student outcomes in the CCB programs. For instance, the findings suggest the limits of using a brief non-cognitive survey in explaining long-term outcomes in the CCB context. In addition, the results suggest a need to better understand how program design, institutional support, and labor market context may shape CCB student success.Educational evaluationEducational psychologyHigher educationCommunity college educationEducationCommunity College BaccalaureatePractical MeasurementProductive Persistenceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/10h5r462https://escholarship.org/content/qt10h5r462/qt10h5r462.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9bk1395m2026-06-16T06:44:35Zqt9bk1395mIntimate Antagonisms: Bridging the Gap Between Black and Yellow in America, to Go Where?Kwon, SeraOrtiz, VilmaKelley, Robin D.G.2026-06-12This dissertation examines the relationship between intimacy and solidarity through an analysis of historical and contemporary interactions between East Asians and Black people, focusing specifically on the formation of “AfroAsia”—the shared cultural and political histories of people racialized as “Asian” or “Black” (Blain 2015). It considers the early co-constitutive and comparative racialization of “Yellow” and “Negro” that formed following the formal end of slavery and the start of American imperialism in East Asia. The first part of the dissertation provides a brief review of Afro-Asian encounters prior to collective contact in the Americas, tracking changes in conceptions of color, race, blackness, and anti-blackness over the centuries leading up to “racialized modernity.” The second part of the dissertation analyzes contemporary examples of Asian ~ Black conflict and solidarity. Drawing on 81 interviews with self identifying Asian, Black, and Blasian people, these chapters link present-day sentiments with historical context to deconstruct comparative stereotypes. The interviews reveal the ways in which conversations about Asian ~ Black relations are shaped by the racialization of communication patterns and political narratives.SociologyPolitical scienceBlack studiesEthnic studiesafro-asiapubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bk1395metdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8jv6d4jb2026-06-16T06:44:30Zqt8jv6d4jbFilipino Fantasies Under Colonization: Medievalism, Nationalism and Resistance from the Spanish Colonial Period to the Japanese Occupation of the PhilippinesMatabang, Stefanie LydiaStahuljak, Zrinka2026-06-12This project illuminates the national relevance of literary medievalism in the Philippines, that is, the rich narrative corpus of adapted European chivalric literature, focusing on popular and socio-politically significant pieces in literature and film, which span the Spanish (1565-1898), the United States’ (1898-1946), and the Japanese (1942-1945) colonial periods. In the non-settler colonial space of the Philippines, Filipinos could mold and manipulate medievalism without a consistent and substantial settler colonial population to gatekeep and fastidiously monitor Filipino use and application of medievalism, opening it up to greater adaptation and reformulation for local needs, even if those needs are contrary to a European imperialist project. I argue that through this tailoring that created and re-created an imagined medieval world unbeholden to realism and prescribed Western history, further unchecked by the immediate presence of a dominant, corollary medievalist tradition, the Filipino imagining of a Middle Ages became a naturalized space for subversion and anticolonial expression that persisted through multiple periods of foreign colonization and occupation. However, Filipino literary medievalism as a fictive interpretation and recreation of a seemingly foreign Middle Ages also heralded risk and invited significant criticism, most notably by Filipino national hero, Jose Rizal, who generally perceived medievalism as a continuing sign of negative foreign influence and coloniality and an obstacle to the attainment of modernity. Indeed, comparable to other instances of postcolonial medievalism in other colonial contexts, Filipino medievalism operated in different and sometimes contrasting modes, where it also repeated Western ideologies and norms, even those problematically orientalist in nature. However, these entangled operations do not wholly negate the recurring utilization of medievalism in Filipino literature and cinema to relay anticolonial sentiment and the elevation of the subjugated and colonized Filipino figure, especially during historical moments of colonial tension and censorship. Ultimately, this points to a tradition of literary medievalism’s generally overlooked and complex role in the story of the development of Filipino nationalism and the construction of a Philippine nation, rewriting a national narrative that up until now has tended to situate medievalism as peripheral and even detrimental to its founding.Southeast Asian studiesMedieval literatureComparative literatureLiteraturepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jv6d4jbetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7m03837d2026-06-16T06:44:25Zqt7m03837dThe utilization of in vitro model systems to dissect the role of Smad1 and Smad5 during dorsal spinal cord developmentGallardo Dominguez, SalenaButler, Samantha J2026-06-12Embryonic development relies on the coordinated action of multiple signaling pathways that guide pluripotent cells toward specific fates. Among these, Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMPs), are essential in the development of various tissues and organ systems. This versatility raises a fundamental question: how does a single signaling pathway generate such diverse responses? In this thesis, I investigate how downstream BMP signals are interpreted during dorsal spinal cord development, with a focus on the distinct contributions of Smad1 and Smad5. I summarize work that leverages in vitro differentiation systems to dissect BMP pathway mechanisms and demonstrate how these platforms can be further utilized to study dorsal interneuron (dI) specification.First, we establish a directed differentiation protocol that allows us to generate the full complement of dorsal interneurons from mouse embryonic stem cells. This highly synchronized in vitro model system serves as a platform for probing BMP dependent signaling events that are difficult to isolate during in vivo development of the dorsal spinal cord. Next, I used this in vitro model system to investigate whether Smad1 and Smad5 transmit BMP signals in distinct ways during neural differentiation. We found that Smad5 acts early in lineage specification, preventing bipotent neuromesodermal progenitors from adopting mesodermal fates and instead steering them toward neural derivatives. In addition, Smad5 is required for the specification of dP1–dP3 progenitors and their subsequent differentiation into dI1–dI3 interneurons. In contrast, Smad1 primarily functions to restrict the expansion of the dP1 lineage. Together, these findings demonstrate that R Smads are not functionally interchangeable and instead contribute distinct regulatory activities during dorsal spinal cord development. Finally, we extend these approaches to human systems by developing a neuromesodermal progenitor based differentiation protocol that produces human dIs spanning anterior–posterior identities. Our work illustrates how in vitro model systems can be used to interrogate developmental signaling pathways, highlights that the differential functions of R-Smads contributes to the promiscuity of the BMP signaling pathway and provides new insights into how dorsal spinal cord diversity is established.Developmental biologyNeurosciencesMolecular biologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7m03837dhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7m03837d/qt7m03837d.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7s88z3r82026-06-16T06:44:20Zqt7s88z3r8Synthetic and Chemical Biology Studies on Natural Products: Metastable Pyrrolines for Portimine A and Brain-Penetrant Designs of Complex CatechinsLotuzas, AleksandrasHarran, Patrick G2026-06-12Natural products represent foundational blueprints for therapeutic discovery, yet their clinical advancement is frequently constrained by synthetic challenges or poor pharmacokinetic properties. This dissertation addresses these structural and delivery bottlenecks through a series of interconnected programs spanning fundamental heterocyclic methodology, complex natural product total synthesis, and targeted chemical biology.Chapter 1 establishes the essential synthetic groundwork for a class of highly reactive, metastable heterocycles: the 3-methylene-1-pyrrolines (methylidene pyrrolines). A highly scalable, one-pot isonitrile insertion-Heck cyclization cascade was developed to provide streamlined access to 2-acetyl-3-methylene-1-pyrrolines. Additionally, a convergent Stille-Staudinger cascade sequence was optimized to synthesize diverse, previously inaccessible 2-formyl congeners. Systematic reactivity studies revealed that these cyclic imines possess unique dual profiles, acting as exceptionally potent Diels-Alder dienophiles upon protonation and as highly competent electrophiles at the α-imino carbonyl carbon. Chapter 2 leverages this structural and conceptual framework to advance the total synthesis of the marine toxin portimine A. While an initial asymmetric organocatalytic strategy successfully constructed a key chiral polyketide core on a multi-decagram scale, first-generation macrocyclization campaigns were repeatedly thwarted by the severe geometric constraints and instability of late-stage alkyne-containing intermediates. Drawing directly from the heterocyclic methodology established in Chapter 1, a second-generation approach was devised using a novel hyper-enophile vicinal tricarbonyl methylidene pyrroline. This ultra-reactive heterocycle engaged in a rapid, catalyst-free intermolecular ene reaction with a functionalized linear enol ether at room temperature. Subsequent oxidative decarboxylation mediated by KOTMS/O2 delivered a stable advanced linear intermediate containing the entire carbon skeleton and exact oxidation state of portimine B, positioning the framework for a final biomimetic cascade sequence. Chapter 3 shifts focus toward engineering targeted drug delivery systems for epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), a green tea polyphenol that disaggregates pathological tau fibrils in Alzheimer’s disease but is severely limited by its inability to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Guided by cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structural data, a site-specific C–H functionalization strategy was implemented on the solvent-exposed B-ring of EGCG. By installing structurally rigid, chemically orthogonal linkers via Cadiot-Chodkiewicz cross-coupling, stable bioconjugates were successfully appended to brain-penetrant peptide vectors (such as Angiopep-2) without compromising the therapeutic efficacy of the polyphenol core. In conclusion, this dissertation demonstrates distinct yet complementary strategies within modern organic chemistry to maximize the therapeutic utility of natural products. While Chapters 1 and 2 capitalize on the fundamental development and application of highly reactive heterocyclic intermediates to build dense molecular architectures from the ground up, Chapter 3 transitions to the precise, non-destructive modification of existing complex polyols to overcome translationally restrictive delivery barriers. Together, these investigations underscore how tailored chemical design and architectural control can overcome synthetic, structural, and pharmacokinetic bottlenecks at the interface of total synthesis and molecular therapeutics.Organic chemistryPathologyAnalytical chemistryBiochemistryAlzheimer's diseaseBioconjugationCatechinsHeterocyclesPortiminePyrrolineapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7s88z3r8https://escholarship.org/content/qt7s88z3r8/qt7s88z3r8.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6234p63m2026-06-16T06:44:15Zqt6234p63mDirect Measurements of Hydroxyl Radical Formation in Atmospheric Aerosols and Studies of Wildfire Air QualityBanach, Catherine AmandaPaulson, Suzanne E2026-06-12Aerosols and their interactions with clouds, fog, and haze have direct and indirect impacts on the climate and air quality. Aqueous processing, mediated by reactive oxygen species (ROS), result in changes of aerosol size distribution, mass concentration, and chemical composition. The hydroxyl radical (OH) is a key oxidant for aqueous organics and a subset of inorganic species in cloud droplets. Recent work has identified a new source of OH called the OH burst. The burst is characterized by rapid OH production when aerosol particles interact with cloud water lasting for only one to two minutes. This work presents on the improvement of OH burst measurement techniques by developing an automated Direct-to-Reagent (auto-DtR) system in which aerosols are depositing directly into an OH scavenging probe. The method enables continuous measurements of the OH burst and is remotely operated. The system incorporates the newly developed Handix Scientific Temperature Level Controller (TLC). This work also investigates the pH dependence and solubility effects of 2-hydroxyterepthalic acid (hTA) and disodium terephthalate (TA), the chemical probe used to quantify hydroxyl radicals. Fluorescence emission spectra showed distinct spectral changes associated with monoanionic (HTA-) and dianionic (TA2-) species of hTA. The pKa2 of hTA was determined to be at pH= 4.45. pH-dependent solubility transitions of TA were characterized by fluorescence light scattering measurements. Analysis of the scattering behavior identified the midpoint of dissolution to be at pH=2.4 for 0.2 mM TA, representing the condition at which the solution was approximately 50% soluble. The auto-DtR was deployed during the Department of Energy Eastern Pacific Cloud Aerosol Precipitation Experiment (EPCAPE) in La Jolla, CA to investigate the role that aqueous processing and chemical composition might have on the OH burst. Results from the campaign shows lower OH burst concentrations when samples were collected during cloud influenced period and a statistically significant relationship with relative humidity (RH). There were no correlations with non-refractory species of sampled aerosols, likely a result of deliquescence of the sampled aerosols, but more exploration is needed. Analysis of refractory and non-refractory species as a function of RH suggest a transition in chemical properties near the deliquescence point (RH = 75). Although this shift is complex, it may explain the lack of correlation between the OH burst and measured non-refractory aerosol species. Finally, I examine air-quality impacts from the January 2025 Eaton and Palisades wildfires which burned a combined 15,163 hectares of wildland and 18,298 structures, respectively. I use a combined dataset of filters, hourly measurements of particulate matter, trace gases, metals, meteorology, and air-mass transport models to probe fire impacts on air quality. The smoke increased airborne concentrations of arsenic, chlorine, bromine, copper and in particular lead concentrations by up to 250 times its background. Potassium, known to be a tracer for wildland smoke, was strongly associated with coarse particles and anti-correlated with smoke. Little evidence is found of fire-associated pollution days following fire containment.Atmospheric chemistryGeophysicsEnvironmental sciencepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6234p63metdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt82h8t9922026-06-16T06:44:11Zqt82h8t992You Can Dance, But You Can’t Hide: Collegiate Bollywood Dance and Indian-AmericannessSatyagal, NidhiMankekar, Purnima2026-06-12In this thesis, I explore how Bollywood dance student groups on college campuses position themselves as a harmless expression of culture, while doing the work of consolidating and constructing a version of Indianness/Indian-Americanness that aligns itself with nation-building projects in both India and the U.S. In particular, I focus on Indian-American youth on college campuses in the U.S. and coming-of-age narratives that aim to naturalize a hegemonic construction of Indianness based on markers of affluence, upper-casteness, and heteropatriarchal expressions of gender and sexuality. Through textual and media analysis, I explore how the film American Desi and collegiate Bollywood dance performances present an idea of Indianness that exists at the juncture of multiculturalism, the neoliberal university, and multiple (ethno)nationalisms. I argue that a sect of Indian-American campus groups (and narrative representations of these groups) are able to produce an idea of Indian-Americanness that relies on a binaristic relationship between India as a nation and the diaspora, thus reproducing hierarchies of caste, class, religion, and gender, while masking themselves as fundamentally social/cultural. I look to online confessional forums that expose the behind-the-scenes experiences of young dancers participating in collegiate Bollywood dance competitions and how these confessions reveal the fractures of a universalizing idea of Indian-Americanness.Asian American studiesDancepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/82h8t992etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1w74p6892026-06-16T06:44:06Zqt1w74p689Computational Investigations of the Oxa-di-π-Ethane Photochemical RearrangementLu, ChangHouk, Kendall K. H2026-06-12The oxa-di-π-ethane (ODPE) photochemical rearrangement converts γ,δ-unsaturated carbonyl compounds into structurally complex cyclopropane-containing products under visible light irradiation. Although experimental studies have demonstrated broad substrate scope and synthetic utility, the detailed reaction mechanism was uncertain due to the transient nature of the proposed intermediates. In this work, density functional theory (DFT) calculations were employed to investigate the mechanistic pathways of ODPE and ODPP rearrangements. Computational analysis supports a triplet-sensitized energy-transfer mechanism in which excitation occurs preferentially at the alkene rather than the carbonyl group. Subsequent radical cyclization, β-scission, and intersystem crossing and diradical coupling lead to the observed cyclopropane products. Competing pathways, including hydrogen atom transfer and [2+2] cycloaddition processes, were found to be energetically disfavored. These results provide mechanistic validation for experimentally observed reactivity and establish a theoretical framework for the future development of ODPE photochemical transformations.BiochemistryPhysical chemistryOrganic chemistryMolecular chemistryComputationalOxa-di-π-Ethanephotochemistryapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1w74p689https://escholarship.org/content/qt1w74p689/qt1w74p689.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2492k3zj2026-06-16T06:44:01Zqt2492k3zjThe Effect of Storm Water from the 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles on the Dissolved Organic Carbon Entering the Pacific OceanZhang, ZhixuSuffet, Irwin H2026-06-12Wildfire can alter the composition of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in the aqueous phase. However, there is limited understanding of this effect in urban stormwater systems on DOM polarity and charge-related properties, as well as on their size distribution in Los Angeles stormwater and drains following the 2025 Palisades Fire. The polarity rapid assessment method (PRAM) and ultrafiltration (UF) were used to characterize differences in DOM runoff between the fire and non-fire zones. The physicochemical analysis of ultraviolet light and adsorption at 254 nm (the maximum absorption wavelength of benzene molecules) and the DOM size distribution measured by ultrafiltration provided key data for describing the characteristics of stormwater runoff following drastic changes in the runoff area caused by wildfires.This study found that runoff from burned and unburned areas differed significantly in DOM size distribution and polarity. Temporal and spatial variations in the composition of UV-absorbing DOM were evaluated for the first time from the Palisades Wildfires in Los Angeles, CA. For example, temporal comparisons showed substantially increased UV-absorbing DOM at the Sunset Storm Drain site immediately after the wildfire, whereas the referenced baseline site at the Storm Drain at Pico exhibited relatively stable characteristics. Subsequent analysis by PRAM and UF of subsequent storms showed runoff changes in the polar, non-polar, charged, and molecular-size distribution fractions over subsequent time periods after the wildfire. The stormwater from the burned area that immediately flowed into the Pacific Ocean after the Palisades Fire through the storm drain had 14 times the UV254-absorbing DOM abundance of the unburned area, and was mainly composed of small size fragments. Spatial comparisons of November 2025 samples indicated that wildfire-associated changes in DOM characteristics varied among the four fire-affected sampling sites. These findings show that wildfire will significantly affect the physicochemical properties of DOM in stormwater. The significant effects of changes in DOM on ocean ecology and its ability to transport hazardous metals and organic compounds, such as Polyaromatic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, to the Ocean thus need further study.Environmental scienceEnvironmental healthDissolved organic matterSolid phase extractionStormwaterUltrafiltrationUV-VisWildfireapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2492k3zjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2492k3zj/qt2492k3zj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0nd9k73d2026-06-16T06:43:56Zqt0nd9k73dOptimizing Causal Objective Functions with Probabilistic Graphical ModelsHuang, HaiyingDarwiche, Adnan2026-06-12Probabilistic graphical models provide a principled framework for representing and reasoning with uncertainty, causality, and domain knowledge. In recent years, reasoning about the behavior of objects under interventional or counterfactual conditions has become increasingly important in areas such as artificial intelligence, recommendation systems, planning, robotics, and biology. In many of these settings, one would like not only to predict an object’s response to a particular action or intervention, but also to identify which objects (e.g., people, agents, regions, policies, decisions) are most desirable under a causal evaluation criterion. This motivates the problem of optimizing causal objective functions, known as the Causal Unit Selection problem.We study in this thesis two challenges arising in causal unit selection. The first challenge asks how to optimize a causal objective function given a complete and fully-specified causal model, and how hard it is to find the exact optimal solution. We introduced a broader class of causal objective functions than is normally considered, and proposed a reduction of optimizing this class of causal objective functions to optimizing a single associational probability on a meta-model called the objective model. We showed that the unit selection problem with this class of objective functions is NPPP-complete. We proposed the first exact algorithm for finding the optimal unit by reasoning on the objective model, and characterized its complexity in terms of treewidth. We further accelerated the unit optimization process by compiling the objective model into a special class of tractable arithmetic circuits, allowing the optimal unit to be computed in time linear in the circuit size. The second challenge is how to reason plausibly when the available causal model is incomplete, e.g., due to missing edges or missing variable states. We provide a unified treatment of these modeling errors as instances of state-space abstraction. We showed that by dynamically selecting model parameters based on observed evidence, one can recover the targeted probabilistic function from these modeling errors, and identified conditions under which a full recovery can be achieved. We finally show that a new class of probabilistic graphical model, called Testing Bayesian Network (TBN), can be used to efficiently implement this recovery mechanism. Together, our results provide a computational foundation for causal objective function optimization, while extending these techniques to practical settings with incomplete models.Artificial intelligenceComputer engineeringComputer scienceInformation technology(Testing) Bayesian NetworksCausal InferenceProbabilistic Graphical ModelsStructural Causal ModelsTractable Arithmetic CircuitsUnit Selectionapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0nd9k73dhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0nd9k73d/qt0nd9k73d.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt24f1r0r62026-06-16T06:43:51Zqt24f1r0r6Rewiring Fear: Behavioral Adaptations and Sleep in the Stress-Enhanced Fear Learning Model in MiceAyala Rosario, Shantee NicolePoe, Gina R2026-06-12Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating psychiatric condition characterized by persistent fear, impaired extinction memory, and dysregulated arousal after traumatic stress. Despite decades of research, fundamental questions remain about how biological sex, sleep physiology, and social context interact to shape the trajectory of fear learning and recovery. This dissertation addresses these questions using an updated Stress-Enhanced Fear Learning (SEFL) protocol in male and female C57BL/6J mice, combining behavioral, molecular, polysomnographic, and social-buffering approaches to characterize the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying PTSD-like phenotypes.A central methodological contribution is the introduction of a dedicated third context for fear extinction and extinction recall, separating extinction from the environments associated with trauma and subsequent stress. This three-context design more closely mirrors the sequential structure of human trauma and exposure-based therapy, and revealed a previously unreported sex difference in extinction recall. SEFL-exposed males (SEFL-M) showed persistent and significantly elevated freezing during extinction recall compared to controls without SEFL (nSEFL-M) (? = 0.0065, ? = 16 per group), while SEFL-exposed females (SEFL-F) extinguished fear to levels indistinguishable from controls. This dissociation reflected a selective failure in extinction memory retention in males, accompanied by substantially greater individual variability in recovery (SD = 16.26% versus 8.20% in SEFL-F), and suggests that prior null results in mixed-sex SEFL cohorts may reflect a methodological blind spot: when extinction is tested in the conditioning context rather than a novel one, sex differences in extinction memory retention are not detectable. Preliminary molecular analyses of ΔFosB were conducted in the medial prefrontal cortex, dorsal hippocampus, and amygdala. No significant group differences were observed at current sample sizes, though a consistent numerical trend toward greater infralimbic than prelimbic expression across all groups is directionally consistent with sustained extinction circuitry engagement. These analyses are ongoing and hypothesis-generating.The sleep architecture and spectral dynamics were characterized using continuous polysomnographic recording throughout sleep before and after SEFL. Despite the preserved gross sleep macroarchitecture, SEFL-exposed males (SSEFL-M) showed a sustained broadband elevation in low-frequency power (0–5 Hz) in NREM, REM, and active wake during post-trauma sleep, persisting before beginning to attenuate after fear conditioning. Delta ratio homeostasis analysis revealed a consistent failure to dissipate sleep pressure in SSEFL-M, with delta ratios rising rather than declining across the recording window. REM bout length was the most sensitive metric for detecting SEFL-induced disruption (Cohen’s ? = 1.49; ? = 8 per group for 80% power). SSEFL-F showed a qualitatively distinct pattern of slow-wave energy suppression, adding a physiological dimension to the behavioral sex difference. Together, these findings motivate the hypothesis that post-trauma REM disruption may contribute mechanistically to impaired retention of extinction memory in males.The final experimental chapter introduces the Tribe paradigm, testing whether continuous co-housing with a familiar conspecific attenuates the PTSD-like phenotype in males. In the main behavioral cohort (? = 8 per group), complete cohabitation in standard home cages did not provide a measurable reduction in extinction recall freezing (TSEFL-M vs. individually housed controls, ? = 0.997). TSEFL-F showed a trend toward elevated rather than reduced freezing, possibly reflecting chronic subordination stress from the dominant–submissive dyads that formed consistently in the female pairs. A separate sleep pilot (? = 2 pairs, male only) used a modified divided cage with a perforated plexiglass divider, which allowed visual and olfactory contact without physical cohabitation. In contrast to the behavioral cohort, TSSEFL-M in this condition showed markedly reduced contextual freezing, dropping SEFL freezing around 20% (compared to individually housed animals) and close to zero when exposed to the SEFL context the following day . This counterintuitive pattern, reflecting that more restricted social contact associated with greater fear attenuation than full cohabitation, suggests that the sensory modality and structure of social interaction may be the critical variable. Additionally, TSSEFL-M and companions showed broadly overlapping delta ratio trajectories, in contrast to sustained elevation in isolated SSEFL-M, further implicating social contact modality in post-trauma sleep homeostasis. All sleep pilot observations are preliminary.Together, this dissertation advances a multidimensional framework in which sex, sleep, and social context are central determinants of fear extinction outcomes. The three-context SEFL protocol provides a more sensitive and translational tool for detecting sex-based differences in extinction memory retention. The convergence of behavioral, molecular, sleep and social findings points toward an integrative model in which post-trauma REM disruption, sex-specific prefrontal engagement, and the social environment of recovery interact to shape whether extinction memory is formed, retained, and expressed, laying the groundwork for socially informed and sleep-oriented intervention strategies for PTSD.NeurosciencesBehavioral psychologyPhysiologyCognitive psychologyFearLearningSEFLSleepapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/24f1r0r6https://escholarship.org/content/qt24f1r0r6/qt24f1r0r6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6cw756st2026-06-16T06:43:46Zqt6cw756stTransfer by Design: Associate Degrees for Transfer and Student Success in California Community CollegesAyon, Carlos MichaelEagan, Kevin2026-06-12The Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT) was established through California's Student Transfer Achievement Reform Act of 2010 to create a more efficient pathway from California Community Colleges to four-year institutions. Despite widespread implementation, limited empirical evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of the ADT in achieving its intended outcomes. This study examined the characteristics associated with ADT participation and evaluated the effectiveness of the pathway in promoting transfer and post-transfer success.Using a quasi-experimental design, institutional records from 42,666 degree-seeking students enrolled in a large, transfer-oriented Southern California community college district were combined with National Student Clearinghouse data. Propensity score weighting was employed to balance observable differences between ADT earners and three comparison groups: traditional AA/AS earners, transfer-prepared students who transferred without earning a degree, and students who did not complete either pathway. Logistic and linear regression models were used to examine transfer, units accumulated prior to transfer, transfer destination, bachelor's degree completion, and time-to-degree. Results indicated that ADT earners differed systematically from students in other pathways, demonstrating stronger transfer intent and greater representation of Hispanic students. After adjustment for demographic and academic characteristics, ADT earners had significantly higher odds of transfer than AA/AS earners (OR = 4.05), transfer-prepared students (OR = 5.38), and students in the non-completer category (OR = 38.46). ADT earners transferred with fewer units than AA/AS earners and primarily utilized the pathway as intended, with 84% of ADT transferees enrolling in the California State University system. Among transfer students, ADT earners demonstrated a modest advantage in bachelor's degree completion and completed degrees more quickly than transfer-prepared students. However, transfer destination emerged as a stronger predictor of post-transfer outcomes than pathway participation. The findings provide strong evidence that the ADT is achieving its primary objective of increasing transfer while reducing excess unit accumulation. Results further suggest that the ADT may help mitigate transfer barriers for Hispanic students, although broader inequities in transfer outcomes remain. Implications for transfer policy, institutional practice, and future research are discussed.Higher educationCommunity college educationStatisticsHispanic American studiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cw756stetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7ph3j8102026-06-16T06:43:42Zqt7ph3j810Pain Ties: Spirit and Substance, Israel-PalestineAvramovich, Leor PerlaGuzmán, Joshua J.2026-06-12“Pain Ties: Spirit and Substance, Israel-Palestine,” takes its name from two novels: Pain (2015), by the Israeli author, Zeruya Shalev and Blood Ties (2016), by the Palestinian author, Ayman Sikseck. In these novels, the protagonists are earnest pedagogues: an elementary school principal and a university chemistry professor, respectively. For they both face a complex knowledge problem: What is the relation between personal and collective memory in a reality of seemingly endless cycles of violence? To answer this, I return to an intractable philosophical inquiry: How do particulars relate to universals? Is the relation between them constituted by negation, as in the tradition of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, later elaborated through Freudian and Lacanian thought? Or is their relation, rather, a positive one of infinite intertwinement, as figured by the tradition of Baruch Spinoza and the strands of affect theory it has enabled? A study of intellectual traditions and their influence on performance and aesthetics, “Pain Ties” argues that this theoretical infrastructure amounts to a choice-of-law problem which undergirds political conflict and the structure of memory with which people reckon as they organize for social change.Chapter One, “Late Style or Secular Criticism,” is titled after Pierre Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza, since I argue that Edward Said’s reflections on methodology amount to the choice between dialectics and monism. I analyze Said’s lecture, “Freud and the non-European,” about Sigmund Freud’s 1939 book, Moses and Monotheism—in particular, I read Said’s exchange with Jacqueline Rose about Moses to suggest that methodological mistranslations prevented the thinkers from seeing commonalities between their positions. Chapter Two, “Memory,” recasts the introductory chapter in object-driven terms. I read across the novels—Blood Ties and Pain to foreground their structural similarity, for just as Said and Rose did before them, Shalev and Sikseck contemplate how to end the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians by de-essentializing cultural memory. Chapter Three, “Disidentifications: Queer Theory and Israel-Palestine,” traces the field-formation edifices that brought about this intellectual juncture and reformulates the political desires which I argue are currently vested in it.Gender studiesPolitical sciencePeace studiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ph3j810etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6zg557sb2026-06-16T06:43:37Zqt6zg557sbIlluminating a Hidden Companion through Tidal Disruption Events in Supermassive Black Hole BinariesMelchor, DenyzNaoz, Smadar2026-06-12Galaxy mergers are common across time, and since most massive galaxies host a central supermassive black hole (SMBH), mergers inevitably produce SMBH pairs. These binaries are expected to be long-lived and dynamically influential, yet they remain observationally elusive across a wide range of separations. Tidal disruption events (TDEs), which take place when a star ventures too close an SMBH and is torn apart by its tidal forces, offer a promising indirect probe of these hidden binaries. The rate and character of TDEs are sensitive to the dynamical environment of the disrupting black hole, making them a powerful too for identifying SMBH binaries in otherwise quiescent galactic nuclei.This thesis, models TDE production in SMBH binaries under the combined influence of the eccentric Kozai Lidov (EKL) mechanism and two-body relaxation. These two processes are complementary; together they widen the parameter space over which disruptions occur and sustain TDE rates over timescales long enough for star formation to replenish the disrupted stellar population.The stellar density profile emerges as the dominant factor governing TDE production in this combined channel. Cusp-like profiles produce higher overall rates and are the only configuration that naturally form repeated TDEs, where a bound star is partially disrupted over multiple orbits. Distinctly, core-like profiles produce rates consistent with both observed average and post-star burst galaxy TDE rates. Binary-driven rates also increase with disrupting SMBH, the opposite trend from single-SMBH systems, providing a falsifiable observational signature of the binary channel.This work computes volumetric TDE rate upper limits as a function of redshift that the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time will directly test. Together, these results suggest that SMBH binaries are a physically motivated and observationally constrained explanation for the anomalous TDE rate distributions observed in post-starburst environments.AstrophysicsAstronomyPhysicsPlanetologyNuclear Star ClusterStellar DynamicsSupermassive Black HolesTidal Disruption Eventsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zg557sbhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6zg557sb/qt6zg557sb.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7mx5q7002026-06-16T06:43:32Zqt7mx5q700Soft Magnetoelastic Needle Sensors for Self-Powered Biofluid Flow MonitoringDowney, FranciscoChen, Jun2026-06-12Since 1865, the magnetoelastic effect had remained a property only seen in select rigid metals and metal alloys, limiting its applicability in biomechanical sensing. It was not until 2021 that the giant magnetoelastic effect in soft systems was discovered, demonstrating its ability to convert mechanical motion into electrical signals and establishing its potential for biomechanical monitoring applications. However, current magnetoelastic sensors can be further improved in detecting subtle mechanical stimuli with high sensitivity. This thesis investigates a self-powered soft magnetoelastic sensor with integrated needles designed to improve biomechanical sensitivity. The sensor is composed of a polymer matrix embedded with neodymium-iron-boron magnetic nanoparticles and positioned above a silicone encapsulated copper coil array for signal acquisition. The influence of geometric and compositional parameters on the magnetic and mechanical performance of the needles was evaluated. Long-term stability of the magnetoelastic needle sensor was assessed over a four-week period by monitoring its magnetic flux density and weight. Finally, the study demonstrated the sensor’s ability to generate distinct electrical signals in response to applied biomechanical forces.BioengineeringBiomedical engineeringBiomechanicsBiofluidBiomechanicalMagnetoelasticitySensorpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mx5q700etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0mj564732026-06-16T06:43:28Zqt0mj56473Broadening Participation in Computing: Unpacking Computing Identity by Examining Predictors of Performance/Competence, Recognition, and Interest Among Diverse Undergraduate StudentsLe, Brian DSax, Linda J.2026-06-12Research suggests that the underrepresentation of racially minoritized students in computing fields remains a persistent challenge in higher education. Despite efforts to broaden participation in computing, Black and Latine students continue to face systemic barriers that shape their experiences. One way to better understand how computing students navigate these challenges is to examine how they form their computing identity. While previous literature has studied how computing identity shapes students’ experiences, the field has yet to examine computing identity at the individual dimensions.Utilizing longitudinal survey data from Momentum’s Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC) survey at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), this quantitative study examined the changes in computing identity among undergraduate computing students across three dimensions: performance/competence, recognition, and interest across two time points, baseline and follow-up one survey. Drawing on Rodriguez and colleagues’ (2020) framework for computing identity development, this study examined changes in performance/competence and interest over time, identified predictors of each dimension, and explored broadening participation in computing through subsample regression analyses of Black and Latine undergraduate computing students.Results from this study suggest that belonging is the strongest predictor across all regression models for all students. Findings revealed that undergraduate computing students experienced a performance/competence and interest paradox, in which performance/competence increased over time while interest in computing declined, a pattern consistent across all racial/ethnic groups. Hierarchical regression analyses further identified belonging and positive course perceptions as the most consistent predictors of computing identity across all three dimensions. With the analyses of the Black and Latine subsample, belonging remained prominent. Overall, these findings offer novel insights into the undergraduate experiences that predict computing identity among computing students broadly and Black and Latine students specifically. These findings provided important implications for practice and policy aimed at creating further opportunities for these students in computing.Higher educationStatisticsEducationBelongingBroadening Participation in ComputingComputing Identityapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mj56473https://escholarship.org/content/qt0mj56473/qt0mj56473.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3gb5t0sz2026-06-16T06:43:23Zqt3gb5t0szAuxiliary Function Unit (AFU): A Heterogeneous Architecture for Tensor Processing in Edge AccelerationSingh, AnjanaMarkovic, Dejan2026-06-12Modern machine learning (ML) and digital signal processing (DSP) hardware accelerators heavily rely on dense Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) arrays for matrix multiplications and convolutions. However, the raw accumulator values produced by homogeneous MAC arrays require significant post-processing, including non-linear activation functions, spatial pooling, and requantization. Integrating this heterogeneous workload directly into MAC Processing Elements (PEs) or offloading it to a host CPU degrades system utilization and severely limits energy efficiency at the edge. This thesis presents the architecture design and RTL implementation of the Auxiliary Function Unit (AFU), a specialized co-processor that sits alongside the MAC array to execute the post-MAC tensor lifecycle. The core novelty lies in a heterogeneous, parallel-lane execution architecture that dynamically routes vector data to specialized hardware pipelines based on computational complexity. Low-latency operations, such as ReLU and simple arithmetic functions, are handled in parallel by a vectorized Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) that executes in a single cycle. Complex transcendental macro-operations and DSP functions are handled using an optimized lookup table (LUT) pipeline and a deeply pipelined CORDIC engine with operation-specific dispatch. The AFU is implemented in Verilog, synthesized for AMD Xilinx Versal Premium VP1802 FPGA and 16 nm ASIC flow. It supports over 20 distinct post-MAC operations spanning neural network inference and DSP workloads. Workload-level evaluations demonstrate energy advantages ranging from approximately a factor of three against a Cortex-M4F host with floating-point unit and DSP extensions to several orders of magnitude against a GPU special function unit, illustrating that the AFU provides a flexible and energy-efficient post-processing framework that improves accelerator utilization. Full-system emulation is performed for a System-on-Chip (SoC) that instantiates the AFU and memory-expansion architectures are explored. The integration of the SoC into a complete wearable closed-loop neuromodulation platform is specified at the architecture and interface-protocol level and identified as future work.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringArtificial intelligenceActivation functionsEdge accelerationHeterogeneous datapathNeural signal processingPost-MAC coprocessorReconfigurable computingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gb5t0szhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3gb5t0sz/qt3gb5t0sz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt276287pd2026-06-16T06:43:18Zqt276287pdPolycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) contribute to inflammation in a pregnancy cohortCho, YoojinRitz, Beate2026-06-12Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are ubiquitous environmental contaminants generated from incomplete combustion and are detectable in nearly all individuals in the U.S. population. Prenatal PAH exposure has been linked to adverse birth and child health outcomes, but few studies have examined associations between biomarkers of PAHs and inflammation during pregnancy across gestational windows. We investigated associations between urinary PAH metabolites and urinary inflammatory markers among 159 pregnant women enrolled in the placental assessment in response to environmental exposures cohort (2016–2019). Urine samples were collected up to three times during pregnancy (10–17, 18–29, and ⩾30 gestational weeks). Hydroxylated PAHs metabolites were quantified using liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry, and inflammatory markers (IL-6, IL-1β, TNF-α, and IL-10) were measured using immunoassays. Biomarker concentrations were adjusted for urinary dilution using specific gravity and log-transformation. Effect estimates were generated using linear mixed-effect models with random intercept for each participant to account for repeated measures, and linear regression to assess sampling-period-specific associations while adjusting for maternal age, ethnicity/race, parity, education, and BMI. We found that most PAH metabolites, particularly phenanthrene and naphthalene metabolites, are positively associated with urinary inflammatory markers, except for fluorene metabolites. In mixed-effects models, each doubling of urinary PAHs concentrations was associated with approximately 10%–50% increases in IL-6, IL-1β, TNF-α, and IL-10 levels. Sampling period-specific analyses indicated that associations with pro-inflammatory cytokines were stronger in early and mid-pregnancy (10–29 weeks), whereas associations with IL-10 were most pronounced later in pregnancy (⩾30 weeks). Results were robust to the exclusion of participants with preeclampsia. These findings indicate that prenatal PAH exposure is associated with sustained inflammatory activity across pregnancy, with gestational timing–specific patterns that may help explain windows of increased vulnerability for adverse pregnancy outcomes. This longitudinal evidence strengthens biologic plausibility linking environmental PAH exposure to maternal inflammatory processes.EpidemiologyEnvironmental healthWomens studiescytokineinflammationpolycyclic aromatic hydrocarbonspregnancyurinary biomarkerapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/276287pdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt276287pd/qt276287pd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt20h2k4jg2026-06-16T06:43:14Zqt20h2k4jgAccurate Energetics and Restructuring of Cu Electrodes under Electrochemical ConditionsCheng, DongfangSautet, Philippe2026-06-12Electrochemical CO₂ reduction offers a route to convert CO₂ and renewable electricity into fuels and chemical feedstocks. Copper is unique among monometallic catalysts because it can produce hydrocarbons and multicarbon oxygenates, yet the origin of its activity and selectivity remains difficult to define. Two issues limit predictive understanding. First, the relevant intermediates at Cu electrochemical interfaces, including *CO, *OH et al., are highly sensitive to the underlying electronic-structure method. Standard generalized gradient approximation density functional theory (GGA-DFT) often gives inaccurate adsorption energies, site preferences, and potential-dependent stability windows. Second, Cu electrodes are not static under reaction conditions. Electrode potential, pH, and adsorbates can drive surface roughening, adatom or clusters formation, step generation, and faceting, producing active sites that are absent on ideal low-index surfaces.This dissertation addresses these two challenges through the theme of accurate energetics and restructuring of Cu electrodes under electrochemical conditions. The first part develops and applies electrochemical-aware random phase approximation (RPA) approaches to establish more reliable energetics for Cu electrocatalysis. By combining many-body perturbation theory with solvation and constant-potential treatments, this work reassesses key interfacial processes that are poorly described by semi-local DFT functionals. The studies show that the proton source for CO protonation on Cu(100) should be surface water through a Grotthuss-type mechanism over a broad potential range, whereas solvent water dominates only at more negative potentials. The same framework quantitatively describes hydroxyl adsorption on Cu(100), reproducing the experimentally inferred *OH desorption fingerprint and showing that *OH remains stable over a wider reducing potential window than predicted by common GGA functionals. These results demonstrate that many-body accuracy can alter not only numerical adsorption energies but also the inferred reaction mechanism and surface speciation. The second part examines how Cu surfaces reconstruct under electrochemical reduction conditions and how these reconstructed states control catalytic activity. Joint grand canonical global optimization, grand-canonical DFT, ensemble analysis, kinetic modeling, and comparison with operando or well-defined experimental observations reveal that adsorbates can act as thermodynamic drivers for surface restructuring. In acidic electrolyte, high H coverage stabilizes Cu adatoms on Cu(111), creating active sites for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and triggering CO reduction under conditions where pristine H-covered Cu(111) would be inactive. Under CO₂RR conditions, CO binding at steps and kinks stabilizes defective Cu surfaces and promotes self-activation of initially planar surfaces. The active motifs for C2 formation are not simply undercoordinated atoms, but square Cu ensembles adjacent to defects, where CO generation, CO coverage, and C-C coupling become coupled. Together, these studies support a unified view of Cu electrocatalysis: the active interface is a potential-, pH-, and adsorbate-dependent ensemble whose composition and structure must be determined under reaction conditions. Accurate energetics are required to predict which adsorbates and surface states are stable, while restructuring-aware models are required to identify where reactions actually occur. This dissertation therefore moves beyond static GGA calculations on ideal facets and establishes a framework in which many-body electronic structure, grand-canonical thermodynamics, surface ensemble sampling, and reaction kinetics are combined to understand and eventually control Cu electrodes during CO₂ electroreduction.Computational chemistryEnergyPhysical chemistryapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/20h2k4jghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt20h2k4jg/qt20h2k4jg.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt90m208kb2026-06-16T06:43:08Zqt90m208kbAging, HOXB13 germline risk variants, and prostate cancer riskZhang, ShileGoldstein, Andrew S2026-06-12Aging and germline variants are two of the biggest biological risk factors for prostate cancer initiation. Common aging prostate diseases include benign prostate hyperplasia, prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia, and prostate adenocarcinoma, all of which involve dysregulated prostate cell growth and are associated with an expansion of progenitor-like luminal cells. Normal prostate tissue development depends on the transcription factor HOXB13. Carriers of specific germline HOXB13 variants experience higher risk of developing prostate cancer as well as earlier age of disease onset, which potentially signifies accelerated aging in prostate epithelium. More interestingly, distinct germline HOXB13 variants are found exclusively in individuals of distinct ancestries. It remains unclear to what extent these ancestry-associated germline HOXB13 variants alter the prostate aging signature, and how that may contribute to prostate cancer initiation. To address this question, this dissertation defines a non-malignant human prostate aging transcriptomic signature and generates prostate organoid models that permit studying the germline variants in parallel. In chapter 1, I discuss the role of both systemic and tissue specific aging on prostate cancer risk. In chapter 2, I identify specific molecular or phenotypic changes in prostate epithelial cells. In chapter 3, I investigate aging features altered by germline HOXB13 variants found in individuals of Caucasian, Japanese, Chinese, and West-African descent. In chapter 4, I discuss the unexpected role of TCA Cycle enzyme OGDHL in prostate cancer cell metabolism and proliferation. Together, this body of work establishes connection between prostate aging and ancestry-associated HOXB13 variants.BiologyCellular biologyOncologyAgingGeneticsAgingCancer riskGenetic VariantsMetabolismProstate Cancerapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/90m208kbhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt90m208kb/qt90m208kb.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt18x4w1mx2026-06-16T06:43:03Zqt18x4w1mxControlled Drug Delivery System in Vivo for the Assessment of Bone Regeneration and Mineralization Using a Murine Calvarial Defect ModelGargoum, Ausama HassanKapila, SunilChang, Jia2026-06-12Maintaining a balance between osteoblast-mediated bone formation and osteoclast-mediated bone resorption is essential for bone homeostasis, and disruptions in this balance can impair bone regeneration. Biomaterial-based microparticle drug delivery systems offer a minimally invasive means of providing localized, sustained therapeutic effects for craniofacial bone regeneration.In this study, we investigated a novel controlled drug delivery system utilizing hollow hydroxyapatite microparticles (HHAPs), which serve both as an osteoconductive scaffold and as a carrier for bioactive molecules. HHAPs were loaded with osteoprotegerin (OPG), a potent inhibitor of osteoclastogenesis that binds receptor activator of nuclear factor kappa-B ligand (RANKL) to prevent osteoclast differentiation. Building on promising in vitro findings, this study evaluated the efficacy of HHAPs, with and without OPG, in promoting bone regeneration and mineralization in a murine calvarial defect model and assessed whether locally delivered OPG could diminish osteoclast activity and stimulate osteogenesis. A pilot study first compared particles incorporated into a hydrogel carrier with powder-only delivery. Micro-computed tomography at 4, 6, and 8 weeks showed regeneration in both groups, with a non-significant trend favoring powder-only delivery given the limited sample size, supporting the use of HHAP powder alone for the main study. For the main study, twenty-three 12-week-old male C57BL/6 mice underwent creation of bilateral 3-mm critical-sized calvarial defects; five were lost to postoperative complications, yielding 18 mice and 36 defects for analysis. Defects were assigned to four groups: (A) empty control, (B) HHAP alone, (C) OPG-loaded HHAP, and (D) HHAP supplemented with free OPG for an initial burst-release profile. Regeneration was assessed by in vivo micro-computed tomography at 4 and 10 weeks and ex vivo at 16 weeks, with bone volume and mineralization quantified in Dragonfly. Hematoxylin and eosin and tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase staining were initiated for qualitative evaluation. All HHAP-containing groups showed progressive mineralized tissue regeneration, and burst-release OPG delivery demonstrated the strongest regenerative trends across both in vivo and ex vivo analyses, suggesting that early localized modulation of osteoclastic activity may influence long-term craniofacial remodeling. Threshold-based Dragonfly segmentation distinguishing immature from mature bone provided further insight into regenerative progression. Collectively, these findings support HHAP-mediated localized OPG delivery as a minimally invasive strategy for craniofacial bone regeneration and warrant continued investigation of controlled calcium phosphate microparticle systems for translational applications.BiologyDentistryHealth sciencespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/18x4w1mxetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8885f32x2026-06-16T06:42:59Zqt8885f32xBioelectronics for continuous biomarker monitoring and neuromodulation across the wearable-to-implantable spectrumTan, JiaweiEmaminejad, SamMosleh, Ali2026-06-12Bioelectronic systems that interface with biological tissues across the spectrum from skin-worn wearables to chronically implanted devices hold the promise of continuous, molecular-level access to physiological and pharmacological dynamics that remain inaccessible to conventional clinical sampling. Realizing this promise has been constrained, however, by a central engineering paradox: the materials and chemistries that maximize electrochemical performance are typically rigid and brittle, whereas the soft, deforming tissues with which they must interface impose mechanical constraints that span six or more orders of magnitude in stiffness. The resulting modulus mismatch drives cascading mechanical, electrical, and biological failure modes that have limited the analytical fidelity, durability, and clinical translation of bioelectronic platforms.This dissertation addresses this central paradox through three complementary contributions that span the wearable-to-implantable spectrum, unified by the engineering principle of decoupling mechanical constraints from electrochemical performance through layered, hierarchical, and composite material architectures. Chapter 1 introduces relevant background on bioelectronic platforms across the spectrum, the mechanical constraints imposed by biological interfaces, the principal electrochemical sensing modalities employed in this work, and the role of active biofluid management in wearable bioanalytical systems. Chapter 2 presents a programmable epidermal microfluidic valving system that enables active biofluid sampling, routing, and compartmentalization for contextually relevant on-body biomarker analysis, supporting flow-rate-undistorted sensor operation and integration with consumer wearable electronics. Chapter 3 introduces a strain-insensitive bioelectrode architecture that confers tissue-like softness and stretchability on clinically established brittle interfacial materials, enabling high-fidelity electrochemical sensing and in vivo neuromodulation under deformation. Chapters 4 and 5 develop ultrasoft native-interfaced bioelectronics (uSNB), a platform that bridges a six-order-of-magnitude modulus mismatch between rigid benchmark biosensing interfaces and tissue-matched ultrasoft substrates: Chapter 4 details the materials and integration strategy, and Chapter 5 demonstrates the in vivo deployment of uSNB for compartment-resolved pharmacokinetic monitoring of central nervous system–resident drugs through minimally invasive intervertebral spinal implantation. Chapter 6 synthesizes the contributions across the spectrum and outlines future directions toward multiplexed implantable sensing, closed-loop therapeutic systems, and clinical translation.Electrical engineeringBioengineeringMaterials scienceEngineeringaptamer sensingbioelectronicsbiosensingsoftstrain insensitivepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8885f32xetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3p90m8282026-06-16T06:42:54Zqt3p90m828What Transfers? Gendered Violence and Narrative Meaning-Making Across the Community College Transfer PathwayDorst, Lauren GraceHarris, Jessica C2026-06-12While campus sexual violence research has largely centered direct-admit students at four-year residential universities, a critical gap remains in understanding how community college transfer students experience gendered violence across educational contexts. This study addresses that gap by foregrounding the narratives of community college transfer student survivors and conceptualizing gendered violence as a cumulative, intersectional, and longitudinal phenomenon that shapes educational pathways before and through college. The study drew on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nine women who transferred from nonresidential community colleges to a large residential public university and identified as survivors of gendered violence. Interviews were analyzed using narrative analysis, guided by an intersectional framework and tenets of a transfer-receptive culture. Findings indicate three interrelated themes: (1) Violence and the Formation of Academic Identity, which demonstrates how academic identities and college-going trajectories are shaped by inequitable access to prevention education and interpretive frameworks for recognizing gendered violence; (2) College Contexts and Experiences of Harm, which illustrates how campus structures and cultures shaped women’s experiences of harm and healing; and (3) Navigating Institutional Support through Transition, which highlights how participants negotiated help-seeking across institutional contexts. This study reconceptualizes gendered violence in higher education as a cross-institutional, longitudinal process that challenges linear models of student success and reframes academic identity as co-constructed through trauma and structural inequity. It extends transfer-receptive culture by positioning it as a trauma-informed and intersectional framework centered on continuity of care, institutional accountability, and coordinated systems of support that extend beyond access to higher education to promote recovery and healing.Educational leadershipHigher educationWomens studiesGender studiesCommunity college educationcommunity collegegender-based violenceintersectionalitysexual violencetransfer studenttransfer-receptive cultureapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3p90m828https://escholarship.org/content/qt3p90m828/qt3p90m828.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt47z316702026-06-16T06:42:49Zqt47z31670Disentangling Latent Structure in High-Dimensional Biomedical DataChen, Zeyuan JohnsonHalperin, EranSankararaman, Sriram2026-06-12Epigenomic modalities, such as DNA methylation, gene expression, and 3D chromatin organization, promise a dynamic and tissue-specific perspective on genomic influences on disease risk. However, their interpretation is often confounded by cellular heterogeneity. My research aims to disentangle high-dimensional tissue-level signals and attribute them to specific underlying cell types, enabling a more precise and mechanistic understanding of disease. To address this, we first used single-cell technologies to directly isolate individual cells from tissues and profile them across multiple epigenomic modalities. This enabled us to catalog a comprehensive multi-omic atlas at cellular resolution and reveal coordinated regulatory interactions. In addition, we found that many genetic risk factors for abdominal obesity are located in the open 3D compartment of fat-storing cells (adipocytes), whereas variants associated with inflammation often reside in regions regulated in immune-related cell types. This reinforces the idea that risk is driven by specific disease-relevant cell types within a tissue rather than the tissue as a whole. However, single-cell experiments are cost-prohibitive and limited in scale. To overcome this, I developed a distribution-free framework that computationally infers cell-type-level signals from readily available tissue-level datasets by leveraging cell-type proportions and matching statistical moments. We demonstrated the practical utility and robustness of this method by recapitulating known cell-type level differential expression patterns in heterogenous tumors with and achieving the highest replication rate when evaluated across independent datasets for detecting cell-type-specific differential methylation patterns. Together, my work bridges experimental and computational approaches to disentangle latent structure in high-dimensional biomedical data and reveal clinically relevant disease mechanisms.Computer scienceBioinformaticsGeneticsChromosome conformationComputational MedicineEpigenomicsMethylationTranscriptomicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/47z31670https://escholarship.org/content/qt47z31670/qt47z31670.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt54m073m12026-06-16T06:42:45Zqt54m073m1Investigating YAP-Mediated Cell Plasticity in Adult Mouse Incisor and Signaling Regulation of Lineage Specification in Embryonic Mouse MandibleGautam, Shilpa JoshiHu, Jimmy J.K.H2026-06-12Craniofacial development is a highly coordinated biological process that depends on tightly regulated interactions between epithelial, mesenchymal, musculoskeletal, and connective tissues. These interactions are regulated by complex molecular signaling networks that regulate cell proliferation, differentiation, tissue patterning, and homeostasis throughout embryonic development and postnatal growth. Disruptions in these regulatory mechanisms can contribute to craniofacial abnormalities, impaired tissue regeneration, and developmental disorders affecting the jaws, teeth, and associated craniofacial structures. Understanding the signaling pathways that control craniofacial tissue development and renewal is therefore essential for advancing developmental biology, regenerative medicine, and translational applications in orthodontics and craniofacial therapeutics. This study investigates molecular mechanisms regulating two distinct but complementary aspects of craniofacial biology: dental epithelial renewal in the continuously growing murine incisor and embryonic mandibular osteochondral fate specification. Although these systems represent different developmental contexts, both rely on coordinated signaling interactions and transcriptional controls that regulate progenitor cell proliferation, differentiation, and tissue structural organization. However, the underlying mechanisms driving coordinated cell behaviors to generate spatiotemporally organized craniofacial tissues remain an important open question. The first component of this work focuses on the role of Hippo signaling in regulating dental epithelial cell proliferation and plasticity. The continuously erupting mouse incisor serves as an ideal model for studying epithelial stem cell maintenance due to its lifelong regenerative capacity. Within this system, the Hippo signaling pathway plays a central role in controlling tissue growth and cellular differentiation through regulation of the transcriptional co-activator Yes-associated protein (YAP). We therefore hypothesized that increased YAP activity can revert differentiated cells back to a progenitor-like state, informing strategies for human tooth regeneration. To investigate the effects of ectopic YAP activation in dental epithelial cells, conditional deletion of the Hippo pathway kinases Lats1 and Lats2 was done within the dental epithelium. Histological analysis, proliferation assays, and immunostaining were used to assess alterations in tissue organization, progenitor behavior, and cellular differentiation. Conditional activation of YAP resulted in expansion of proliferative dental epithelial progenitor populations within the apical bud and induced thickening of the suprabasal epithelial compartment. Increased proliferative activity was observed in epithelial progenitor regions, indicating that YAP signaling promotes maintenance of a proliferative progenitor state during incisor renewal. Despite this proliferative expansion, differentiated ameloblasts remained largely non-proliferative in vivo, suggesting that terminal differentiation imposes significant restrictions on proliferative re-entry within intact tissue environments. Additionally, disruption of normal tissue architecture and altered differentiation of pre-ameloblast populations were observed following ectopic YAP activation. To further investigate epithelial plasticity outside the native tissue environment, dissociated dental epithelial cells were cultured in three-dimensional spheroid conditions and treated with the LATS inhibitor TRULI. Under these conditions, a subset of differentiated ameloblasts demonstrated the capacity to form colonies, suggesting that cellular plasticity can be partially restored in vitro following tissue dissociation and pharmacologic modulation of Hippo signaling. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that YAP signaling promotes expansion of dental epithelial progenitors while revealing context-dependent limitations in the regenerative potential of differentiated ameloblasts. These studies provide insight into mechanisms governing epithelial stem cell behavior and suggest potential strategies for modulating dental epithelial regeneration in future stem cell-based therapies. The second component of this thesis investigates signaling interactions regulating embryonic mandibular development and Meckel’s cartilage formation. While these structures must form at precise times and locations, how different cell types emerge in a spatiotemporally regulated manner is still not fully understood. To understand how distinct cell types are specified within a relatively confined space, our lab has conducted single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) to define the transcriptional signature of each cell population. This revealed many markers and my thesis aimed to characterize the spatial distribution of multiple molecular regulators involved in Meckel’s cartilage and mandibular development. Spatial gene expression analysis demonstrated distinct regional expression patterns corresponding to chondrogenic and osteogenic compartments within the developing mandible. Markers associated with cartilage differentiation and extracellular matrix organization, including Sox9, Col2a1, Matn4, and Col9a2, localized primarily within the chondrogenic regions of Meckel’s cartilage, whereas osteogenic regulators such as Runx2 and Sp7 were enriched in surrounding mandibular bone-forming regions. Additional signaling molecules, including Bmp4, Fgf8, Fgf9, Tgfb2, and Pdgfa, demonstrated region-specific expression patterns consistent with their potential roles in craniofacial patterning, mesenchymal proliferation, and tissue differentiation. To further characterize spatial gene expression during embryonic mandibular development, this work optimized and modified HCRTM Gold RNA-FISH protocol for three-dimensional whole- mount imaging of E12.5 embryonic mandibles. Complementary RNAscope analysis confirmed spatial localization and signal specificity at higher resolution. In addition, lineage tracing of Sp7- expressing cell populations using Sp7-tTA;tetO-Cre;R26mCherry mice provided further insight into the spatial organization of osteogenic cell populations during mandibular morphogenesis at E12.5 and E13.5. Combined with optical tissue clearing and two-photon microscopy, this approach enabled visualization of tissue-wide gene expression patterns within intact developing mandibular structures. Together, these approaches established imaging and molecular tools for examining three-dimensional signaling and lineage relationships during early craniofacial development. Among all the signaling pathways identified from the scRNA-seq, fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signaling is particularly interesting, as Fgf9 is specifically expressed in the mesoderm and its receptor Fgfr3 is specifically expressed in the cartilage. To further investigate the functional role of FGF signaling during mandibular development, pregnant mice were treated with the FGFR inhibitor infigratinib at E10.5 and E11.5. Embryos harvested at E12.5 were evaluated using proliferation assays and RNAscope spatial gene expression analysis. Pharmacologic inhibition of FGFR signaling did not significantly alter overall mesenchymal proliferation within the embryonic mandible. However, expression of Matn4 was reduced following FGFR inhibition, suggesting that FGFR signaling contributes to cartilage maturation and extracellular matrix organization rather than directly regulating cellular proliferation and specification during this early developmental stage. Together, the studies presented in this thesis highlight the importance of tightly regulated signaling pathways in controlling craniofacial tissue development, progenitor maintenance, and differentiation. By investigating the Hippo-YAP and FGFR signaling pathways in distinct biological systems, my studies demonstrate how modulation of developmental signaling networks influences tissue organization, cellular behavior, and regenerative potential within the craniofacial complex. These findings contribute to a broader understanding of craniofacial developmental biology and may provide foundational insight for future therapeutic approaches targeting tissue regeneration, developmental abnormalities, and craniofacial reconstruction.Developmental biologyBiologyCellular biologyHippoLatsYAPpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/54m073m1etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9602f46v2026-06-16T06:42:40Zqt9602f46vEvaluation and Characterization of Airborne Substances and Soil Contaminants in Burn Zones Following Wildfire EventsPineda, Amanda AliciaTsai, Candace S.J.2026-06-12Wildland-urban interface (WUI) wildfires have increased in frequency and severity in recent decades, yet environmental conditions within post-fire burn zones during recovery remain poorly understood. Existing studies have primarily focused on contaminant exposures during active combustion and firefighter suppression activities, with comparatively limited attention given to the recovery period following wildfire suppression. This study characterized airborne contaminants and soil metal concentrations in post-wildfire burn zones across Southern California to better understand conditions relevant to reentry, cleanup and recovery activities. Stationary air monitoring was conducted across six burn zone locations associated with four wildfire events between August 2024 and February 2025, targeting polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), elemental carbon, asbestos, fungal bioaerosols, carbonyl compounds and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Soil metals were additionally evaluated during the immediate post-fire recovery period and approximately one year later. PAHs and elemental carbon remained below reporting limits, while transmission electron microscopy did not identify asbestos fibers despite several low-level phase contrast microscopy detections. Carbonyl compounds, VOCs and fungal bioaerosols remained detectable and varied spatially across sampling locations. Soil analyses identified lead and arsenic as contaminants of concern, with lead concentrations at Eaton Fire sites reaching 316.6 mg/kg, exceeding the EPA residential Regional Screening Level (200 mg/kg) and California Human Health Screening Level (80 mg/kg), while arsenic exceeded screening values but remained consistent with elevated California background concentrations. Overall, findings suggest that contaminant conditions during wildfire recovery differ from active wildfire phases and are shaped by contaminant type, time since containment and site-specific environmental conditions. Although several combustion-related analytes were low or non-detectable under sampled conditions, detectable airborne and soil contaminants indicate that exposure potential may persist during wildfire recovery. Because recovery environments involve changing exposure scenarios and mixtures of airborne and surface-associated contaminants, exposure conditions may vary across reentry, cleanup and debris removal activities.Environmental healthSoil sciencesEnvironmental scienceWildlife conservationAirborneBurn zonesContaminantsSoilWildfirepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9602f46vetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8321v9dh2026-06-16T06:42:35Zqt8321v9dhEvaluating Methods to Identify Symptom Change In People with Fibrotic Interstitial Lung DiseaseChannick, Jessica ErinHays, Ronald Dale2026-06-12Background: Interstitial lung diseases, particularly those with progressive fibrosis, are characterized by increasing fibrosis, declining lung function, and worsening symptoms. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) provide important information regarding symptom burden, yet interpreting meaningful change in scores remains challenging. We aim to compare methods for estimating thresholds for meaningful and statistically significant between- and within-patient change in dyspnea among those with interstitial lung disease (ILD).Methods: Data were obtained from the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation Patient Registry. Adults with baseline and follow-up University of California, San Diego Shortness of Breath Questionnaire (SOBQ) scores were included. Anchor-based minimally important change (MIC) thresholds, using the Short Form 6 Dimensions (SF-6D) health survey, were estimated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and predictive and adjusted predictive modeling. Individual-level change thresholds were estimated using coefficients of repeatability (CR) at 95%, 68%, and 50% confidence levels. Longitudinal mixed-effects modeling was used to provide additional information about changes in SOBQ over time and to assess the influence of patient and disease characteristics on the expected change in SOBQ.Results: Among 561 patients in two-timepoint analyses, the SF-6D index and SF-6D physical functioning domain met criteria for anchor qualification for worsening. Anchor-based estimates of meaningful worsening in dyspnea generally ranged from approximately 7 to 12 SOBQ points, with larger estimates at 24 months than at 12 months. CR change thresholds were approximately 12 points at the 95% confidence level, with lower thresholds identified using likely change. The repeated-measures mixed-effects analysis included 1,096 patients. The models showed that worsening health status and physical function were consistently associated with greater increases in SOBQ scores over time. Models incorporating patient-specific random slopes provided consistently better fit, supporting substantial heterogeneity in symptom trajectory. Significant anchor-by-time interactions indicated that the decline in dyspnea over time among patients with worsening conditions was more rapid than for others. Baseline lung function, age, diagnosis, and smoking history were not significant predictors of change in dyspnea.Conclusions: Interpretation of symptom change thresholds depends on the intended application. Meaningful worsening in dyspnea among patients with ILD appears to occur with SOBQ group-level average increases of approximately 7–12 points, which is generally in line previous estimates which range from 5-11 points. Statistically significant individual-level worsening requires changes of at least 12 points, whereas lower thresholds may be used if symptom change is part of a screening algorithm. Repeated-measures models complement approaches by characterizing longitudinal dyspnea trajectory while accounting for heterogeneous disease progression. Together, these results support the use of the SOBQ as a valid measure of dyspnea progression in ILD and provide a framework for interpreting symptom change in multiple settings.Health sciencesMedicineHealth OutcomesHealth-related quality of lifeInterstitial Lung DiseasePatient-reported Outcomesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8321v9dhhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8321v9dh/qt8321v9dh.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5w87d26s2026-06-16T06:42:31Zqt5w87d26sMechanosensing by T cellsTukiman, Lizabeth AmmabelLi, Song2026-06-12T cell therapies have revolutionized the treatment of hematological malignancies, but their efficacy against solid tumors remains limited by complex physical and immunosuppressive barriers within the tumor microenvironment. Emerging evidence indicates that T cells actively integrate mechanical cues from their surroundings, which critically regulate their activation and function. Understanding how mechanical properties, such as stiffness and viscoelasticity, influences T cell behavior may enable the development of improved biomaterials for immunotherapy and adoptive cell manufacturing. To investigate the effects of mechanical properties on T cell activation, this study utilized a microfluidic-based approach to fabricate alginate-based synthetic cells with independently tunable stiffness and viscoelasticity. Nine distinct types of alginate beads were engineered, spanning three physiologically relevant stiffness levels and three viscoelasticity profiles. These beads were subsequently functionalized with anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 antibodies to provide T cell activation signals. T cells stimulated by the viscoelastic synthetic cells exhibited more T cell receptor clustering and higher nuclear translocation of nuclear factor of activated T cells compared to T cells stimulated by elastic synthetic cells. Varying synthetic cell stiffness produced no significant differences in either event. These results identify viscoelasticity as a key regulator of early T cell activation and suggest that stress relaxation may represent an important design parameter for artificial antigen-presenting cells and biomaterial platforms aimed at enhancing T cell manufacturing and immunotherapeutic performance.BioengineeringBiomedical engineeringBiochemistryImmunologypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5w87d26setdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0tm3v8282026-06-16T06:42:25Zqt0tm3v828Nonrandom Timing, Biased Inference? Rethinking Survey-Based DiscontinuitiesStecher, ElayneHazlett, Chad2026-06-12Unexpected events during survey fieldwork are often used to estimate causal effects by comparing respondents interviewed before and after the event. This thesis argues that the credibility of these designs depends not only on whether the event was unexpected, but also on whether fieldwork rollout shaped the composition of respondents observed before and after the event. When rollout is geographically structured, the event cutoff may divide respondents by place and composition in ways related to potential outcomes. I examine this problem using survey data around the 2015 Garissa University College attack in Kenya. The case shows that standard design repairs, including restricting to common support and adjusting for covariates, improve comparability but do not necessarily eliminate rollout-related confounding. Except where stronger assumptions can be justified, unexpected-event survey designs belong in the world of selection on observables. Their advantage is not automatic as-if random timing, but diagnostic transparency: researchers can observe the fieldwork sequence, assess overlap, restrict claims to supported comparisons, and test whether similar estimates appear at non-event cutoffs.StatisticsLaw enforcementCriminologyCausal inferenceKenyaPolitical violenceSurvey methodologyUnexpected events during survey designapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0tm3v828https://escholarship.org/content/qt0tm3v828/qt0tm3v828.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7vj8t4kc2026-06-16T06:42:21Zqt7vj8t4kcOrbitofrontal Cortex: Where Value is Learned, Updated, and AppliedRomero Sosa, Juan LuisIzquierdo, Alicia AI2026-06-12We live in a changing and uncertain world. A strategy that once proved adequate to solve a problem in the past may no longer be useful under new circumstances and with new information. To adapt, it is therefore vital that we recognize meaningful changes in our environment, and learn and adopt new strategies as needed. The research presented here resulted from a study of such flexible learning with the goal of understanding contributions of the ventrolateral Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC). First, I review decades of research that points to neurons in OFC as highly influential in integrating time and reward information in constructing value. I then describe how I used single-cell calcium imaging to compare neuronal activity in OFC with secondary motor cortex (M2) in tracking important task variables such as choice and outcomes under reinforcement uncertainty. We found that although neurons in M2 signaled choice more strongly than OFC neurons,only neurons in OFC increase their signaling of choice as the uncertainty increased. Finally, we used a novel viral approach to image from a subpopulation of OFC neurons (BLAOFC) that receive direct inputs from the Basolateral Amygdala (BLA) to compare it with the pan-OFC population while rats learned a visual discrimination under varying levels of uncertainty, followed by a reversal. We replicated results from the previous experiment showing that pan-OFC neurons exhibit sensitivity to different levels of uncertainty. Interestingly, we also found a difference between the two populations of neurons with BLAOFC neurons increasingly signaling the visual stimulus after the rat had learned the task and wherein this signal degraded after a reversal. Overall, these results suggest OFC is a nexus where uncertainty is factored into value computations, to integrate and use to guide adaptive decision making.NeurosciencesPsychologyPhysiological psychologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vj8t4kchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7vj8t4kc/qt7vj8t4kc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6199f2pj2026-06-16T06:42:16Zqt6199f2pjScheduling Algorithms for Millimeter-Wave Full-Duplex Integrated Access and BackhaulCHO, SUNGHORoberts, Ian2026-06-12Millimeter-wave integrated access and backhaul (IAB) enables dense wireless deployments by allowing access and backhaul links to share spectrum. Full-duplex operation can further improve spectral efficiency and reduce delay, but self-interference makes its practical scheduling problem challenging. In full-duplex IAB networks, each node must coordinate multiple antenna panels whose simultaneous transmissions affect receivers, making link rates schedule dependent. This thesis studies scheduling for full-duplex mmWave IAB networks under self-interference. We formulate the scheduling problem as a maximum-weight optimization over a multi-hop IAB tree and develop a forward–backward dynamic programming algorithm that computes the throughput-optimal schedule with nearly linear complexity. We also propose FD-LocalMWBP, a local max-weight scheduler only based on local information. FD-LocalMW-BP learns effective backhaul-downlink weights during an estimation phase and reuses them during deployment to approximate unobservable self-interference-dependent rates. We prove stability of the centralized back-pressure policy and derive a stability condition for FD-LocalMW-BP. Simulations show that FD-LocalMW-BP approaches global scheduling performance while substantially reducing control overhead, especially in self-interference limited regimes.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6199f2pjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6199f2pj/qt6199f2pj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2179c3g72026-06-16T06:42:11Zqt2179c3g7A Model of Iterative Morphophonological Learning: Two Empirical StudiesXu, LilySundara, MeghaMoore-Cantwell, Claire2026-06-12This dissertation aims to bridge the gap between theoretical and computational research on phonotactic learning and infant language acquisition, focusing on the morphophonological interface. Two acquisition findings are relevant. First, sensitivity to phonotactics emerges around the same time as knowledge of common affixes, suggesting that early stages of phonotactic learning are based on input with minimally partial morphological information. Second, morphological and phonotactic learning appear to mutually influence each other; early phonotactic knowledge can be utilized by infants to discover morphological boundaries. These developmental facts have fundamental implications for any account of the productivity and learnability of phonological patterns sensitive to morphological structure. This dissertation focuses on two such patterns, morpheme-bounded phonotactics and morphologically-derived environment effects (MDEEs). I present novel data from two empirical studies and use the results to motivate a developmentally-plausible model of morphophonological learning, implemented computationally in the Iterative MorphoPhonological (IMP) learner. The first empirical study focuses on a morpheme-bounded pattern, Arabic OCP. Even though the lexicon data shows a weak tendency for OCP to apply regardless of morphology, a nonce word judgment experiment demonstrates that Arabic speakers learn OCP as strictly morpheme-bounded. I show that existing models which learn phonotactics from a fully parsed lexicon or unparsed data fail to account for this discrepancy between the lexicon and speaker intuitions. I then show that IMP does successfully model Arabic speakers’ intuitions. Specifically, in utilizing emerging phonotactic knowledge to discover morpheme boundaries, the learner strengthens the morpheme-boundedness of OCP. In the second study I compare the laboratory learning of morpheme-bounded patterns to MDEEs, manipulating how much morphological information is available to learners. The results suggest an advantage for learning morpheme-bounded patterns even with minimal morphological information, akin to what is available to young infant learners. In contrast, MDEEs can only be learned successfully with maximal morphological information which is unusual in acquisition. Existing accounts which attribute the underlearning of MDEEs to a bias for morphologically general constraints are unable to account for these differences in learnability between the two patterns, but they emerge as a natural consequence of iterative morphophonological learning.LinguisticsLanguageMorphologyArabicArtificial grammar learningComputational modelingLearningMorphologyPhonologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2179c3g7https://escholarship.org/content/qt2179c3g7/qt2179c3g7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3b7689mz2026-06-16T06:42:06Zqt3b7689mzElectric-field Gradients for Molecular Qubits and Quantum SensingMitts, Grant DHudson, Eric R2026-06-12This dissertation focuses on implementing electric-field gradients into a cryogenic ion trap for purposes related to quantum computing and sensing. The principal goal of this experiment is to introduce electric-field gradients as a new platform for molecular ion quantum logic. The work covered in this document discusses the progress made towards performing molecular spectroscopy on parity transitions within the hyperfine manifold of HCl+. A byproduct of this research has been the introduction of motional Raman transitions. Our research into this phenomenon demonstrates its application as a wideband, phase-sensitive electric field sensing scheme and, through quantum amplification, its ability to sense below the Standard Quantum Limit. The motional Raman scheme is also investigated as a nonlinear process, where probing a signal at subharmonics of a motional frequency can result in sensing below the linear Fourier Transform Limit. Sensing below the Fourier Transform Limit is further investigated in the context of two closely separated tones. By applying a single phase reversal during the pulse sequence, we demonstrate super-resolution of two 80 MHz tones separated 5 Hz. The final focus of this dissertation is on implementing quantum techniques into mass spectrometry. Specifically, we demonstrate how CAT interferometry can be used to perform a high-precision mass measurement on an H35Cl+ ion. Atomic physicsMolecular physicsOpticsApplied physicsQuantum physicsCAT interferometerCryogenicIon trapMolecular ionsMotional RamanSuper-resolutionapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b7689mzhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3b7689mz/qt3b7689mz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2vz0r3rd2026-06-16T06:42:01Zqt2vz0r3rdCommitments for Behavior ChangeWeber, MeganFox, Craig RHershfield, Hal E2026-06-12People use all kinds of tools to help themselves achieve their goals. Commitment strategies are one such method that help by making temptations harder to choose. For example, someone who wants their future self to eat healthily can lock up tempting snacks ahead of time or pledge to donate money if they indulge. Despite the promise of such approaches, however, the practical use of commitments can be fraught – adoption is often low, failure can be common, and welfare effects are sometimes murky. To provide a more comprehensive understanding of the psychology of commitment strategies, Chapter 1 of this dissertation outlines a conceptual model of “intrapersonal” self-control involving three selves: (1) a prospective self who chooses to deploy commitment strategies, (2) a present self who decides whether to resist or indulge, and (3) a retrospective self who assesses impact and learns for the future. Chapters 2 and 3 each present an empirical project related to this conceptual model. Chapter 2 investigates the psychological underpinnings of awareness of the need for commitment, highlighting the perceived persistence of future obstacles as a key input. Chapter 3 explores how the structure and framing of commitment incentives influence uptake and effectiveness in a consequential field context. Together, this work aims to advance theory by providing a deeper understanding of when, why, and how people use commitment strategies, exploring the psychological dynamics of how different types of commitments work and highlighting how factors such as retrospective evaluation, learning, and incentives can play an important role. Practically, it also provides concrete recommendations for behavioral scientists, organizations, and policymakers seeking to use commitment strategies to change behavior in the real world.Behavioral sciencesPsychologyMarketingManagementbehavior changecommitment strategiesself controlapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2vz0r3rdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2vz0r3rd/qt2vz0r3rd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0gv964rv2026-06-16T06:41:56Zqt0gv964rvOverwriting Arcadia: Enclosure, Commodification, and the Post-Pastoral in Early Imperial Latin LiteratureDavis, Benjamin RonnMartelli, Francesca2026-06-12This dissertation undertakes a survey of the ideological potential of Roman pastoral literature which moves beyond Latin pastoral poetry’s most canonical text (the Eclogues of Vergil, written ca. 42-37 BCE) and the poets of the Augustan era to lesser-studied authors of the Neronian, Flavian, and early Antonine periods. While ancient pastoral has frequently been narrowly defined as a genre of hexameter poetry exemplified by Theocritus’ Idylls and Vergil’s Eclogues, treatments of pastoral literature in the context of 20th and 21st century environmental humanities and ecocriticism tend to define pastoral broadly as a discourse or mode of idealizing representation of the countryside. Accepting this broader definition, I argue that the pastoral mode in Roman literature was definitionally concerned with the enclosure of landscapes, viewsheds, and human and non-human beings, and that as such it was particularly useful for Roman elites to think with in an era of imperial autocracy and expansion. While the pastoral mode in antiquity is best understood as an elite fantasy of the countryside, I suggest that careful reading of Roman texts in dialogue with modern ecocritical treatments of the pastoral mode reveals the internal contradictions of Roman pastoral and its close relationship with the structures of domination at the heart of Roman society.Each of the chapters presents a case study in the development of the Roman imperial pastoral (Newlands 2002), which I identify as a kind of “post-pastoral” as defined by Terry Gifford (1999). In the first chapter, I utilize the ecocritical writer Timothy Morton’s notion of ambient poetics (Morton 2007) to argue that the Neronian pastoral poet Calpurnius Siculus reworks the familiar Vergilian frame of the bucolic eclogue to develop a kind of Latin “antipastoral” (Gifford 1999) which critiques the idealization and nostalgia inherent to the pastoral mode. In the second chapter, I deploy Tim Ingold’s theory of the taskscape (Ingold 1993) as well as ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood’s analysis of the logics of colonization (Plumwood 1993) to explore how Columella’s poem on gardening uses the parameters of the garden, and the fiction of self-sufficiency it sustains, to comment on the bucolic ideal’s dependence on enslaved labor and imperial violence. In the third, I argue the famous villa ekphrases found in Statius’ Silvae 1.3 and 2.2 and the younger Pliny’s Epistulae 2.17 and 5.6 produce a kind of Latin “hyper-pastoral” (Larsen 2010), in which the elite villa and the notion of bucolic otium are imagined as a competing spectacle to the more familiar urban spectacles of the arena and racecourse. Finally, the fourth chapter undertakes three individual case studies of pastoral and anti-pastoral themes in the corpus of Roman declamation and argues that this corpus is fruitful ground for reading the pastoral mode’s relationship with nostalgia and utopianism. Taken as a whole, the project presents an argument for the applicability of ecocritical methodologies to Roman studies and links the Roman tradition of bucolic representation with real-world imperial processes, with potential implications for understanding the pastoral discourse(s) of later periods.Classical studiesClassical literatureClergyReligionRomance literatureCalpurnius SiculusColumellaecocriticismpastoralPlinyStatiusapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gv964rvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0gv964rv/qt0gv964rv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7tx0p1hn2026-06-16T06:41:51Zqt7tx0p1hnEquitable Decarbonization in Practice: Energy Justice, Building Electrification, and Vehicle Infrastructure Planning in Los AngelesSheinberg, Rachel LPincetl, StephanieBarreca, Alan I2026-06-12The transition away from fossil fuels is among the most consequential infrastructure transformations of our time, carrying broad implications for who bears its costs and who captures its benefits. While decarbonization holds the potential to reduce pollution burdens that have long fallen disproportionately on Black, brown, indigenous, and poor communities, the way that transition is designed and financed matters enormously. Drawing on energy justice frameworks and the concept of fossil fuel racism, this dissertation asks: how can local energy planning and implementation incorporate environmental justice goals to improve energy transition outcomes for low-income households and communities of color? I examine this question through three interdisciplinary studies set around Los Angeles—home to the country's largest municipal utility, the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP)—each addressing a different scale of decarbonization. The first examines the Los Angeles 100% Renewable Energy Equity Strategies effort as a case study in utility-scale energy justice planning, finding that while the three-tenet energy justice framework used to guide the effort successfully enabled a groundbreaking, community-engaged process, broad frameworks are insufficiently nuanced to overcome the structural and institutional barriers that perpetuate energy injustice. The second presents the Los Angeles Residential Energy Transition (RESET) Tool, a decision-support model developed in collaboration with LADWP, finding that high-efficiency electrification can reduce average household energy spending by $750 annually by 2035—countering widespread skepticism about electrification costs while demonstrating the value of locally-grounded affordability analysis. The third develops an optimization framework for heavy-duty electric vehicle charging infrastructure near the San Pedro Bay ports, demonstrating that phased expansion and smart charging can enable fleet electrification within existing grid capacity limits, reducing costs by up to 69% in early phases. Together, these studies illuminate a consistent tension at the heart of equitable decarbonization—the gap between what is technically feasible and what is institutionally and socially achievable—and exemplify the types of tools that will be necessary to enact change.EnergyEnvironmental justiceEngineeringUrban planningDecarbonizationElectric VehiclesEnvironmental JusticeEquityUrban PlanningUtilitiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tx0p1hnhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7tx0p1hn/qt7tx0p1hn.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3w82s2wp2026-06-16T06:41:47Zqt3w82s2wpInfrastructures of Care and Management: Theorizing the Functions of Shelter and Housing Provisions in the Violence Against Women ActZhang, LindaWang, Lee Ann2026-06-12This thesis traces out the presence of domestic violence shelter, transitional housing assistance, and affordable housing provisions in the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 and its subsequent reauthorizations in 2000, 2005, 2013, and 2022. This thesis implements an infrastructural framework in order to theorize the infrastructures that are constructed through these provisions and the functions of these infrastructures. This thesis proposes that we consider shelter as infrastructure of care, transitional housing as infrastructure, and affordable housing as infrastructure of management. This work draws from and is grounded in infrastructural studies frameworks, abolitionist and women of color feminist literature, critical disability studies frameworks and critiques of welfare reform.LawEthnic studiesLaw enforcementCriminologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3w82s2wphttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3w82s2wp/qt3w82s2wp.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9g86f2sz2026-06-16T06:41:32Zqt9g86f2szContesting Chinatown: Community Ownership in Urban Growth Politics in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, 1975-2012Tran, VictoriaZhou, Min2026-06-12This dissertation examines the community politics of urban redevelopment in Los Angeles’ Chinatown from 1975-2012, using archival documents, interviews with community leaders, government staff, Chinatown residents, and small business owners, newspaper articles in English and Chinese, and Census Data. It asks: How do community groups—particularly those rooted in ethnic communities—acquire and exercise power in shaping urban redevelopment projects? What strategies do community groups use to gain legitimacy for representing community needs in addressing neighborhood redevelopment, public safety, and economic well-being? How do different community stakeholders define who counts as the community and what community needs are? How do groups deploy narratives tied to race, ethnicity, migration and class to create boundaries around who belongs to the community?
In the 1970s, LA’s Chinatown began to rapidly grow as immigrants and refugees moved in from Southeast Asia, China, and Central America. Despite a shared ethnic Chinese identity, many new immigrant groups spoke different dialects, came from different countries, and did not assimilate into the existing Chinatown organizational and political structure. At the same time, the neighborhood struggled under the dual pressures of rising land values and investment from overseas capital and demands for more affordable housing, economic opportunities, and social services. Situating the redevelopment of Chinatown in the larger history of the changing racialization of Chinese Americans throughout the end of the 20th century and the shifting role of urban development in capitalist expansion, this dissertation integrates theories from the sociology of race and ethnicity, migration studies, and urban sociology to understand how community groups attempted to remake the neighborhood and incorporate Chinese Americans into urban politics through redevelopment. In particular, the dissertation analyzes the role middle class Chinese Americans living outside Chinatown with social, economic, cultural stake in the neighborhood participated in Chinatown based organizations and the neighborhood’s political structure and directed redevelopment priorities that may conflict with resident interests. Ultimately, this project interrogates how differences within the neighborhood based on race, ethnicity, class, and migration histories created boundaries around who could participate in the redevelopment process and who benefited from redevelopment.SociologyUrban planningAsian American studiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g86f2szhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9g86f2sz/qt9g86f2sz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2gv0w2v72026-06-16T06:41:28Zqt2gv0w2v7Chronic cold exposure induces mitochondrial calcium plasticity in brown fat of UCP1-deficient miceChamorro, Casandra GeorginaBertholet, Ambre MVillanueva, Claudio J2026-06-12Brown adipocytes are highly thermogenic due to optimized mitochondria for heat production, termed mitochondrial thermogenesis, that increases energy expenditure and burn fat, one of the best ways to fight metabolic syndrome1-4. Uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1), a mitochondrial carrier specific to brown adipose tissue (BAT) mitochondria, is responsible for mitochondrial thermogenesis by transporting H+ across the inner mitochondrial membrane (IMM) 1. The thermogenic program of brown adipocytes is potentiated through a cold challenge4. White adipose tissue (storage fat) also transforms under cold exposure into brown fat like depots called beige fat, becoming a “fat burner” tissue2. The presence of brown and beige fat has recently been demonstrated in adults when activated, but they don’t abundantly express UCP1 as in mice, suggesting other mechanisms of mitochondrial thermogenesis and opening a new field of research to combat metabolic syndrome5,6. WT mice with intact brown fat resist an acute cold challenge, in contrast to Ucp1-/- mice which die7-9. Interestingly, when Ucp1-/- mice are put under a progressive cold challenge, they withstand the cold suggesting a compensatory and alternative mechanism of mitochondrial thermogenesis7-9. Ucp1-/- mice thus provide a great model to study UCP1-independent pathways of mitochondrial thermogenesis. Our mRNA expression analysis revealed brown and beige fat of Ucp1-/- mice develop a thermogenic profile when exposed to cold, comparable to WT mice. To determine the mitochondrial thermogenic capacity of brown fat after cold acclimation, we performed patch-clamp applied to brown fat mitochondria10,11. We found a dramatic Ca2+ current across the IMM of Ucp1-/- mice when exposed to cold. Gradual acclimation to cold led to an increase in Ca2+ uptake in BAT mitochondria through the mitochondrial calcium uniporter (MCU) in Ucp1-/- mice when robust thermogenesis was required. Tethering implicated in calcium fluxes between mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) after chronic cold in Ucp1-/- mice were also enhanced, confirming a significant restructuring to adapt to a remodeled Ca2+ homeostasis. Thus, we propose a new role for MCU as a key regulator of mitochondrial plasticity, enabling efficient thermogenesis in beige and brown adipose tissues in the absence of UCP1.PhysiologyCellular biologybrown fatcalciummitochondriathermogenesisapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gv0w2v7https://escholarship.org/content/qt2gv0w2v7/qt2gv0w2v7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1mb9z5mc2026-06-16T06:41:23Zqt1mb9z5mcDifferences in Access to Clean Water in the San Joaquin Valley, California among White and Latine/Hispanic CommunitiesHerrera, Emily MarieMacinko, James2026-06-12An individual’s access to clean water is a human right, but it is not universally given. Negative health consequences associated with a lack of access to clean water include depression, anxiety, diarrheal diseases, and cancer. There is a disproportionate lack of access to clean water, and therefore negative health effects, for people living in areas with high proportions of communities of color and concentrated poverty. This study presents an ecological associational study that used a publicly available data from the SAFER Dashboard, which collects data on water systems in the San Joaquin Valley (n=210). Ordinal logistic regression models were conducted to determine the relationship between access to clean water and race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. The results found that water systems that serve a larger Latine/Hispanic population are more likely to have a worse water quality risk (OR = 1.012), accessibility risk (OR = 1.036), affordability risk (OR = 1.020), and overall SAFER Status (OR = 1.029), while systems with more White individuals have a smaller likelihood of having a water system of high risk. For socioeconomic status, poverty prevalence was significantly associated with higher water quality risk and accessibility risk, while affordability risk was associated with water quality risk only at the low-to-medium level (p< 0.05). High concentrations of Latine/Hispanic and White residents within a community are strong indicators of SAFER Status, water quality risk, and accessibility risk, while affordability risk did not show a consistent association.Public healthLatin American studiesHydrologic sciencesHispanic American studiesAccessibilityLatine/HispanicSan Joaquin ValleyWaterWater QualtiyWater Systemapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1mb9z5mchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1mb9z5mc/qt1mb9z5mc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5n13c30p2026-06-16T06:41:18Zqt5n13c30pDevelopment of Point-of-Care Diagnostics Incorporating Unconventional Body Fluid Sampling MethodsCarr, Teagan Shing-JenKamei, Daniel T2026-06-12Accurate and accessible diagnostic technologies are essential for effective disease detection, monitoring, and treatment, particularly in resource-limited or decentralized healthcare settings. Point-of-care (POC) diagnostics are especially valuable in these environments due to their ability to provide rapid results without the need for centralized laboratories or trained personnel. One diagnostic modality with widespread use for POC applications is the lateral-flow immunoassay (LFA), which is commonly utilized in over-the-counter pregnancy tests and COVID-19 rapid antigen tests. Although LFAs are rapid, inexpensive, and user-friendly, conventional LFAs are often limited by reduced sensitivity and an inability to provide quantitative results. Furthermore, many existing diagnostic workflows rely on conventional sample collection methods that may be invasive, inconvenient, or impractical for frequent monitoring. The work presented in this thesis focuses on improving the performance and accessibility of LFAs through the integration of unconventional body fluid sampling strategies.
First, a quantitative LFA platform was developed for therapeutic drug monitoring of digoxin from dried blood spot (DBS) samples. To accomplish this, a fully automated and battery-powered device was developed to execute a novel workflow that integrates the simplicity and long-term stability of DBS sampling with LFA-based detection through the push of a single button. To further improve assay sensitivity and enable detection within the therapeutically relevant range, gold-coated magnetic nanoprobes were incorporated into the assay platform. In addition, quantification of LFA results was achieved through a smartphone application that correlates LFA test line intensity from captured images. The automated device in conjunction with the smartphone app delivered consistent quantitative results for digoxin DBS concentrations between 0 and 10 ng/mL, enabling accurate and accessible monitoring of drug levels in patient blood while maintaining compatibility with POC settings.
Subsequently, a diaper-compatible diagnostic platform was developed for colorimetric detection of congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) from newborn urine samples. To address the lower sensitivity typically associated with LFAs, osmotic preconcentration of urinary biomarkers was optimized, ultimately demonstrating a tenfold improvement in LFA sensitivity. Moreover, an LFA for the detection of CMV glycoprotein B was developed, and flexible thermoplastic polyurethane casings were designed for both diaper-compatible LFA integration and passive osmotic preconcentration.BioengineeringNanoscienceImmunologycongenital cytomegalovirusdried blood spotslateral-flow immunoassayosmotic preconcentrationpoint-of-care diagnosticstherapeutic drug monitoringpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5n13c30petdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2hp934sj2026-06-16T06:41:14Zqt2hp934sjBioinspired Magnetoelastic Skin for Wearable Touch-to-Speech TranslationLiu, QixiaoChen, JunHuang, Yu2026-06-12Visual information acquisition through tactile exploration of Braille is essential for individuals with visual impairment; however, natural tactile perception cannot be directly translated into analyzable electrical signals for digital processing and communication. Here, we present a bioinspired electronic skin system based on soft magnetoelastic materials that enables real-time conversion of tactile Braille stimuli into high-fidelity electrical signals and further into auditory outputs. The device is inspired by the structure and mechanical properties of human fingertip skin, featuring a flexible and stretchable architecture with skin-like modulus and high conformability for stable interfacing during dynamic touch. Upon interaction with Braille patterns, the magnetoelastic sensing layer effectively captures subtle spatiotemporal deformation induced by fingertip sliding and converts them into high-fidelity electrical signals via electromagnetic induction. These touch induced electrical signals are subsequently processed by machine learning algorithms to decode Braille characters with high accuracy, and the recognized information is further translated into audio outputs, enabling an end-to-end tactile-to-auditory communication pathway.Materials scienceBiomedical engineeringComputer scienceElectrical engineeringpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2hp934sjetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt73k867m72026-06-16T06:41:09Zqt73k867m7Resituating Women’s Agency via Medical Fantasy in late Qing Science Fiction: the Case of Nüwa StoneZhang, JingwenGoldman, Andrea S2026-06-12This thesis reexamines Nüwa Stone, an unfinished late Qing science fiction novel, through Karen Barad's posthumanist framework of intra-action. Against readings that reduce the novel's female figures to nationalist symbols or failed feminist archetypes, this thesis proposes medical technology as an analytical entry point, attending to the material-discursive conditions through which new forms of women's agency were made imaginable rather than simply prescribed. Chapter One focuses on the epistemic landscape of Western anatomical and physiological knowledge as it entered late Qing China—selectively appropriated by medical missionaries, reform politicians, feminist thinkers, and commercial publishers alike—producing a contested terrain on which the female body became newly available as a site of redefinition. Chapter Two turns to Nüwa Stone itself, reading the artificial insemination fantasy and the brainwashing surgery not as instruments of a fixed ideological program, but as generative sites in which the entanglement of women and medical technology performs agential cuts that loosen, without resolving, the boundaries between body, sexuality, and social identity. This textual analysis is extended through intertextual readings of contemporaneous women's periodicals and the practices of historical female medical professionals, situating the novel within a broader cultural field in which medical knowledge circulated as a resource for self-imagination. The thesis argues that what was at stake in this moment was not the redefinition of the female body, but the opening of a horizon in which its fixity could be questioned.East Asian studiesWomens studiesearly Chinese feminismlate Qing science fictionmedical fantasywomen's body and agencyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/73k867m7https://escholarship.org/content/qt73k867m7/qt73k867m7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5r9293742026-06-16T06:41:04Zqt5r929374Broadband Terahertz Quantum-Cascade Vertical-External-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers and their ApplicationsMorag, EilamWilliams, Benjamin S2026-06-12It has been just over a decade since the demonstration of the first terahertz quantum-cascade vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser (QC-VECSEL). These devices consist of an amplifying, QC-loaded metasurface and a highly reflective output coupler; when properly aligned, these two elements and the space in-between them form the external cavity. Perhaps the most distinctive qualities of the QC-VECSEL are its excellent beam pattern and its broad, single-mode, continuous tunability. Devices have been demonstrated with nearly 20% continuous fractional tuning in continuous-wave, single-mode operation, which amounts to two orders of magnitude more tuning than a conventional monolithic QC laser. These qualities make them enticing candidates for terahertz spectroscopy, either as local oscillators pumping heterodyne receivers or as tunable sources for laser absorption spectroscopy. This dissertation explores the limits of their single-mode operation and leverages their broad single-mode tuning for laser absorption spectroscopy.The relationship between the metasurface design and the QC-VECSEL’s single-mode operation is investigated via the design, fabrication, testing and analysis of VECSELs based on intentionally disordered metasurfaces. I show that this disorder establishes cavity modes with low spatial overlap, permitting spatial hole burning and therefore multi-mode lasing. The spatial filtering effect of the external cavity is observable as an inverse relationship between the density of lasing modes and the external cavity length. We compare these devices to conventional, uniform metasurfaces, and investigate the role of external feedback in a disordered device.The first successful attempt to develop QC-VECSELs into laser absorption spectrometers is discussed in the second half of this work. A QC-VECSEL capable of single-mode continuous-wave operation across 2.5–2.9 THz is used to interrogate several rotational absorption features of hydrogen sulfide. The characteristics of this particular device are examined, and the sensitivity, speed, bandwidth, and spectral resolution of the spectroscopic system are discussed.Finally, we discuss several paths for developing broadly tunable QC-VECSELs into more reliable sources. In particular, we address the challenges of suppressing the substantial frequency instability and of improving the tuning speed of short-cavity QC-VECSELs to unlock applications in time-resolved spectroscopy.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringMetasurfaceQuantum cascade laserSpectroscopyTerahertzTunableVECSELapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r929374https://escholarship.org/content/qt5r929374/qt5r929374.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7gw3d2k62026-06-16T06:40:59Zqt7gw3d2k6Building Foundations of Trust and Resilience in Green and Blue Infrastructure DevelopmentSiegel, MadeleineMalloy, Timothy2026-06-12As climate change intensifies pressures on urban environments and coastal ecosystems, green and blue infrastructure–networks of natural and semi-natural features designed to deliver ecosystem services alongside social and economic benefits–have emerged as critical tools for building socio-ecological resilience. Yet, the success of such initiatives depends not only on their technical soundness, but also on the social and institutional context in which they are embedded. This dissertation investigates the role of community engagement and public attitudes across three interconnected forms of infrastructure: green stormwater management systems (with a global focus), kelp forest restoration as blue infrastructure (informed by subject-matter experts internationally and a California-wide survey), and multi-benefit green infrastructure (in Los Angeles County).
Comprising three chapters, this dissertation draws on a narrative literature review guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method, semi-structured interviews with practitioners and subject-matter experts, and a statewide survey of individuals in California. Together, these sources illuminate the conditions under which community participation strengthens infrastructure outcomes, the barriers that obstruct meaningful engagement, and the institutional and social factors that shape public support for environmental initiatives.
Across all three chapters, several cross-cutting themes emerge. Trust in scientific institutions, in facilitating agencies, and in the community-based organizations that often mediate between residents and government–emerge as foundational to durable participation. Social connection and neighborhood attachment prove to be more reliable motivators of civic engagement than environmental concern alone, with meaningful implications for how practitioners frame outreach. When designed with intention and genuine attention to equity, community engagement functions not merely as a procedural requirement, but as a generative force improving project design, incorporating place-based knowledge, cultivating long-term stewardship, and advancing social equity.
These findings have implications through the lens of the Virtuous Cycle Framework (Morrison, 2015), which anticipates that by generating tangible benefits for people, interventions promoting environmental resilience catalyze ongoing community investment in further resilience-building action. This dissertation advances that framework by revealing the social mechanisms, such as institutional trust, through which such cycles are initiated, sustained, and, at times, disrupted. It further contributes to the literature on equity, institutional trust, and participatory governance as cross-cutting conditions of equitable and effective infrastructure development. Recommendations are offered for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers seeking to design engagement that is not only inclusive in reach, but substantive in impact.Environmental scienceEnvironmental managementClimate changeapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7gw3d2k6https://escholarship.org/content/qt7gw3d2k6/qt7gw3d2k6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt83k6h4352026-06-16T06:40:53Zqt83k6h435Between Precarity and Injustice: Workers’ Experience of Occupational Health in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s Informal Waste EconomyMonolina, ProkritiSchwarz, Kirsten2026-06-12Informal waste workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, operate within the city's urban waste infrastructure, which is essential to its functioning, yet remain invisible to the legal and institutional systems that govern it. This study documents the self-reported occupational health outcomes of informal waste workers in Dhaka and examines the contextual and structural conditions workers identify as contributing to those outcomes. This study uses the lens of Precarious Work Theory and Environmental Justice and argues that the occupational health burden these workers carry is not incidental but contextually and structurally produced. Informal waste workers’ adverse health outcomes are a consequence of precarious employment arrangements that deprive workers of protection and leave environmental and occupational risks unmitigated.A mixed-method design was used. Eighty-five informal waste workers across eight locations completed a semi-structured questionnaire. Participants represented waste collectors, sorters, and recyclers working at landfills, transfer stations, and open dumps. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Spearman correlation, ordinal logistic regression, Kruskal-Wallis tests, and Mann-Whitney U tests. Qualitative data were analyzed through thematic mapping. Findings reveal a significant and widespread occupational health burden. Fatigue, muscle pain, and backache were near-universal among respondents. Skin diseases, respiratory issues, and eye irritation were also commonly reported. Importantly, most indicators of employer-provided occupational health supports, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) provision, workplace facilities, environmental health and safety (EHS) training, vaccination, and healthcare coverage, were reported as absent, with only one exception having drinking water and handwashing facilities. This underscores how precarious the work environment is, especially when workers have little to no facilities, protection, or training. Work location was significantly associated with several symptoms, with landfill workers bearing the highest burden. Handwashing frequency showed no significant correlation with reported symptoms, a finding attributed to the absence of soap and adequate hygiene infrastructure rather than the act of handwashing itself. More than two-thirds of respondents did not use government health facilities, citing contextual and structural barriers such as transportation costs, distance, wait times, and the cost of care. Workers overwhelmingly identified formalization, employer-provided PPE, and basic workplace facilities as pathways to improvement. This study contributes to the growing literature on precarious work and occupational health in the Global South and serves as a documented human account of the contextual and structural neglect faced by informal waste workers, those who keep the city clean, yet remain unseen by the systems that depend on them.Environmental healthOccupational safetyLabor relationsEnvironmental justiceEnvironmental JusticeInformal Waste WorkersOccupational Health and SafetyOccupational Health RisksOccupational JusticePrecarious WorkpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/83k6h435etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0tm1x2ch2026-06-16T06:40:48Zqt0tm1x2chAllele-specific alternative polyadenylation links noncoding genetic variation to Alzheimer’s disease riskBarney, Ryan MitchellXiao, Xinshu2026-06-12Background. Alternative polyadenylation (APA) is a crucial post-transcriptional mechanism generating isoform diversity in the nervous system. While genetic variants significantly influence gene expression, the extent to which they regulate 3’ UTR usage in the human brain remains underexplored. We aimed to characterize the landscape of allele-specific alternative polyadenylation (asAPA) and investigate its role in neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. Results. Analyzing 1,047 RNA-seq data from 293 Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and control donors across four brain regions, we identified 4,462 asAPA events involving 3,432 SNPs. We prioritized a core set of putative functional variants that drive consistent cis-regulatory effects across individuals. These functional SNPs are enriched for RNA-binding protein motifs, particularly those recognized by FMRP. In Fragile X Syndrome brains lacking FMRP, we observed widespread 3’ UTR shortening, with FMRP motifs enriched in the 3’ UTR extension regions of shortened transcripts, suggesting FMRP normally protects against proximal site usage. Integrating these data with population genetics, we found that asAPA SNPs significantly overlap GWAS risk loci for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), ADHD, and AD. Furthermore, comparing AD to control brains within our cohort revealed 77 asAPA genes exhibiting condition-specific shifts in allelic bias, affecting key synaptic genes including CAMK2G. Conclusions. Our study uncovers a pervasive layer of cis-regulatory variation in the human brain that links noncoding genetics to transcript structure via RBP interactions. We identify FMRP as a key regulator of this process and demonstrate that asAPA provides a mechanistic bridge connecting genetic risk to neuronal pathology in both neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration.BioinformaticsBiologyGeneticsAging3'UTRAllele-specific expressionAlternative polyadenylationAlzheimer's DiseaseAutism Spectrum DisorderGWASapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0tm1x2chhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0tm1x2ch/qt0tm1x2ch.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7h6477wz2026-06-16T06:40:43Zqt7h6477wzDistributed Feedback Control of Multiple Stable Limit Cycle Oscillations for Robot LocomotionTaneja, LaqshyaIwasaki, Tetsuya2026-06-12A feedback controller that can achieve a desired oscillation as a stable limit cycle of the closed-loop provides autonomy in returning to the oscillation after perturbations, without mandating strict phase timing. In addition, as compared to centralized control, a distributed control architecture with independent control stations that communicate with pre-selected neighbors can provide robustness to localized failures in the system. Developing theoretical foundations towards such autonomy and robustness can enable control design advancements for applications like robotic locomotion in uncertain environments.This work bridges the gap between linear pattern formation control (via linear eigenstructure assignment theory) and distributed nonlinear control to achieve a stable limit cycle. The high-level approach is the extension of the linear theory in two directions. First, a linear distributed controller was constructed by taking a strongly connected distributed synthesis of the central control and showing that the closed-loop performance of the central controller can be recovered almost exactly in the H2 and H∞ senses as the coupling between distributed control stations is made infinitely strong. Second and separately, the linear theory was augmented by replacing the internal linear oscillator model by a class of nonlinear oscillators that behave the same as the linear one when meeting the desired oscillation; a centralized observer-based central control was thus developed to guarantee stable limit cycle formation in the closed-loop. Both avenues were combined to achieve the stable limit cycle using a distributed nonlinear controller; this was done by taking a strongly connected distributed synthesis of the observer-based control and then replacing the oscillator in each control station by an identical one of the described nonlinear class. Moreover, the centralized (and distributed) control theories were extended to achieve multiple prescribed oscillations as stable limit cycles through augmentation by nonlinear oscillator(s) that themselves embed all corresponding rhythms as stable limit cycles. In application, the centralized and distributed controllers were found effective in simulations of a constrained rigid body locomotor actuated through torque control to embed a flapping or slithering gait as part of the designed stable limit cycle in the closed-loop. Even though a linearized model was used for control design, the resulting controller was still able to achieve each stable limit cycle in simulations of the considered nonlinear model, while indirectly stabilizing the uncontrolled locomotion velocity. In addition, modified centralized and distributed controllers embedding both gaits simultaneously as two coexisting stable limit cycles were constructed and demonstrated to autonomously transition between the two gaits in the presence of a narrow passageway. Next, the methods were applied to the nonlinear oscillation control of a tensegrity (flexible) locomotor with control of cable rest lengths towards the objective of producing the slithering gait as a stable limit cycle of the closed-loop. Using an approximate rigid body model nearly the same as previously considered and an appropriate transformation between torque control and cable rest length control, the control design performed using a linearization of this approximate model yielded a controller that was applied in simulations of the full nonlinear dynamics to yield a stable limit cycle on which the locomotor produced a slithering gait similar to the target design.Mechanical engineeringRoboticsApplied mathematicsCentral pattern generatorDistributed nonlinear controlEigenstructure assignmentNonlinear oscillatorOrbital stabilityTensegrity robotapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7h6477wzhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7h6477wz/qt7h6477wz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt59d9g2dv2026-06-16T06:40:38Zqt59d9g2dvBeyond the IEP: Pre-Service Teachers Perceptions of and Accommodation for Students With Emotional and Behavioral DisordersSarkissyan, TatevGraham, SandraOsipova, Anna2026-06-12Students with emotional disturbance (ED) make up about five percent of all students with disabilities (Pew Research Center, 2023), and they spend 80% of their time in general education classrooms (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2024). Teachers are an incredibly important part of a student’s life – specifically for those students who experience marginalized identities, such as students with ED. However, teachers’ perceptions and expectations can impact student success and behavior (Ansari et al., 2020). The aim of this dissertation is to examine how pre-service teachers’ perceptions differ based on students’ disability label, and how this impacts their suggested accommodations.
Using a vignette-based research design, this quantitative dissertation examines preservice teachers’ perceptions of students with emotional disturbance. Pre-service teachers (n = 291) were recruited from Cal State LA’s EDSP 400 courses: Foundation of Special Education. They received vignettes that manipulated the race (Black, White, Hispanic), gender (Boy, Girl), and disability label (emotional disturbance with externalizing symptoms, emotional disturbance with internalizing symptoms, or no mention of disability) of a sixth-grade student. Race and gender were manipulated by using research based stereotypical names (e.g., DaShawn, Black boy; Alejandra, Hispanic girl). To manipulate disability label, the students were described (1) with an emotional disturbance who throws tantrums, is impulsive, and can be verbally hostile; 2) with an emotional disturbance who isolates themselves, has low self-esteem, and is afraid to make mistakes in class; or 3) no mention of disability. In total, there were 18 different versions of the vignette. Each preservice teacher participant received one vignette to read and respond to survey measures which included the 10-item Characteristic Perceptions Questions (CPQ-10), Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Disabled Students (TATD), and accommodation questions.
Results showed that pre-service teachers were significantly more likely to perceive students described with emotional disturbance negatively as compared to students without a disability. Students with emotional disturbance, with externalizing symptoms, were perceived to be more extraverted, less emotionally stable, and less agreeable than students without a disability label. Further examination showed that these perceptions impacted participants’ intended accommodation behaviors. Pre-service teachers were significantly likely to provide more behavioral accommodations for students with emotional disturbance with externalizing symptoms, as opposed to students without a disability label. Regression analyses showed that perceived comfort level moderated the relation between disability label and pre-service teacher perceptions. Participants were more positive about the student with emotional disturbance with externalizing symptoms when they felt more comfortable interacting with students with ED.
Overall, this study filled a gap in the existing literature on teachers’ perceptions of students with emotional disturbance and how that could potentially impact their behaviors towards these students. Future research should focus on understanding the impact of perceptions on behaviors within the classroom, through observational research. Future research should also focus on unpacking the barriers teachers face towards providing appropriate accommodations to students with emotional disturbance.Special educationBehavioral psychologyTeacher educationDisability studiesaccommodationsemotional behavioral disordersemotional disturbanceperspectivesteachersapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/59d9g2dvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt59d9g2dv/qt59d9g2dv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2z8471nq2026-06-16T06:40:33Zqt2z8471nqThe Effect of Vape Aerosols Containing Nicotine on the Synergistic Relationship Between Streptococcus mutans and Candida albicansCall, KamronTran, Nini C2026-06-12Electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), commonly referred to as e-cigarettes or vaping devices, have rapidly increased in use over the past decade, particularly among adolescents and young adults (1, 2). Unlike conventional cigarettes, ENDS generate aerosols composed of nicotine, humectants such as propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, and numerous chemical flavoring additives that are inhaled and deposited within the oral cavity (3). These vape aerosols directly contact oral microorganisms and host tissues and may alter microbial ecology and behavior in ways that increase disease susceptibility. Emerging clinical and laboratory evidence suggests that ENDS use may be associated with an elevated risk for dental caries, although the biological mechanisms underlying this association remain poorly understood (3–5).Two microorganisms strongly implicated in caries development are Streptococcus mutans (Sm) and Candida albicans (Ca). Individually, each contributes to acid production, biofilm maturation, and enamel demineralization; however, when present together, they form synergistic interkingdom biofilms with enhanced virulence compared with either organism alone (6–11). Prior studies have examined the effects of purified nicotine on these organisms, but relatively few have evaluated the complex chemical composition of ENDS aerosol condensates, particularly within dual-species systems (12–16). Consequently, the impact of nicotine-containing vape aerosol condensates on Sm–Ca interactions remains poorly defined. The goal of this study was to determine how ENDS aerosols containing nicotine influence the growth, biofilm formation, and cariogenic potential of Sm–Ca biofilms. A custom vaping apparatus was used to reproducibly generate aerosol condensates from commercially available ENDS liquids. Sub-inhibitory nicotine concentrations (8 mg/mL for Sm and 4 mg/mL for Ca) were identified via minimum inhibitory concentration testing to enable functional biofilm assessment. Mono- and dual-species biofilms were exposed to ENDS aerosol condensates and compared with purified nicotine. ENDS exposure resulted in organism-dependent changes in biofilm biomass rather than a uniform increase. Notably, Ca exhibited a significant reduction in biomass under nicotine-containing vape aerosol (N-VA) conditions, whereas dual-species biofilms demonstrated increased biomass under the same exposure conditions. These responses differed from those observed with purified nicotine alone and nicotine-free vape aerosol exposure, suggesting that both nicotine and non-nicotine aerosol constituents within the carrier e-liquid contribute to the observed organism-specific effects on biofilm biomass. Targeted RT-qPCR analysis identified exposure-dependent changes in virulence-associated gene expression, particularly in Sm. Increased expression of gtfB was observed under both purified nicotine and nicotine-containing ENDS aerosol exposure conditions, consistent with enhanced extracellular polysaccharide synthesis and the biofilm biomass changes observed phenotypically. In addition, ldh expression appeared most elevated following exposure to nicotine-containing ENDS aerosol condensates, suggesting that aerosol-derived constituents may influence acidogenic pathways beyond the effects of nicotine alone. In contrast, transcriptional responses in Ca were more variable, with modest changes observed in selected virulence-associated genes. Collectively, these findings provide molecular support for the phenotypic observations and suggest that ENDS aerosol exposure may promote virulence-associated biofilm remodeling through mechanisms that differ from purified nicotine alone. Further transcriptomic analyses will be necessary to more comprehensively define the regulatory pathways involved in these responses.MicrobiologyCellular biologyHealth sciencesMolecular biologyBiofilmCandida albicansElectronic cigarettesNicotineOral MicrobiomeStreptococcus mutanspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2z8471nqetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt12t387vp2026-06-16T06:40:28Zqt12t387vp“What Are We Doing About the Student Wellness Crisis?” Conceptualizing Holistic Wellbeing, Measuring It, and Cultivating It Through a Yoga-Based Seminar in Higher EducationYang, JohnEagan, Kevin2026-06-12Colleges and universities are confronting a growing student wellbeing crisis, marked by rising mental health concerns alongside financial stress, sedentary lifestyles, and uncertainty about the future. Although many students report experiencing these challenges, even fewer seek the support they may need. In response, institutions have expanded counseling and related services; however, these resources remain underutilized among first-generation, low-income, and students of color, signaling persistent inequities in access. This gap between student need and support points to deeper challenges in how wellbeing is defined, measured, and cultivated on college campuses. This study employs a convergent mixed-methods design to address this gap.
The quantitative strand focuses on advancing a multidimensional, student-centered measure of holistic wellbeing through the development and validation of the How Are You (HAY) Survey, assessing 40 items across eight interrelated dimensions: physical, psychological, spiritual, intellectual, financial, occupational, sociocultural, and environmental wellbeing. Survey data from 251 undergraduate students were analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with ordinal indicators. Results supported a robust eight-factor structure with strong reliability, good model fit, and measurement invariance across gender, race/ethnicity, and first-generation status. Group difference analyses revealed significant disparities in wellbeing across first-generation status, household income, sexual orientation, and disability/health condition status, while regression analyses demonstrated that several dimensions of wellbeing predicted academic performance, belonging, persistence, and campus satisfaction.
The qualitative strand examines curriculum-based approaches to cultivating wellbeing through analyses of reflection journals and semi-structured interviews from a yoga-based, credit-bearing seminar, which attracted a diverse student population, particularly low-income and students of color. Students described wellbeing as dynamic, relational, and shaped by academic demands, with yoga, breathwork, meditation, and journaling providing practical, contemplative tools they applied beyond the classroom to manage stress, relationships, and uncertainty. The course also fostered awareness and personal transformation, with students engaging more intentionally with their thoughts, emotions, and broader college experiences.
Overall, this study provides empirical support for a valid, multidimensional measure of holistic wellbeing, alongside qualitative insights into how students navigate wellbeing in college. These findings underscore the urgency of addressing student wellbeing more proactively and suggest that curricular approaches hold promise as scalable and equitable strategies for narrowing the gap between student need and support. Higher educationEducational psychologyEducationHigher education administrationmixed-methodspsychometricsstudent wellnesssurveywellbeingyogaapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/12t387vphttps://escholarship.org/content/qt12t387vp/qt12t387vp.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0dn120622026-06-16T06:40:22Zqt0dn12062Quantitative metabolomics and fluxomics reveal metabolic adaptations underlying stress resilience in immune and brain cellsO'Keeffe, SamanthaPark, Junyoung O.2026-06-12Immune and brain cells both face metabolic stress and rely on rapid metabolic rewiring. These cells regulate metabolite levels and activate signaling networks to efficiently utilize metabolic networks and avoid toxic buildup. In turn, metabolites drive immune and neurological function. Despite their foundational role in cell physiology, kinetics, and thermodynamics, absolute metabolite concentrations and fluxes are seldom known, and metabolic changes are often inferred from other omics datasets. Scalable and accessible techniques are needed to accelerate quantitative metabolomics and fluxomics across diverse cell types.
A challenge in studying and engineering immune cells is high donor to donor variability. To establish a baseline for resting T cell metabolism, we set out to profile metabolomes of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells across individuals. We quantified over 80 metabolites in T cells using an ensemble method for absolute metabolite quantitation and Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry. We co-extracted T cells and 13C-labeled reference cells to measure absolute concentrations in bulk. T cell metabolomes resemble one another across subtypes and individuals. We found that T cells possess high adenylate energy charge and favorable redox ratios for energy and biomass production without compromising the forward driving force in glycolysis. Across metabolism, metabolite concentrations exceed their associated Michaelis constants and inhibitor constants two thirds and half of the time, respectively. The conserved features of T cell metabolomes underlie a design principle: metabolite levels prime cells for adaptive immune response.
Integrated Stress Response (ISR) is a signaling network which is activated by different stressors and triggers a global slowing of protein translation and an upregulation of expression of survival genes. While the ISR is a mechanism to respond to metabolic stress, the short-term effects on metabolism are unknown. We combined isotope tracing with optogenetics in H4 neuroglioma cells to study the short-term metabolic rewiring that occurs upon Integrated Stress Response activation. Isotope tracing revealed that activation of the ISR leads to an immediate (≤5 minutes) upregulation of flux towards the Pentose Phosphate Pathway for reducing agent generation and a downregulation of the oxidative TCA cycle. Cells prioritize redox balance and amino acid generation. Extracellular metabolite level measurements revealed that cells decrease their lactate secretion rates in favor of secreting nitrogen and carbon carrying amino acids. These short-term metabolic changes offer a new perspective on the ISR, where cellular response is not solely reliant on transcriptional and translational changes.
While isotope labeling patterns can be directly and uniquely simulated from flux sets, fluxes are difficult to infer from labeling patterns, and existing tools require iterative optimization. We developed a two-staged deep learning model to predict fluxes from isotope labeling patterns, ML-Flux. We created a large training dataset of fluxes and labeling patterns and trained an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to predict free fluxes from isotope labeling patterns. To capture realistic experimental conditions, we also trained a Mask-Aware Residual Multilayer Perceptron model (MAResMLP) to fill in the complete labeling data from incomplete input. The final two-stage MAResMLP–ANN boasts high accuracy and speed compared to a leading iterative-solver based metabolic flux analysis tool. ML-Flux is available as a webtool for quick and accessible flux quantitation in five metabolic models.
Together, these findings point to how cells prioritize homeostasis and use metabolism as a first line of defense against stressors. Looking forward, these findings and tools can accelerate predictive and preventative medicine by building and employing a quantitative model of human metabolism.Cellular biologyNeurosciencesAnalytical chemistryBiochemistryBiophysicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dn12062https://escholarship.org/content/qt0dn12062/qt0dn12062.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt31h6q7pf2026-06-16T06:40:17Zqt31h6q7pfLife-Lines: Relating Psychosocial Stressors to Enamel HistologyNematollahi, ZahraWhite, Shane N2026-06-12Wilson bands (WBs) are accentuated striae of Retzius in enamel, usually recognized by abnormal prism morphology and visible matrix defects. Since enamel does not remodel after crown formation, a disturbance that occurs during development can remain preserved in the tooth for life. This makes enamel a potentially useful tissue for studying early stress exposure. In this thesis, we evaluated whether WBs in human third molars are related to childhood psychosocial stress measures, and whether the relationship differs between female and male specimens. The rationale for examining sex differences was based on evidence that females and males differ in childhood adversity exposure, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis reactivity, autonomic stress physiology, and patterns of trauma reporting. For this reason, biological sex was treated as a primary analytic variable rather than only as a covariate.The study used 120 de-identified third-molar specimens from the U.S. Army Honolulu Tooth Archive, including 57 female and 63 male specimens. We focused on third molars because their crowns develop largely between approximately 7 and 12 years of age. This late, relatively isolated developmental window allows the third-molar enamel record to capture late-childhood and preadolescent exposures while excluding prenatal and infancy events, giving the enamel signal temporal specificity for disturbances that occur during crown formation. Practically, third molars are also commonly extracted in early adulthood, allowing contemporary psychosocial assessment of donors whose enamel formed years earlier. Histological sections were scored for WBs using locked Goodman and Rose-based criteria. Scoring was performed blinded to the psychosocial data and finalized after three rounds of review. The histology results were then compared with the psychosocial questionaries that included measures of acute peritraumatic autonomic-emotional activation (PASS), peritraumatic dissociation (PDEQ), PTSD symptoms, limbic-system symptoms, depressive symptoms, retrospective childhood stress ratings for ages 0–8 and 8 – 16 years, and family-of-origin socioeconomic variables. Analyses were performed separately by sex using Mann–Whitney U tests, Spearman correlations, and multivariable logistic regression. The primary hypothesis tested whether females with Complete WBs reported greater stress during the 8 to 16-year developmental window. The primary hypothesis was supported. Female specimens with Complete WBs had higher retrospective stress ratings for ages 8 to 16 years. Female WB positivity was also associated with both PASS and PDEQ, suggesting that both autonomic-emotional and dissociative responses to stress may be relevant to enamel disruption. Weaker associations were also seen with early childhood stress and depressive symptoms. The male results were different. In males, family education was the only independent predictor of WB positivity, while PASS and PDEQ were not significantly associated with WBs. Sex × stress interaction models supported the interpretation that the female and male patterns were meaningfully different rather than simply the result of smaller subgroup analyses. Independent timing estimates from the Reid laboratory placed the enamel signal within the expected third-molar crown-formation period. Overall, these findings support the idea that WBs may preserve a biological record of childhood stress, but not in the same way across sexes. In females, the signal appears more related to acute peritraumatic stress physiology. In males, the signal in this archive was more closely tied to family-of-origin socioeconomic background. These results support enamel as a developmental stress archive and suggest that WBs may be useful as a candidate biomarker of early-life adversity. However, prospective studies with physiological measures collected during tooth development are needed before this approach can be used clinically.DentistryPsychologyBiologyAdverse Childhood ExperiencesBiomarkersDental EnamelPost-Traumatic Stress DisordersStress PsychologicalWilson Bandsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/31h6q7pfhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt31h6q7pf/qt31h6q7pf.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0vm2p3jb2026-06-16T06:40:12Zqt0vm2p3jbTransplanting Empire: Gardens, Environment, and Literary Form in Global Anglophone Writing, 1780–1930Radnia, MichelleBristow, Joseph E.2026-06-12Connecting literary form to material ecologies in global Anglophone writing of the long nineteenth century, Transplanting Empire explores how British and South Asian authors drew upon the garden to formulate environmental strategies for colonization as well as for anti-imperialism and national sovereignty. Integrating an ecocritical lens with decolonial perspectives, the dissertation argues that subaltern writers—troping ecological transplantation in their cross-cultural appropriation and revision of English literature—transgress horticultural, literary, and religious borders in demonstrating that political sovereignty can be attained through a feminine reconceptualization of environmental aesthetics and sustainability. The first chapter considers how John Keats—infamously associated with waste in the press—addresses dialogues about pollution and natural resource extraction through a potted Indian basil ecosystem that foregrounds feminine nurturing sympathy in outlining visions for sustainability in the metropolitan and literary landscapes. Further tracing the colonial implications of horticultural aesthetics, the second chapter analyzes the way in which Benjamin Disraeli and Rudyard Kipling use contemporary garden styles to visualize a unified empire-as-nation, while, within India, horticulture became a tool through which the British state subjugated the foreign landscape and reproduced the literal and figurative borders used to circumscribe and divide the territory. Situating the feminine garden sonnets of Toru Dutt within the context of such horticultural imperialism, the third chapter views how the first Indo-Anglian woman poet borrows from Keats to rework the sonnets of William Wordsworth and reveal that a future sovereign nation must be cultivated by a united Indian people on their shared native landscape. The final chapter then regards how—in elaborating on Dutt’s garden-nation model—Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain reimagines Western eco-utopian and speculative fiction in invoking the garden to link environmental and national independence to women’s physical and intellectual procreativity, whereas Sarojini Naidu—positing the political and spiritual regeneration of the horticultural space—recasts the imagery and poetic forms of Alfred Tennyson to represent the female-spurred rebirth of India into nationhood. Along with Dutt, these authors forge an emerging literary tradition that—in integrating but transcending British literature—exemplifies the way in which India might incorporate but ultimately surpass Western influence to achieve sovereignty.LiteratureEnvironmental studiesSouth Asian studiesRomance literatureBritish & Irish literatureEcocriticismGardensIndian Anglophone literaturePostcolonial theoryRomanticismVictorian literaturepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vm2p3jbetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3cb279q52026-06-16T06:40:06Zqt3cb279q5Student Voices in the Equation: Using Empathy Interviews to Transform Math EducationSwan, Kaitlyn MicheleFranke, Megan L2026-06-12This qualitative dissertation study examined how empathy interviews could amplify student voice and inform more equitable mathematics instruction for historically marginalized elementary students. Persistent disparities in mathematics achievement, engagement, and belonging continue to affect students of color, emergent bilinguals, and students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Although equity-centered instructional frameworks such as Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI), Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT), and the California Mathematics Framework (CMF) emphasize student-centered learning, they often lack structured approaches for authentically capturing and responding to students’ lived experiences and perspectives.This study explored how empathy interviews revealed what supported and hindered students’ learning in mathematics and how students experienced identity, participation, and belonging in mathematics classrooms. The research was conducted at a Title I elementary school in Los Angeles County serving a predominantly Hispanic/Latinx and multilingual student population. Participants included 24 students in Grades 1 through 6 who engaged in semi-structured empathy interviews focused on their mathematical experiences, emotions, challenges, and supports. Data were analyzed using deductive and inductive thematic coding informed by Sense of Belonging Theory and Student Voice Theory. Findings revealed that students were highly capable of articulating the conditions that supported their mathematical learning. Key themes included opportunities to share and listen to peer strategies, mathematical discourse, instructional technology, visual supports, problem-solving experiences, positive mathematical mindsets, and support from teachers and peers. Students also identified barriers to learning, including emotional vulnerability when sharing ideas publicly, limited participation opportunities, inconsistent access to support, and difficulty understanding peers’ explanations. Across interviews, students demonstrated sophisticated understandings of mathematical learning, collaboration, and identity. Findings further revealed that empathy interviews functioned as more than a data collection method; they served as a relational and reflective practice that fostered listening, recognition, and deeper understanding between students and educators. The findings suggest that centering student voice through empathy interviews can help educators design more inclusive, affirming, and responsive mathematics learning environments that strengthen belonging, engagement, and equity.Educational leadershipMathematics educationPsychologyElementary educationEducational psychologybelongingempathy interviewsidentitymathematics experiencesstudent voiceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cb279q5https://escholarship.org/content/qt3cb279q5/qt3cb279q5.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt13x8c8km2026-06-16T06:40:00Zqt13x8c8kmReaction Discovery for Bioactive Natural Product Synthesis: De Novo Heterocycle Construction toward Portimine A and Complex Spiroketals, and Chemoenzymatic Peptide MacrocyclizationGreene, EmmaHarran, Patrick G2026-06-12This dissertation describes the discovery and application of new bond-forming reactions for assembling the oxygen- and nitrogen-containing heterocycles that define three classes of bioactive natural products: the marine toxin portimine A, polyketide-derived spiroketals, and the macrocyclic peptide antibiotic darobactin A.Chapter One addresses a convergent synthesis of portimine A, a highly oxygenated cyclic imine isolated in 2013 from the dinoflagellate Vulcanodinium rugosum. Unlike the pinnatoxins and gymnodimines, which bear six- or seven-membered cyclic imines, portimine A contains an unusual five-membered spirocyclic imine, and it is a potent, selective inducer of apoptosis with nanomolar cytotoxicity despite comparatively low acute toxicity in vivo. The strategy sought to install the spirocyclic imine in a late-stage union of a pyrroline fragment with a fully elaborated polyoxygenated chain. A first-generation convergent carbonyl-ene disconnection was hampered by the volatility and insufficient electrophilicity of a methylidene pyrroline aldehyde, and a subsequent intermolecular Diels–Alder approach was constrained by an inherent endo selectivity that catalyst screening could not override. These results guided a productive redesign of the enophile as a vicinal tricarbonyl: the resulting oxoacetyl pyrroline proved a stable, isolable, and highly electrophilic coupling partner that engaged an exocyclic enol ether in an uncatalyzed, convergent carbonyl-ene reaction. Desilylation followed by a decarboxylation/autoxidation sequence (KOTMS, O₂) then furnished the conjugated α-iminoketone, with the remaining steps targeting construction of the macrocyclic ketal by transketalization and the spirocyclic imine by intramolecular Diels–Alder reaction—en route to the most concise synthesis of portimine A reported to date.Chapter Two reports the discovery of an uncatalyzed inverse electron-demand hetero-Diels–Alder (IED-HDA) reaction that enables the diastereoselective synthesis of spiroketals under exceptionally mild conditions. The reaction exploits a previously unrecognized reactivity of vinyl vicinal tricarbonyls, proceeding spontaneously in dichloromethane at room temperature without catalysts or additives. It is compatible with even the most sensitive methylidene tetrahydrofurans, pyrans, and oxepanes—substrates ordinarily prone to isomerization and hydrolysis—and tolerates variation in enol ether substitution and ring size to deliver 5,6-, 6,6-, and 7,6-spiroketal frameworks in good to excellent yields and high diastereoselectivity.Density functional theory calculations indicate that these cycloadditions are highly asynchronous, concerted processes passing through markedly zwitterionic transition states with activation free energies near 18 kcal mol⁻¹. A competing stepwise carbonyl-ene pathway, which proceeds through zwitterionic intermediates with low barriers to proton transfer, becomes competitive only for six-membered enol ethers. The unsaturated alpha keto ester present in cycloaddition products can be manipulated in a variety of useful ways. A selection of enabling transformations is demonstrated, as is a concise synthesis of a reveromycin B subunit.Chapter Three describes a chemoenzymatic route to darobactin A, a ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptide (RiPP) from Photorhabdus that binds the outer-membrane protein BamA and is active against Gram-negative pathogens otherwise untreatable with approved antibiotics. The macrobicyclic scaffold is installed by the radical SAM enzyme DarE, which alone forges both the ether and tryptophan-lysine (W-K) crosslinks on the DarA pro-peptide. In contrast to the in vivo requirement for the 48-residue leader, DarE was shown to process truncated, leader-free substrates in vitro and to do so with multiple turnovers, rather than the stoichiometric enzyme-to-product ratio seen with full-length DarA. Synthetic N-acetyl, N-benzyloxycarbonyl, and N-(naphthylmethoxycarbonyl)-capped 10-residue fragments, together with an N-acetyl 11-mer, proved to be effective darobactin A precursors, with the C-terminal tail removable by proteinase K; however, DarE exhibited low promiscuity, as single-atom perturbations such as benzofuran-for-indole substitution sharply diminished productive turnover.Mechanistic experiments with deuterium-labeled isotopologs localized the initial hydrogen-atom abstraction to the β-carbon of the P3 tryptophan (W3), evidenced by a primary kinetic isotope effect, while an ¹⁸O₂-labeling experiment established molecular oxygen as the source of the ether-linkage oxygen. The dispensability of the leader peptide in vitro streamlines both analog synthesis and mechanistic study, though engineered DarE variants with greater promiscuity and stability will likely be needed for a scalable chemoenzymatic synthesis of darobactin A and its analogs.Organic chemistryPhysical chemistryComputational chemistrycarbonyl-enecyclic iminedarobactin Ahetero-diels-alderportimine Aspiroketalapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/13x8c8kmhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt13x8c8km/qt13x8c8km.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt614868rb2026-06-16T06:39:55Zqt614868rbFrom Rats to Robots: Developing a Comparative-Cognition Toolkit for Evaluating Large Language ModelsKirkman, Cyrus FletcherBlaisdell, Aaron P.2026-06-12Recent advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the development of machine systems with emergent reasoning capabilities. Modern large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) are capable of incredible feats, but their abilities are unpredictable in a distinctly unhuman way. Current AI evaluation methods thereby face challenges in distinguishing genuine intelligence from shallow statistical pattern-matching. Existing benchmark-driven evaluations offer only aggregate scores and general trends, masking brittle generalization and obscuring underlying functional behavioral mechanisms. Recent psychologically grounded evaluations have shown promise as a more theoretically grounded alternative, yet frameworks designed for human cognition do not transfer cleanly to AI systems and risk importing assumptions that can distort interpretation (such as anthropomorphism). To address this gap, this dissertation develops a comparative cognition-inspired framework––grounded in the scientific study of diverse animal intelligences––to evaluate scaled AI systems, like LLMs and VLMs. Four empirical chapters chart a progressive arc from foundational associative learning to abstract numerical reasoning. Experiment 1 developed a rigorous in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) task to conduct an associative battery in an LLM. A mixed Instrumental-Pavlovian contingency demonstrated a general capacity for rapid and robust associative learning that was differentially influenced by feedback probability and format (Experiment 1.1). Blocking was observed, but only in prediction-based stimulus–outcome excitatory associations (1.2). Conditioned inhibition was also observed, but only in stimulus–stimulus associations (1.3). Across the associative battery, a series of minor probabilistic biases were observed, inspiring a targeted investigation of the Feature-Positive Effect in an ICRL paradigm across two generations of LLMs (2). Although no such effect was detected, both LLMs demonstrated heightened sensitivity to stimulus base rates in training, leading to further investigation of numerical abilities. Transitive inference abilities were investigated when all links of an ordinal chain were explicitly provided to the LLM (3.1) or abstractly learned via reinforcement history in an ICRL task (3.2); a general transitive reasoning ability across neutral stimuli was observed in zero-shot tasks but was not abstracted from ICRL histories. Furthermore, degree of ordinal reasoning was shown to be correlated with relative alignment of stimulus relationships with those established in prior model training. Specific effects of prior training data upon numerical reasoning were further investigated in multimodal visual stimuli (4). VLMs were shown to capitalize upon available covariates of number when discriminating element count in visual stimuli. Certain visual covariates could increase enumeration accuracy and decrease bias but always did so at the cost of collapsing response resolution. We hypothesize that data priors act as attractor states that guide scaled language model behavior in recapitulating training data patterns, which prove useful within in-distribution scenarios but brittle in edge cases. This phenomenon is akin to the psychological notion of heuristics. Taken together, these four experiments offer a layered view of how generative scaled models acquire, combine, and misapply knowledge, bridging animal and artificial cognition and contextualizing patterns in the cognitive capacities of modern AI systems.Behavioral psychologyAnimal sciencesArtificial intelligenceartificial intelligencebehaviorin-context reinforcement learninglarge language modelsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/614868rbhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt614868rb/qt614868rb.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5wg5v1pz2026-06-16T06:39:50Zqt5wg5v1pzCross-Kingdom Genome Mining: Elucidating the Biosynthesis of Fungal Metabolites with Relevance to Human HealthJohnson, ColinTang, Yi2026-06-12Fungal genomes encode an enormous diversity of specialized metabolites, yet many of the biosynthetic pathways responsible for their production remain unknown. Advances in genome sequencing, bioinformatics, and synthetic biology have transformed the ability to identify, characterize, and engineer these pathways for fundamental studies and practical applications. This dissertation investigates fungal natural product biosynthesis through genome mining, pathway elucidation, heterologous expression, and enzyme characterization, while demonstrating how these approaches can be leveraged for synthetic biology.Genome mining efforts described herein led to the identification of biosynthetic pathways that enabled access to rare natural products, elucidation of unusual enzymatic transformations, and development of new biotechnological applications. For example, the identification of a fungal prenyltransferase pathway enabled the engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for the production of rare and low-abundance cannabinoids. Genome mining and biochemical characterization also revealed the biosynthetic pathway of the C-glycosylated depside arenicolin B, including the role of a nonreducing polyketide synthase thioesterase domain in catalyzing depside formation. Knowledge gained from these pathways facilitated the development of an antimicrobial polymer derived from biosourced 2,4-dihydroxy-6-alkylbenzoic acid monomers, illustrating the utility of natural product biosynthesis for sustainable materials applications. This dissertation also addresses challenges in food and industrial biotechnology through elucidation of the biosynthetic pathway of the mycotoxin 3-nitropropanoic acid (3-NPA) in Aspergillus oryzae. Identification and characterization of the responsible BGC enabled efforts to improve the safety profiles of industrially important fungal strains used in food, beverage, and seasoning production. Finally, this work expands the scope of fungal genome mining through a cross-kingdom strategy that uses characterized enzymes from diverse organisms to identify previously unrecognized fungal pathways lacking canonical biosynthetic enzymes. These findings highlight the power of genome mining to uncover new chemistry, reveal unusual biosynthetic logic, and provide novel enzymatic tools for biocatalysis, metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology.ChemistryMicrobiologyBiochemistryGeneticsOrganic chemistrybiosynthesisgenome miningnatural productspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5wg5v1pzetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5p2223832026-06-16T06:39:45Zqt5p222383Memetic Ligands for Zeolite Brønsted Acid Sites: A syn-4-tBuphenyl-3-truxenetriol Base with the Diphenyl Silane ScaffoldSzeliga, Piper NNava, Matthew J2026-06-12Despite the long history of zeolites and their widespread use in industrial processes for heterogeneous catalysis, homogeneous models of these materials remain underdeveloped. Current models of zeolite Brønsted acid sites lack the aluminum embedded within the framework and are synthetically challenging to construct due to the inherent flexibility of Si–O bonds and the potential for silicon to become hypervalent. In this thesis, a molecular model comprising a C3 symmetric, diphenylsilanol scaffold coordinated to an aluminum center was developed and functions as a Lewis acid site mimic. This Lewis site is capable of binding a variety of Lewis bases including diethyl ether, tetrahydrofuran (THF), pyridine (Py), and hydroxide. This scaffold was attached to a base of 5,10,15-tri(tert-butylphenyl)truxene-5-yl (syn-4- t Buphenyl-3-truxenetriol) providing the rigidity necessary to prevent structural collapse. During the synthesis of the targeted scaffold, a novel selective precipitation method was discovered and employed to separate syn- and anti-products that can be conveniently filtered without the need for chromatography. By utilizing this procedure, models of zeolite Brønsted acid and Lewis acid sites were generated and are accessible for further investigation using common solution-based characterization techniques, including solution-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and ultraviolet–visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopies.Inorganic chemistryPhysical chemistryAnalytical chemistryMolecular chemistryBrønsted acid sitehomogeneous modelsLewis acid sitezeolitepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5p222383etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8j13s3tb2026-06-16T06:39:40Zqt8j13s3tbStreaming Functional EncryptionKorb, Alexis Lei WanSahai, Amit2026-06-12We initiate the study of streaming functional encryption (sFE) which is designed for scenarios in which data arrives in a streaming manner and is computed on in an iterative manner as the stream arrives. Unlike in a standard functional encryption (FE) scheme, in an sFE scheme, we (1) do not require the entire data set to be known at encryption time and (2) allow for partial decryption given only a prefix of the input. More specifically, in an sFE scheme, we can sequentially encrypt each data point x, in a stream of data x = X1... Xn as it arrives, without needing to wait for all n values. We can then generate function keys for streaming functions which are stateful functions that take as input a message x₁ and a state st, and output a value yi and the next state sti+1. For any k ≤ n, a user with a function key for a streaming function f can learn the first k output values y1... yk where (Yi, sti+1) = f(xi, sti) and st₁ = 1 given only ciphertexts for the first k elements x1... Xk.In this thesis, we introduce the notion of sFE and show how to construct it from FE. In particular, we show how to achieve a secure sFE scheme from a secure FE scheme. Furthermore, by combining our result with the FE construction of Jain, Lin, and Sahai (STOC, 2021), we show how to achieve a secure sFE scheme from the polynomial hardness of well-studied assumptions.Computer scienceComputer engineeringApplied mathematicsCryptographyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8j13s3tbhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8j13s3tb/qt8j13s3tb.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9850z2tn2026-06-16T06:39:35Zqt9850z2tnA Geometric Approach to Low-Energy Trajectory Planning in the Circular Restricted Three Body ProblemZafran, Eden MaeLopez, Brett T.2026-06-12This work develops a framework to identify low-energy trajectories in the Circular Restricted Three Body Problem (CR3BP) based on the identification of minimal geodesics. We propose that minimal geodesics on a manifold described by a Randers metric that encodes the dynamics of the CR3BP correspond to natural, low-energy pathways through the state space of the physical three body system. We demonstrate the efficacy of this framework by comparing its results to both periodic low-energy orbits in the CR3BP and as-flown spacecraft ephemerides. This framework transforms the trajectory planning problem from an iterative boundary value problem in terms of time-dependent variables to a direct minimization problem solely parametrized by the curve length of the trajectory. Since the dynamics of a spacecraft traveling between celestial bodies in our Solar System can be modeled with the CR3BP, the proposed geometric framework is suitable for preliminary trajectory planning for missions within the Solar System.Aerospace engineeringAstrophysicsApplied mathematicsAnalytic geometryCircular Restricted Three Body ProblemOrbital DynamicsTrajectory optimizationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9850z2tnhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9850z2tn/qt9850z2tn.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt55t2r7jp2026-06-16T06:39:30Zqt55t2r7jpOctopaminergic neuromodulation of Visual Processing and Behavior in Drosophila melanogasterPalacios Castillo, Lesly MariaFrye, Mark A2026-06-12Neuromodulatory systems do not simply broadcast a uniform signal across the brain. Rather, individual neuron subtypes within a modulatory population may exert distinct, circuit-specific effects on behavior, yet the cellular and synaptic mechanisms underlying this specificity remain poorly understood. Octopamine, the invertebrate analogue of norepinephrine, is well-positioned to address these questions, as it modulates a diverse array of neural circuits and behaviors across a genetically tractable model organism, Drosophila melanogaster. Here, we describe the generation and characterization of a comprehensive library of split-GAL4 driver lines providing selective genetic access to nearly all long-range octopaminergic/tyraminergic (OA/TA) neuron types in the adult brain, establishing the toolkit that makes functional studies possible. Two-photon calcium imaging in quiescent flies is used to characterize the sensory responsiveness of AL2i2 neurons, an OA subtype whose optic lobe projections position it to modulate early visual processing. Results show that 2i2 neurons do not respond to appetitive olfactory stimuli or to visual stimuli in a stimulus-locked manner. This finding hints at a top-down modulatory role rather than direct sensory encoding.A combination of connectomics and optogenetic manipulation in virtual reality flight simulators are used to query whether AL2i subtypes exert dissociable, stimulus-specific modulatory effects on optomotor behavior. Connectome data revealed that AL2i1 synapse onto T4 and T5 direction-selective neurons, important for gaze stabilization, while AL2i2 synapse onto T3 omnidirectional feature detectors, important for object tracking behavior. Consistent with this architecture, activation of AL2i2 selectively enhances bar tracking performance and saccade rate without affecting optomotor responses, while silencing of AL2i1 modestly decreased wide-field gaze stabilization. These results establish that distinct OA subtypes can selectively modulate parallel visual processing streams in a connectivity-predictable manner. Together, these studies establish a new framework for understanding how small populations of aminergic neurons achieve functional specificity, and in turn provide insight on the noradrenergic system in vertebrates. Additionally, we extend the laboratory’s behavioral platforms to three collaborative studies probing how disruptions to developmental neural activity and synaptic organization affect adult visual flight. TrpGamma and SIFaR mutants, with decreased patterned stimulus-independent neural activity during pupal development, are assessed for optomotor reflexes. SIFaR mutants show no robust behavioral phenotype under the conditions tested, while TrpGamma mutants show an increased optomotor response gain. Neuroligin-4 knockdown in T4/T5 neurons, which disrupts the spatial localization of the GABA receptor Rdl at the dendrite base, show increased flight responses, suggesting that precise inhibitory localization contributes to the tuning of direction selectivity rather than its generation.NeurosciencesGeneticsPhysiologyBehavioral sciencesDrosophila melanogasterNeuromodulationOctopamineOptomotor behaviorSplit-Gal4Visual circuitsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/55t2r7jphttps://escholarship.org/content/qt55t2r7jp/qt55t2r7jp.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4t63c6jk2026-06-16T06:39:25Zqt4t63c6jkLower Bounds in Communication Complexity: Quantum Advantage, Matrix Rank, and Direct SumStorozhenko, AndreiSherstov, Alexander A2026-06-12One of the central goals of theoretical computer science is to understand the intrinsic resources required for computation. This dissertation studies communication as such a resource: how several parties, each holding only part of the input, can jointly solve a computational problem with minimal communication, and how this cost changes in the presence of randomness, quantum information, or multiple independent instances. Communication complexity provides a clean mathematical framework for these questions and has deep connections to circuit lower bounds, query complexity, streaming algorithms, and data structures.The first part of the dissertation studies the power of quantum communication relative to classical randomized communication. We prove that there exist partial functions for which the gap between quantum and randomized communication complexity essentially matches the largest possible separation. The proof proceeds through the query model, where we first establish an optimal separation between bounded-error quantum and randomized query complexity, and then lift this separation to communication complexity.The second part determines the communication complexity of several fundamental linear algebra problems over finite fields. In particular, we give a tight characterization of the communication required to approximate matrix rank. We prove strong lower bounds for distinguishing matrices of two prescribed ranks, even for quantum protocols and even with exponentially small advantage over random guessing. We complement these lower bounds with matching upper bounds and extend the method to determinant, subspace sum, and subspace intersection.The third part studies linear algebra problems in stochastic streams, where an algorithm receives random samples from an unknown subspace over a finite field. We develop a self-contained framework for proving optimal memory-sample tradeoffs in this setting. For rank estimation, subspace membership, and subspace intersection, the resulting lower bounds show that an algorithm must either use quadratic memory or observe exponentially many samples.The final part concerns direct sum in deterministic communication complexity. The strong direct-sum conjecture asserts that solving ℓ independent instances of a total function should require ℓ times the communication needed for one instance. We revisit a recent interlacing-based construction and give the first correct proof showing that this intuition fails: there is a family of total functions fn and a constant α < 1 such that, for every ℓ ⩾ 4, we have D(f ℓ n ) ⩽ αℓ D(fn) for all sufficiently large n. Thus, solving the instances jointly can save a constant fraction of the communication required by the naive protocol, refuting the strong direct-sum conjecture for deterministic communication complexity on total functions. Computer scienceMathematicsApplied mathematicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4t63c6jkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4t63c6jk/qt4t63c6jk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt20c9r7qb2026-06-16T06:39:20Zqt20c9r7qbStylistic Bodies: Racialized Gender, American Empire, and Performance in Millennial Cultural ProductionsDixon, Lynette MawoluMcMillan, Uri GGuzmán, Joshua J2026-06-12This study examines cultural productions from 1997–2004 to demonstrate the relationship between racialized embodiment, technology, and U.S. empire illuminated by the Y2K bug and the anxiety it produced at the turn of the millennium. Analyzing works by Missy Elliott, Erykah Badu, Kara Walker, and Kittie KaBoom, each chapter elucidates four strategies of performance or stylistic embodiments—glitch, lag, distortion, and bug(ging)—through which Black women navigate the entanglement of discourses about and representations of racialized gender with U.S. imperial power. In the first chapter, “Glitch,” I analyze the visual and sonic elements of Missy Elliott’s album Supa Dupa Fly (1997) to explore how her otherworldly aesthetics and unique mode of collaboration with other artists rupture mainstream paradigms of representation. Chapter 2, “Lag,” explores the phenomenology of time for Black femmes through a reading of Erykah Badu’s music video for “Didn’t Cha Know” (2001) with Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. I propose that lag names both the space/time of deferred freedom between slavery and full liberation, and the strategy Black femmes use to traverse that time. Chapter 3, entitled “Distortion,” examines Kara Walker’s short film Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (2004) in which she deploys distortion to fracture legibility, limiting viewers’ ability to recognize the images and narratives she produces to crack open the processes by which we recognize and identify with and/or against racist iconography. Chapter 4, “Bug,” reads Black Entertainment Television’s show Cita’s World. I propose that Cita, a virtual reality video jockey voiced by actress Kittie Kaboom, persists as a bug (or contagion) in a 9/11 news archive that otherwise demonstrates how television stations mobilized discourse about national unity as a strategy for managing the nation's vulnerability after the attacks. The conclusion brings the conversation to 2018 with an analysis of Janelle Monáe’s album and “emotion picture” Dirty Computer, demonstrating how Black women and femmes continue to utilize the strategies I outline to glitch U.S. empire in its violent, contemporary instantiation.Gender studiesAfrican American studiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/20c9r7qbetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8gh4d6c22026-06-16T06:39:16Zqt8gh4d6c2Statistical methods for inference of demography and selection within and across speciesMah, Jonathan CharlesLohmueller, Kirk EGarud, Nandita2026-06-12Population demographic history and the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) of new mutations are fundamental determinants of genetic diversity within and across species. Advances in high-throughput sequencing and population genomic methods have enabled increasingly detailed inference of these evolutionary processes; however, such inference remains sensitive to the statistical and technical properties of genomic datasets. Here, we investigate how these factors shape evolutionary inference across microbial and human populations using site-frequency spectrum (SFS) based approaches. First, we inferred demographic histories and DFEs for 39 prevalent commensal gut microbial species from North American human populations. Species displayed distinct demographic histories, including both expansions and contractions over timescales extending beyond human generations, with several inferred events coinciding with major transitions in human history. DFEs varied substantially among species, while comparisons between accessory and core genes suggest an important role for genetic drift in shaping selective effects. Second, we investigated how sample size influences demographic inference under simplified demographic models. Using simulated and empirical datasets characterized by an ancient bottleneck followed by recent expansion, inference under a two-epoch model systematically shifted with increasing sample size from signals of ancient contraction to signals of recent expansion. These shifts coincided with changes in singleton proportions and Tajima’s D, demonstrating that rare variants increasingly dominate inferred evolutionary signals as more individuals are sampled. Lastly, we examined whether distinct large-scale human genomic datasets yield consistent demographic and selective inferences when controlling for ancestry and sample size. Comparing the low-coverage 2013 release of the 1000 Genomes Project, the largely overlapping high-coverage re-sequenced 2020 release, and gnomAD, we found that differences in sequencing depth, variant calling, and rare variant ascertainment substantially altered inferred demographic histories and DFEs. Although all datasets recovered qualitatively similar demographic histories consisting of ancient contraction followed by recent expansion, the inferred magnitude and timing of expansion differed markedly among datasets, while inferred DFEs were visually similar yet statistically distinct. In sum, this work shows that evolutionary inference reflects a combination of biological processes, model assumptions, and technical limitations.BioinformaticsEvolution & developmentBiostatisticsDemographyGeneticsSelectionStatisticspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gh4d6c2etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7wj0z1812026-06-16T06:39:11Zqt7wj0z181Numerical Analysis of Acoustically Coupled Combustion InstabilitiesBoranian, John EricKaragozian, Ann R2026-06-12This thesis presents a numerical investigation of acoustically coupled, non-premixed combustion dynamics in a coaxial methane-air laminar jet diffusion flame, replicating the experimental configurations of Vargas et al. (2025) and Hayrapetyan et al. (2025) at UCLA. Simulations are performed using the CELESTE compressible reacting-flow solver with two-step Westbrook-Dryer chemistry on a 1.32-million-cell grid. Buoyancy is implemented as a body-force source through the user-defined source interface, and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) is the principal modal-analysis tool. The LAR-Thin coaxial burner is simulated at jet Reynolds number Re1 = 40 across three velocity ratios (R = 0, 0.11, 0.32) under unforced, pressure node (PN), and pressure antinode (PAN) excitation.The unforced flame produces a natural buoyancy-driven oscillation at an estimated frequency of fpk-tr ≈ 17.1 Hz, within the sinuous-mode band of Cetegen et al. (2000) and consistent with the lifted-laminar correlation of Won et al. (2000). With gravity, the peak volumetric heat release rate is intensified by a factor of 2.6 at essentially identical peak temperature, identifying buoyancy as a likely dominant baseline mechanism at this Reynolds number.Under acoustic excitation near the PN at 332 Hz, the simulated response exhibits three signatures of the experimentally observed periodic lift-off and reattachment (PLOR) cycle: a low-frequency lobe dominating leading POD modes, a coherent slow envelope in the 10–20 Hz band, and closed lens-shaped limit cycles. At R = 0.11, the simulation matches the experimental modal-energy distribution to within 0.5 percentage points on E1 + E2 (52.6% for the simulation vs. 52.2% in the experiments), a direct quantitative validation.Under acoustic excitation at the PAN at 134 Hz, the very low-frequency mode is strongly attenuated and modal energy concentrates onto the forcing fundamental (E1+E2 = 75–83%), placing the response in the sustained oscillatory combustion (SOC) regime of Hayrapetyan et al. (2025). The contrasting role of velocity ratio R—stabilizing at PN but destabilizing at PAN—is reproduced in the simulations. Geometrically, PAN excitation co-aligned with buoyancy suppresses the slow oscillation while PN excitation acts orthogonally and only modulates it, supporting the interpretation of PLOR as natural buoyancy-driven flickering of the small-diameter low-Reynolds-number flame.Aerospace engineeringComputational physicsAcousticsAcousticsComputationalCoupledDynamicsFlameInstabilitiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wj0z181https://escholarship.org/content/qt7wj0z181/qt7wj0z181.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4nn2v4wv2026-06-16T06:39:05Zqt4nn2v4wvTreponema denticola’s Virulence Factor, Dentilisin, Mediates Alveolar Bone Loss and the Therapeutic Effects of NisinGeng, JiaxinHernandez-Kapila, Yvonne YLKRadaic, Allan2026-06-12Periodontal disease is a major public health concern, affecting approximately 30% of adults in the United States. Severe periodontitis lesions often contain high proportions of spirochetes, including Treponema denticola. However, the extent to which T. denticola and its virulence factor, dentilisin, contributes to periodontal disease-associated alveolar bone loss and periodontal tissue changes remains incompletely understood. Dentilisin is a major outer membrane protease complex of T. denticola that can directly degrade extracellular matrix-related substrates and amplify host matrix metalloproteinase activity, suggesting that dentilisin may be a key driver of periodontal tissue destruction. Comparison of wild-type and dentilisin-mutant T. denticola provides a strategy to determine whether T. denticola-associated periodontal microarchitectural changes are dentilisin-dependent. Furthermore, biological sex is increasingly recognized as an important variable in periodontal disease, yet its contribution to T. denticola-associated periodontal tissue changes remains unclear. Nisin is a naturally occurring broad-spectrum bacteriocin that has been shown to inhibit several periodontal pathogens, including T. denticola and bone loss in mouse models of periodontal disease. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of wild-type T. denticola mono-infection, infection with a T. denticola dentilisin-mutant, nisin treatment, and sex on periodontal bone microarchitecture in a mouse model using micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). A periodontal disease mouse model was established using six-week-old wild-type C57BL/6 mice. Male and female mice were assigned to six experimental groups: control, wild-type T. denticola infection, nisin only, wild-type T. denticola infection plus nisin, dentilisin-mutant T. denticola infection, and dentilisin-mutant T. denticola infection plus nisin. Infection groups were orally inoculated with 12.5 μL of T. denticola suspension containing a total of 1 × 10⁹ CFU/mL, four days per week for eight weeks. Control mice were sham-inoculated with carrier solution. Nisin-treated groups received daily oral gavage of nisin for the duration of the experiment. At the endpoint, 24 mouse mandibles were harvested, stored individually in sterile 1.5 mL microcentrifuge tubes, and imaged using micro-CT. Three dimensional (3D) reconstructed datasets were analyzed to evaluate alveolar bone microarchitectural parameters. Data were compared using Two-way ANOVA followed by Tukey’s honestly significant difference post-hoc test. Micro-CT analyses demonstrated treatment-associated differences in bone density and periodontal ligament widening, with outcomes expressed as fold-change relative to control. Wild-type T. denticola infection established a periodontal disease-associated phenotype, characterized by decreased bone density to 0.757 ± 0.242-fold in males and 0.758 ± 0.176-fold in females compared to controls, and increasing periodontal ligament width to 1.536 ± 0.689-fold in males and 1.581 ± 0.586-fold in females compared to controls. Nisin treatment mitigated these infection-associated changes, increasing bone density to 1.220 ± 0.103-fold in males and 1.007 ± 0.036-fold in females, and reducing periodontal ligament widening to 0.801 ± 0.077-fold in males and 0.956 ± 0.079-fold in females. In contrast, infection with the T. denticola dentilisin-mutant showed significantly higher bone density than infection with the wild-type T. denticola in males and females, respectively, 1.068 ± 0.123-fold versus 0.757 ± 0.242-fold and 1.044 ± 0.063-fold versus 0.758 ± 0.176-fold, and lower periodontal ligament widening, 0.952 ± 0.081-fold versus 1.536 ± 0.689-fold and 0.951 ± 0.138-fold versus 1.581 ± 0.586-fold, with outcomes similar to control levels. Sex had a statistically significant but limited effect on bone density, accounting for 3.3% of total variance by two-way ANOVA, but sex did not significantly affect periodontal ligament width changes. These findings indicate that T. denticola infection mediates alterations in periodontal ligament and bone microarchitecture in a mouse model, with dentilisin playing a significant role in this pathogenesis. Nisin treatment abrogates T. denticola-associated bone changes, although further analysis is necessary to determine the mechanism by which nisin mitigates these effect. Sex contributed modestly to bone-density variance but did not significantly affect periodontal ligament width changes.DentistryMicrobiologyBiologyDentilisinNisinTreponema DenticolapubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nn2v4wvetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt89j1d8162026-06-16T06:39:00Zqt89j1d816Advancing Atmospheric and Wildfire Science Education Through a Visual Science Communication FrameworkPetrusevski, Cameron ColeBaijnath-Rodino, Janine A.Bortnik, Jacob2026-06-12Atmospheric and wildfire science can be difficult for non-expert audiences to interpret when communicated primarily through technical language, static figures, or traditional lecture-based instruction. This thesis develops, documents, and evaluates jibber JABR, a multimedia science communication framework for atmospheric and wildfire education grounded in scientific accuracy, narrative structure, visual explanation, conversational accessibility, and classroom integration. Season One episodes translated topics including Southern California fire weather, Santa Ana winds, prescribed fire, biome-level fire danger, and wildfire vulnerability through interviews, narration, motion graphics, animations, and real-world examples. Episodes were integrated into UCLA general education Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences courses through homework, laboratory, discussion, and reflection assignments. Student feedback, episode-linked performance, and platform analytics suggest students valued the framework’s visuals, conversational tone, concise pacing, and real-world relevance, with nearly 90% of AOS 3 respondents rating the videos as helpful or very helpful.Atmospheric sciencesScience educationFilm studiesInformation technologyMeteorologyGeoscience EducationMeteorologyMultimedia LearningScience CommunicationVisual StorytellingWildfire Scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/89j1d816https://escholarship.org/content/qt89j1d816/qt89j1d816.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0bg1r52q2026-06-16T06:38:55Zqt0bg1r52qImpact of Sleep Health on Mortality with Blood Pressure Variability and Race as Effect ModifiersLee, HyunyongZhang, Zuo-Feng2026-06-12Background: While sleep duration is a known determinant of cardiometabolic health, the impact of Multidimensional Sleep Health (MDSH) and its interaction with cardiovascular risk factors like blood pressure variability (BPV) and race/ethnicity remain understudied. This study evaluated the prospective association between MDSH and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, exploring BPV and race/ethnicity as potential effect modifiers.Methods: Data from 10,279 adults (representing ~180 million U.S. adults) in the NHANES 2005–2008 and 2015–2018 cycles were linked to National Center for Health Statistics mortality data through 2020. A composite MDSH score was constructed across four domains (duration, latency, disordered sleep symptoms, and daytime sleepiness) and categorized as ideal (4), moderate (2–3), or poor (0–1). BPV was calculated as the standard deviation of three systolic readings and split into tertiles. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards models adjusted for major demographic and clinical covariates. Results: Over the follow-up period, poor MDSH significantly predicted a higher risk of all-cause mortality compared to ideal MDSH (HR = 2.47, 95% CI: 1.37–4.45, p = 0.031). Among individual domains, daytime sleepiness was the strongest predictor for both all-cause (HR = 1.48) and cardiovascular mortality (HR = 1.71). BPV significantly modified the relationship: poor MDSH was tied to a higher risk of all-cause mortality specifically among those in the highest BPV tertile (HR = 3.02, 95% CI: 1.07–8.53, p = 0.038), with a visible dose-response trend across BPV intensity (p for trend = 0.055). Race/ethnicity also modified outcomes: poor MDSH predicted increased cardiovascular mortality in Non-Hispanic Black participants (HR = 2.17, p = 0.035), whereas Hispanic participants exhibited an inverse "Hispanic Paradox" trend. Conclusion: Suboptimal multidimensional sleep health is an independent risk factor for long-term all-cause mortality, an effect meaningfully amplified by elevated short-term blood pressure variability. These findings underscore the importance of integrated public health strategies targeting both comprehensive sleep optimization and blood pressure stability, particularly within vulnerable subgroups.EpidemiologyPublic healthHealth sciencesBiostatisticsblood pressure variabilityEffect ModifierMortalityMultidimensional Sleep Healthrace/ethnicityapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0bg1r52qhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0bg1r52q/qt0bg1r52q.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt16s4v7072026-06-16T06:38:51Zqt16s4v707Surface Change on Modern Mars as a Record of Atmospheric DriversWidmer, Jacob MichaelDay, Mackenzie D2026-06-12Planetary surfaces preserve an abundance of information about the geologic and climatic conditions in which they were formed. The surface of modern Mars is dry and cold, yet new
landforms are constantly evolving. Much of Mars’ present-day activity is driven by atmospheric
processes related to ice or wind, but direct measurement of these processes at the landform-scale
has proven difficult to acquire. However, by using remote sensing to quantify surface change and
infer cryo- and aeolian-drivers, Mars’ surface provides a physical record of atmospheric activity
on modern Mars. Each chapter described in this dissertation demonstrates how surface change
records fluctuations in the atmosphere, within the present-day climate. To investigate surface
atmosphere interactions at many spatial and temporal scales, this work includes: 1) multi-year
variations in seasonal frost extent as the result of atmospheric heating and volatile availability, 2)
dune-ice appearance as the result of volatile availability in the near-surface atmosphere, and 3)
rover track erasure as the result of surface wind intensity and local regolith properties. Together, these investigations illuminate atmospheric processes that help drive the present-day martian
climate.GeomorphologyGeologyAeolian ActivityMarsSeasonal IceSurface Changeapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/16s4v707https://escholarship.org/content/qt16s4v707/qt16s4v707.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt46x5f3f62026-06-16T06:38:45Zqt46x5f3f6Advancements in Terahertz Quantum Cascade Laser DesignShahili, MohammadWilliams, Benjamin S2026-06-12Terahertz (THz) quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) are promising semiconductor sources for spectroscopy, imaging, and sensing applications, but their performance is strongly limited at higher frequencies due to increasing material absorption and optical losses, particularly in the 5–6 THz range near the GaAs/AlGaAs Reststrahlen band. This thesis investigates device design strategies to extend the operating frequency, improve thermal performance, and enhance efficiency of THz QCLs through combined theoretical modeling and experimental implementation. First, high-frequency THz QCLs are developed through systematic optimization of the active region and waveguide design. Device performance is analyzed using nonequilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) transport modeling and guided by loss engineering in the waveguide. These efforts result in continuous-wave (CW) lasing up to 5.7 THz, representing a record CW operating frequency for THz QCLs at the time of demonstration. Further optimization enables GaAs/AlGaAs QCL emission beyond 6 THz, reaching up to 6.6 THz, the highest reported frequency for this material system. These results identify dominant optical and electrical loss mechanisms at high frequency and provide design constraints for further scaling. To address thermal limitations, a “split-well” active region design is investigated to suppress parasitic carrier scattering and improve carrier transport selectivity. Devices are characterized experimentally and show improved characteristic temperature compared to conventional designs, indicating reduced performance degradation with increasing temperature. Although room-temperature operation is not achieved, the results validate the underlying design approach and provide a pathway toward thermally robust THzQCLs. In addition to ridge-waveguide QCLs, surface-emitting and external-cavity architectures based on quantum-cascade metasurfaces are developed to improve beam quality and enable frequency tuning in the high-frequency THz regime. These devices demonstrate stable single-mode emission and broad tunability in the 5–6 THz range, while maintaining high
quality far-field profiles. The results establish design guidelines for reducing parasitic optical losses and improving scalability of metasurface-based THz sources. Finally, an all-dielectric high-contrast grating output coupler is demonstrated for THz QCLs in an external-cavity configuration. This represents the first implementation of such a grating-based output coupling scheme in the THz regime. By eliminating absorption losses associated with metallic output couplers, this approach improves device efficiency while maintaining comparable operating temperature and threshold characteristics. Overall, this work advances the state of the art in THz semiconductor lasers by extending operating frequency, improving thermal stability, and enhancing optical efficiency. The results provide both new device architectures and practical design guidelines for realizing higher-performance THz QCLs for future applications in spectroscopy, imaging, and sensing.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringEngineeringpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/46x5f3f6etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt41c0w2362026-06-16T06:38:39Zqt41c0w236Toward Autonomous Dental Robotics: From Design Optimization to Learning-based Planning and ControlYoon, HanbyeolRosen, Jacob2026-06-12Robotics in dentistry has significant potential to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of restorative dental procedures such as caries removal and tooth preparation. However, several challenges must be addressed to achieve robotic automation in restorative dentistry. At the design stage, careful optimization of the manipulator link lengths and base pose is required to enable dexterous tool motion around the target tooth within the constrained intraoral workspace, while keeping the robot size and footprint compatible with the limited space of a dental clinic. At the path planning stage, a sophisticated path planning method is needed to balance the competing objectives of complete caries removal and preservation of healthy tooth structure. During execution, safe robotic operation requires not only accurate following of a preplanned path, but also adaptive control of the feed rate, since excessive cutting speed can result in high tool–tooth interaction forces that may compromise preparation quality and thermal safety.This dissertation focuses on robotic automation for restorative dental procedures by addressing these three core technical challenges: robot design, path planning and control. First, a design optimization framework is proposed to determine the link lengths and base pose of a dental robotic system. The optimized design enables dexterous tool motion around target teeth while maintaining a compact configuration. Second, a robotic path planning method is developed for minimally invasive caries removal. The proposed method combines a geometry-based artificial potential field planner with residual reinforcement learning to improve minimally invasive performance under safety constraints. Third, a force-aware control method is developed to adapt the robot's cutting speed during tooth preparation and caries removal. The proposed controller incorporates an online learning-based force prediction model into a model predictive contouring control framework to prevent excessive cutting force while maintaining accurate path following. Each method is evaluated through simulation and real-world robotic experiments.Together, these contributions provide a step toward autonomous dental robotics by addressing key challenges in robot design, path planning, and force-aware control for safe and accurate robotic restorative dental procedures.Mechanical engineeringArtificial intelligenceRoboticsDental RoboticsDesign OptimizationModel Predictive ControlReinforcement LearningpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/41c0w236etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1p46458z2026-06-16T06:38:34Zqt1p46458zElucidating Novel Mechanisms Regulating Cellular Proliferation and Stress ResponseAbdusamad, MaiTorres, Jorge2026-06-12Cell cycle progression is a complex process that is tightly regulated by a sequence of events and protein-protein interactions. The activity of key regulatory proteins is further fine-tuned by post-translational modifications. Determining which proteins are modified, the enzymes responsible, and the functional consequences of these modifications has been central to uncovering how cells orchestrate accurate cell cycle progression. In this thesis, I present various aspects of these post-translational modifications, as well as how organelle integrity and chemical perturbations influence cell cycle progression, to uncover novel mechanisms coordinating accurate cell division. First, I discuss the phosphatase DUSP12 and its role in cell division and apoptosis. Next, I characterize the RNA exonuclease REXO4 as a novel cell cycle regulator in cancer cells. Next, I discuss the Cul3 substrate adaptor SPOP and its role in regulation of Nup153. Finally, I discuss how a microtubule-targeting agent, MI-181, enhances ciliation and restores cilia length in patient-derived fibroblast cells with ciliopathies. Together, this work provides novel insights into the mechanisms that regulate cell cycle progression, revealing how RNA processing, protein turnover, organelle integrity, and mitotic machinery collectively ensure proper cell division—highlighting potential vulnerabilities that can be leveraged for cancer therapy.Cellular biologyBiomedical engineeringBiologyOncologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p46458zhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1p46458z/qt1p46458z.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2rz5x8m42026-06-16T06:38:29Zqt2rz5x8m4PFAS Contamination in Residential Soils After the 2025 Los Angeles WildfiresFinnegan, Maxwell ThomasMohanty, Sanjay K2026-06-12Wildland–urban interface (WUI) fires can generate chemically complex residues by combusting vegetation together with residential structures, vehicles, electronics, treated materials, plastics, textiles, and household products. Although post-fire studies have increasingly examined metals and other combustion-derived contaminants, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in WUI fire-impacted residential soils remain poorly characterized. This study quantified PFAS concentrations in soils and debris collected after the 2025 Los Angeles fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena and evaluated differences among debris, burned-property soils, standing-home soils, scraped and unscraped areas, and fire-impacted communities. PFAS were detected in all analyzed soil and debris samples (n = 119). Total PFAS concentrations ranged from 0.150–28.130 µg/kg in Altadena soils (n = 50), 0.220–34.883 µg/kg in Palisades soils (n = 49), and 0.186–60.473 µg/kg in debris (n = 20), with median concentrations of 3.394, 4.338, and 1.116 µg/kg, respectively. In this study debris had lower total PFAS concentration than the soils, suggesting PFAS were either partially destroyed or leached out of debris into surrounding soils by wind and water. PFAS composition also differed by matrix, with soils more strongly dominated by carboxylic acids and sulfonic acids, while debris showed greater relative contributions from precursor-associated compounds and fluorotelomer sulfonates. Surface scraping significantly lowered total PFAS concentrations (p = 0.000186), indicating that removal of ash, debris, and near-surface soil reduced residual PFAS burdens. Standing-home soils had comparable or slightly higher concentrations than burned-property soils, suggesting that PFAS occurrence was not limited to parcels with complete structural loss. Total PFAS was positively correlated with selected trace metals, including Ag, Cd, and Pb, but correlations were generally weak to moderate, indicating that metals, including lead, are not reliable proxies for PFAS contamination. Overall, these results show that PFAS are present in post-WUI-fire residential environments and should be considered in post-fire soil assessment frameworks, particularly where ash deposition, synthetic materials, and structural debris may contribute to persistent mixed-contaminant exposure.Environmental engineeringSoil sciencesEnvironmental healthpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2rz5x8m4etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3qq696rv2026-06-16T06:38:24Zqt3qq696rvDesigns for mm‑Wave Frequency Synthesis: BiCMOS Integer-N Sub-Sampling PLLs to CMOS Direct Carrier Fractional SynthesizersChen, ChristopherChang, Mau-Chung Frank2026-06-12With Moore’s Law approaching its limit, relying solely on CMOS scaling to achieve improved energy efficiency, wideband millimeter‑wave (mm‑Wave) performance, and higher integration levels may not be feasible. BiCMOS technologies offer a unique solution, integrating easily scalable CMOS devices with higher ft/fmax heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs). The HBT, with its high power handling capabilities and low flicker noise, is attractive for voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) designs, while the CMOS devices are favored for their low power digital logic capabilities. Two BiCMOS integer-N sub-sampling PLLs (SS-PLLs) are presented, leveraging the high performance HBT to design a low noise fundamental mm‑Wave VCO while the high-speed CMOS enables the SS-PLL to directly sample the mm‑Wave output, eliminating the noise amplification of the charge pump, the divider noise, and divider power during the locked state.The main constraint of SS-PLLs is that the VCO must be an integer multiple of the sampling reference clock, but most systems require finer frequency resolution than can be achieved with an integer-N PLL. Fractional-N PLLs achieve this fine resolution using a delta-sigma modulator (DSM), providing a pseudo-random sequence to the multi-modulus divider (MMD) to achieve a non-integer average division ratio; however, because of the large multiplication factor in mm‑Wave PLLs (N=f_out/f_in), the reference frequency noise, in-band spurs, and quantization noise from the fractional divider experience a large amplification at the output. To overcome this challenge, a CMOS direct carrier fractional synthesizer architecture is proposed, removing the DSM controlling the MMD division ratio. Instead, it utilizes a DiCAD-enabled (Digital Controlled Artificial Dielectric) digital-to-phase modulator (DTPM) at the mm‑Wave carrier frequency (before the MMD) to achieve a variable time delay, and thus, a frequency-dependent variable phase shift. Approximated as a cascaded segment of inductor and switched capacitor elements, the DiCAD can provide monotonic and linear phase control with sub-50fs time resolution. By dynamically adjusting this time delay, the DiCAD-based modulator can effectively achieve a frequency translation with a fine frequency step resolution. In summary, these works can be further extended to higher frequencies, where the HBT RF/noise performance is superior and the DiCAD is scalable for fractional frequency synthesis applications.Electrical engineeringEngineeringComputer engineeringBiCMOSDigital Controlled Artificial Dielectric (DiCAD)Direct Carrier Fractional SynthesizersMillimeter-wave (mm-Wave)Phase-Locked Loop (PLL)Sub-Sampling PLL (SS-PLL)publiceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qq696rvetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt39d996hg2026-06-16T06:38:19Zqt39d996hgRenart, the Fox, on Trial for Renardie: Moral Excess, Treason, and Physiognomy in the Roman de Renart through a Global LensMiller, JodieStahuljak, Zrinka2026-06-12This dissertation interrogates the moral-legal, political, and physiognomic dimensions of treasonous behavior in the literary trial scenes of Renart, the fox, and Dimna, the jackal. The trial of Renart is a recurring motif in the Roman de Renart, an Old French literary cycle composed between the late-twelfth and the mid-thirteenth centuries. The trial of Dimna comes from the Kalila and Dimna fable compilation, a work of world literature dating back to Antiquity. I place my focus specifically on the Classical Persian translation of the fables carried out by Nasrallah Munshi in the sixth/twelfth century. This version of the fables is written approximately thirty years before the first sections, or branches, of the Roman de Renart.
This dissertation carries out a thematic comparison in its analysis, centered on the potential for indirect contact between the Roman de Renart and Kalila and Dimna during the translation movement of the fifth to seventh/eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Both works are composed at approximately the midpoint of this movement, and the trial scenes reflect the larger circulation and transmission of knowledge across the Mediterranean through their engagement with moral, legal, and political themes. The first part of the dissertation examines the treasonous behavior of Renart, particularly the concept of renardie, a term coined by the authors of the Roman de Renart to describe his foxishly deceitful, immoral, and criminal actions. In three chapters, I show that renardie is closely connected to deceit and the notion of excess as sin, that it is determined to be treason at the court of law, and that it carries the physiognomic and anti-chivalric marker of reddish fur. The second part of the dissertation adopts a comparative approach to draw parallels between the trial scenes of Renart and Dimna through the portrayal of excessive behavior, treasonous actions, and the juridical use of physiognomy. Akin to renardie, Dimna’s behavior subverts the idealized figure of the javanmard in Classical Persian literature. His trial likewise suggests that the political crime of treason is a moral and physiognomic concern.
Overall, this dissertation argues that the trial scenes provide evidence of indirect contact through the intellectual exchanges and social transformations associated with the translation movement. I identify various means of potential indirect contact, including legal practice, the circulation of ethical and scientific texts, and the migration of Kalila and Dimna across the Mediterranean into medieval Europe. I argue that the trials of Renart and Dimna function as literary staging areas in which moral norms and behaviors are negotiated and articulated, particularly through the moralization of excess and deceit. Both traditions advance the idea that treason is an outcome of excess and deceit, and that it is visible through physical markers on the body.LiteratureFrench literatureexcessfoxglobalRenarttreasontrialpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/39d996hgetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7v0905p52026-06-16T06:38:14Zqt7v0905p5Social sampling, attitude change, and group dynamicsLinford, BryceLu, Hongjing2026-06-12This dissertation investigates how social information shapes decisions, political attitudes, and the language people use to justify their beliefs. Across three chapters containing multiple experiments, the present research examines the cognitive and social processes through which individuals sample information from their social environments, shift their attitudes in response to the views of others, and converge in the linguistic structure of political reasoning. Drawing on theories of social influence, social sampling, and motivated reasoning, the dissertation proposes that political attitudes are dynamically shaped by socially available information rather than solely by stable internal beliefs. Chapter 1 examines how individuals mentally represent their social environments and rely on social sampling processes when making judgments about online and offline activities. These studies explore the structure of perceived social circles and the role of socially retrieved information in guiding judgments and decisions. Chapter 2 investigates the extent to which exposure to others’ political attitudes produces attitude change. Across experiments involving both passive exposure to group-level distributions and simulated online social interactions, participants consistently shifted their attitudes in the direction of the attitudes they observed. These effects also influenced social and attitudinal coherence, suggesting that exposure to socially congruent information promotes ideological alignment within groups. Chapter 3 examines the language and justifications individuals use to support their political beliefs. Using similarity analyses of participants’ written explanations, the findings demonstrate that individuals within ideological groups converge not only in their attitudes, but also in the semantic and conceptual structure of their political reasoning.PsychologyCognitive psychologyExperimental psychologySocial psychologyAttitudesDecision makingPersuasionSocial samplingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7v0905p5https://escholarship.org/content/qt7v0905p5/qt7v0905p5.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt293562w42026-06-16T06:38:09Zqt293562w4New Horror as Feeling: Space, Subjectivity, and the Social in Chinese Digital FictionChu, ChuBerry, Michael2026-06-12This thesis examines “new horror” as an emergent affective formation in contemporary Chinese digital fiction and online popular narratives. Rather than treating it as a continuation of traditional horror narratives taken up by ghosts, supernatural beings, or graphic violence, this thesis argues that new horror legitimizes a suppressed genre long stigmatized by discourses of sensory excess and superstition through its entanglement with fantasies of space. By examining adjacent popular genres, including Backrooms fiction, rule-based weird fiction, and Infinite Flow novels, this thesis attempts to answer how these writing forms and fantasies of space refract social realities that official discourse cannot accommodate. New horror inaugurates what this thesis calls a mixture of feelings, a diffuse feeling without a fixed object, folding together anxiety, nostalgia, longing, and dread into a shared emotional grammar shaped by spatial experience and rules, entangled with discussions of gender and subjectivity. In so doing, this thesis suggests that capturing horror as a negative, unspecified affect offers visibility into transformations in social consciousness within contemporary Chinese youth culture that remain incomprehensible, opening alternative ways of imagining the present and futurities.East Asian studiesChinese literatureChinese Online LiteratureChinese popular cultureHorrorSpaceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/293562w4https://escholarship.org/content/qt293562w4/qt293562w4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt34t4h3102026-06-16T06:38:04Zqt34t4h310Piloting a Nurse Practitioner-led Program to Treat Supragastric BelchingClarke, MaryMacey, Paul M2026-06-12Background: Supragastric belching (SGB) is a behavioral disorder characterized by repetitive inflow and expulsion of air from the esophagus without gastric involvement, resulting in significant symptom burden and impaired quality of life. While SGB accounts for approximately 3.4% of referrals to tertiary gastroenterology (GI) centers, it remains underrecognized, with inconsistent management due to limited standardization of behavioral treatment approaches. Prior evidence supports psychoeducation and diaphragmatic breathing as effective in first-line therapies; however, these interventions are underutilized and not routinely implemented in clinical practices. Objectives: This quality improvement project aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a GI nurse practitioner (NP)-led behavioral intervention, comprising psychoeducation and training in breathing techniques in reducing symptom burden among adults with SGB., since NPs are well positioned to lead a treatment protocol given their accessibility to patients, emphasis on education and play a central role in delivering ongoing, evidence-based treatment. Methods: This quality improvement project used a quasi-experimental, single-group pre-post design to evaluate a NP-led behavioral intervention for adults with SGB in a GI clinic. The intervention consisted of a 10-15 minute psychoeducation session addressing the behavioral mechanisms of SGB and training in diaphragmatic breathing, with brief reinforcement sessions at weeks 4 and 8. Of the 21 patients screened, 12 were eligible, seven enrolled and five completed the intervention. Symptom burden was assessed at baseline, week 4 and week 8 using a 100 point visual analog scale (VAS) across four symptom domains. Results: Three of five participants achieved clinically meaningful response by week 4 (30% or greater reduction in symptom burden), with improvements sustained through week 8. A reduction in symptom burden was observed across all participants over the 8-week intervention period. Conclusion: This pilot study demonstrates that a NP-led behavioral intervention is feasible and deliverable for adults with SGB in a GI clinic setting. Early response at week 4 may serve as a clinically meaningful indicator of sustained treatment benefit. Further investigation in larger populations is needed to evaluate effectiveness and identify patients most likely to benefit. In summary, brief, low-resource NP-led intervention for SGB may improve patient outcomes, reduce unnecessary diagnostic testing, and provide a scalable model for implementation across GI providers.NursingMedicineTherapyBehavioral psychologyBelchingDiaphragmatic breathingSupragastric belchingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/34t4h310https://escholarship.org/content/qt34t4h310/qt34t4h310.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt64c1q9kp2026-06-16T06:38:00Zqt64c1q9kpThe Construction and Collapse of Heterotopia: The Three Layers of Pleasure in Chinese Esports Danmei FictionChen, NuoBerry, Michael2026-06-12This paper examines Chinese online game fiction (wangyouxiaoshuo), with a particular focus on esports danmei fiction as a subgenre, exploring how it constructs narrative pleasure, seeks creative space within the constraints of government censorship, and engages deeply with the cultural ecosystem of online gaming and fandom in mainland China. Drawing on Marie-Laure Ryan's theories of ludic immersion and mimetic immersion, as well as Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, the thesis argues that esports danmei fiction generates three layers of pleasure for its readers: the pleasure of playing the game, the pleasure of triumph in professional esports competition, and the emotional satisfaction derived from the romantic narrative between protagonists.The paper begins by tracing the development of video games and online literature in China, before offering a systematic overview of online game fiction genres, distinguishing between keyboard-based online game fiction, full-dive virtual reality fiction, esports fiction, and "Fourth Calamity" fiction. The second chapter takes The King's Avatar and I Can Do It as its primary examples, analyzing how esports danmei fiction reconstructs the immersive experience of gaming at the textual level by simulating game interfaces, reproducing in-game social interactions, and recreating the atmosphere of live streaming and professional competition. The third chapter focuses on the controversy surrounding the esports danmei fiction writer Jiang Zi Bei, examining the accusations of rong geng (creative appropriation) levelled against her work by Chinese gaming and esports fan communities. The thesis argues that when the “heterotopia” constructed by esports danmei fiction overlaps too closely with real individuals and events, the heterotopic distance that such fiction typically relies upon begins to collapse, and the narrative is pulled back into real-world cultural disputes and conflicts within fandom.LiteratureFilm studiesEast Asian studiesdanmeiesport fictionFandom StudiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/64c1q9kpetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7z16q5xc2026-06-16T06:37:54Zqt7z16q5xcSystem Technology Co-optimization for Chiplet SystemsGraening, Alexander PhillipGupta, Puneet2026-06-12Chiplet-based architectures offer unprecedented flexibility for high-performance computing but introduce a vast configuration space. This research develops tools for optimizing chiplet systems across six primary areas.
The first area, system representation and cost modeling, introduces a framework for an open-source tool and versatile cost-performance framework. This facilitates early exploration of critical parameters, including chiplet count, technology nodes, etc. Case studies demonstrate that due to the yield versus assembly cost tradeoff, it is possible to find a "cost optimal" chiplet size. This highlights that chiplets primarily show a cost benefit for very large SoCs.
The second area extends our STCO framework to include power delivery and thermal. We analyze the performance impacts of power delivery configurations and thermal stack configurations.
The third area, Chiplet Partitioning, features ChipletPart, a manufacturing cost-driven 2.5D system partitioner. ChipletPart addresses complex objective functions, limited inter-chiplet I/O reach, and heterogeneous technology assignment, achieving cost reductions of up to 58% compared to state-of-the-art min-cut partitioners and 47% over prior work like Floorplet.
The fourth area, I/O Planning, focuses on novel algorithms for comprehensive inter-chiplet communication interface placement and routing. This research addresses ESD, reach, and yield using fixed I/O libraries.
The fifth area is assembly order optimization. Since chiplets break a design into multiple chiplets with various costs and yields, the order in which chiplets are assembled can have a significant impact on overall cost.
The sixth area includes our 3Dblox contributions. We proposed improvements to the 3Dblox standard that have been adopted and developed a converter to translate between 3Dblox and the CATCH format used in this work, along with a set of test cases to allow for easier development with 3Dblox.
Collectively, this research delivers integrated methodologies to empower designers in making informed, high-impact decisions for next-generation chiplet-based systems, from architectural exploration to physical planning. In addition to the tools and studies developed in this work, it provides a framework to facilitate future early design cross-stack tools and optimizations.Computer engineeringElectrical engineeringEngineeringRoboticsChipletsCost ModelingPartitioningSystem Technology Co-optimizationpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z16q5xcetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt238052d92026-06-16T06:37:49Zqt238052d9Development of an Enhanced Vertical Flow Assay Platform with Applications in Diabetes, Tick-Borne Disease, and Food Allergy DiagnosticsSantos, Cristian Miko YadaoDi Carlo, Dino2026-06-12Centralized lab testing suffers from long turnaround times and reporting logistics that hinder immediate care changes for patients. These delays can inhibit the ability to intervene early and prevent patients from progressing to later stages of disease that may ultimately be more difficult to treat. Delay in treatment can lead to overall increased medical costs by requiring more intensive treatment options. However, paper-based diagnostics that enable same-day results with low cost of goods may enable more rapid treatment options that lead to improved outcomes while maintaining low cost. The paper-based lateral flow assay, commonly used for viral infections like COVID-19 offer a rapid diagnostic platform, but often struggle with the multiplexed detection of biomarkers to detect more complex conditions like type 1 diabetes, TBDs or allergies. This leaves a gap in the current health system that can be filled with rapid multiplexed detection of several biomarkers for rapid treatment. Here, I report work on developing the vertical flow assay (VFA) for type 1 diabetes (T1D), tick-borne diseases (TBD), and peanut allergies. For T1D and TBD, I contributed to developing improved multiplexing capabilities to detect several antigens or antibodies with new assay parameters and sensing membrane designs. Regarding peanut allergies, I performed literature research and proof-of-concept testing for a risk assessment and oral immune therapy co-diagnostic test. Altogether, this work enables future applications of the vertical flow assay as a point-of-care multiplexed paper-based diagnostic tool.BioengineeringBiostatisticsBioinformaticsAllergiesDiabetesDiagnosticsImmune AssayPoint-of-CareTick Borne DiseasespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/238052d9etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4448p48f2026-06-16T06:37:44Zqt4448p48fSensory Value and Decision Trajectories: The Influence of Aesthetic and Instrumental Sensory Value on Choices and Task EngagementQuintero, Saul IvanShams, Ladan2026-06-12Being able to adaptively and flexibly engage with our environment requires mechanisms for evaluating the resources, relations, affordances and harms present around us. Evidence from empirical aesthetics suggests that physical sensory properties such as color, sound, texture and complexity systematically influence how observers evaluate information and how they assign value to stimuli in their environment. Past research has examined how sensory signals acquire hedonic value, how preferences emerge, and how preferences change over time. However, relatively few studies have directly examined how experimentally manipulating the value of sensory rewards influences decision making in controlled settings. Existing evidence suggests that rewarding sensory cues can bias behavior in domains ranging from gambling and gaming to consumer decision making, however it remains unclear whether sensory rewards can independently sustain engagement, whether their effects persist under different choice constraints, whether they influence trial-by-trial value learning, whether they contribute to the emergence of feedback insensitive behavior over time, how different sensory modalities may have differential rewarding impact.Therefore, I aimed to address several unresolved questions concerning the relationship between sensory value and decision making. In Study 1, participants freely selected among simple psychophysical tasks that were paired with validated positive, negative, or no audiovisual feedback. Across multiple versions of the paradigm and stimulus set, negatively reinforced activities were consistently avoided, while positively reinforced activities were selected more frequently or engaged with for longer periods of time depending on the stimulus configuration, suggesting that sensory feedback can influence behavioral allocation even in the absence of incentives classically used in instrumental paradigms including money, points, or food. Stimulus validation and feature extraction analyses further suggested that sensory value was related to perceptual features such as visual abruptness, motion energy, and auditory uncertainty. In Study 2, I examined whether these effects persist under constrained choice conditions using a forced-choice version of the task with defined decision epochs. Participants showed increased selection of positive tasks, decreased selection of negative tasks, and condition-specific transition patterns, while reaction time effects primarily reflected general speeding across sessions. Our value tracking reinforcement learning model generally provided stronger fits than repitition-based and random-choice alternatives, suggesting that participants tracked and updated the sensory value of available options over time. In Study 3, participants completed the same task across seven sessions to assess whether repeated sensory reinforcement produced persistent feedback insensitive behavioral tendencies. Although value learning was most evident after feedback was introduced, later sessions were increasingly captured by repetition-biases, and preferences for previously rewarded activities remained detectable after rewards were removed. Finally, in Study 4, I compared auditory, visual, and audiovisual rewards directly. Auditory rewards were preferred over visual rewards, whereas audiovisual rewards were preferred over auditory rewards in a separate comparison, suggesting that the rewarding impact of multisensory stimuli is not a simple equally weighted combining of unisensory value signals. Overall, these findings suggest that sensory signals can function as reinforcers capable of shaping choice behavior, sustaining engagement, supporting value learning, and influencing behavior beyond the immediate presence of other rewards.PsychologyHome economicsNeurosciencesExperimental psychologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4448p48fhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4448p48f/qt4448p48f.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6jr927k62026-06-16T06:37:39Zqt6jr927k6Development and Validation of a Computational Pipeline for Pediatric Ureteral Stent Flow Simulation and Future OptimizationChauhan, AkashYang, Xia2026-06-12This thesis develops and evaluates a computational pipeline for pediatric ureteral stent flow simulation. The project addresses a specific problem in simulation based design. A candidate stent cannot be used as training data for future optimization unless the requested geometry, the generated computer aided design geometry, the COMSOL Multiphysics simulation, the extracted measurements, and the output table can be linked at the level of a single design row. The primary validation study was a 140 mm stent length campaign. In this thesis, this campaign is called the 140 mm validation campaign. The name refers to the fixed stent body length used for the first controlled batch of simulations. It does not refer to a clinical standard length or to a final pediatric device. The campaign was used to test whether the pipeline could convert candidate designs into traceable simulation rows. The campaign narrowed 60 intended designs to 54 attempted designs, 47 completed simulations, 46 pilot usable rows, and 3 rows that passed the strict distal partition contract. Among the 47 completed simulations, 44 failed the strict distal partition contract. The 7 missing semantic statuses correspond to attempted designs that did not produce completed extraction rows. These results show that completed numerical simulations and optimization ready observations are not the same object. The contribution of the thesis is a validation and data provenance framework for computational pediatric stent studies. It defines how simulation rows are generated, measured, checked, classified, and held from future optimization when the evidence is not yet sufficient.BioinformaticsPediatricsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jr927k6https://escholarship.org/content/qt6jr927k6/qt6jr927k6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6pm9s2g92026-06-16T06:37:34Zqt6pm9s2g9Energy Landscape Analysis of Multivariable State Dynamics in Functional Neurological DisorderZhang, LuluNishi, Akihiro2026-06-12Background: Functional neurological disorder (FND) is a disabling condition characterized by functional seizures, motor symptoms, sensory symptoms, and cognitive symptoms that can fluctuate across time and context. In addition to functional neurological symptoms, individuals with FND commonly report pain, fatigue, bodily arousal, and dissociative experiences. However, it remains unclear whether these clinical features fluctuate independently or organize into recurrent multivariable states in daily life.Methods: We applied energy landscape analysis (ELA) to ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data from 17 individuals with clinically documented FND. Participants completed up to eight EMA prompts per day over a 7-day period, yielding 770 complete-case time points for five variables: FNS severity, bodily arousal, pain, fatigue, and dissociation. ELA was used to identify stable multivariable configurations, basin occupancy, and dwell time. Daytime and overnight transitions between multivariable states were compared using linear and logistic mixed-effects models. Results: The pairwise maximum entropy model showed good fit to the observed multivariable pattern distribution (r = 0.971, rD = 0.815). ELA identified two local minima: 00000, reflecting relatively low levels across all five EMA variables, and 11110, reflecting relatively elevated FNS severity, arousal, pain, and fatigue and relatively low dissociation. The 32 possible multivariable patterns were assigned to two corresponding basins, with 68.8% of observations in the low-burden basin and 31.2% of observations in the high-burden basin. The low-burden basin was more persistent, with a longer average dwell time (mean = 3.10 vs. 1.74 EMA prompts). Overnight transitions showed a descriptive tendency toward recovery-like movement compared with daytime transitions, but no differences reached statistical significance. Conclusions: Daily clinical fluctuations in FND appear to be organized around two recurrent multivariable states rather than reflecting random variation across individual EMA variables. The high-burden state was characterized by elevated FNS severity, bodily arousal, pain, and fatigue, and appeared relatively transient. These findings suggest that a state-based framework may complement conventional single-variable approaches in characterizing FND dynamics, and highlight the need for larger studies with objective sleep measurement to examine overnight state recovery.EpidemiologyNeurosciencesCognitive psychologyecological momentary assessmentenergy landscape analysisfunctional neurological disordersymptom dynamicspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pm9s2g9multimediaoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3kw9j2zq2026-06-16T06:37:29Zqt3kw9j2zqProgesterone Receptor Signaling Down-Regulates ERα-Mediated Transcription in HEK-293T CellsMartinez, Rosalizbeth MedinaVeen, John Edward vCorrea, Stephanie2026-06-12Progesterone receptor (PR) and estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) signaling are known to have numerous regulatory effects on physiological systems, such as thermoregulation and visceral fat accumulation, and effects on target tissues, particularly in reproductive tissues such as the endometrium. The literature supports the notion that progesterone opposes estrogen-driven growth and development, and although a clear relationship exists between the two steroid hormone receptors, the mechanistic interplay remains unknown. Our lab developed a novel tool, CellSeeER, that enables measurement of normalized fluorescence reflecting estrogen receptor alpha and beta transcription. Using this tool, this project aims to observe the direct output of ER transcription and how PR signaling modulates this in human embryonic kidney cells. The cells were co-transfected with ERα, ERβ, PR isoforms (PRA or PRB), or androgen receptor (AR) and treated with varying combinations of estradiol (E2), progesterone (P4), dihydrotestosterone (DHT), or the PR antagonist mifepristone (RU-486). These experiments validated that E2 significantly increased ERα-mediated transcription. Co-expression of PR significantly suppressed this E2-driven transcriptional increase, revealing a functional crosstalk between these receptors. This inhibitory effect is specific to PR, as evidenced by the lack of damping of E2-mediated transcription when cells were co-transfected with AR and treated with DHT. Importantly, pharmacological inhibition of PRB with RU-486 also reduces ERα-mediated transcription. These results give insight into how PR signaling negatively regulates ERα-mediated transcription in a receptor-dependent and isoform-specific manner. This provides a foundation for future investigation into the molecular mechanisms underlying hormone-driven transcriptional regulation.EndocrinologyCellular biologyPhysiologyPharmacologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kw9j2zqhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3kw9j2zq/qt3kw9j2zq.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7k53f4sj2026-06-16T06:37:24Zqt7k53f4sjComputational Mapping of Neuropsychiatric Risk across Neurodevelopment at Gene- and Isoform-Level ResolutionMargolis, Michael PrakashGeschwind, Daniel H2026-06-12Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have linked thousands of genetic variants to neuropsychiatric disorders (NPDs), yet translating these statistical signals into biological mechanisms remains a defining challenge. This dissertation applies a multi-scale computational framework to map how genetic variation shapes transcriptomic programs during neurodevelopment and explore how risk variation ultimately manifests as clinical phenotypes across diverse patient populations.Chapter 1 provides a conceptual framework for variant-to-mechanism translation in NPDs, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), schizophrenia (SCZ), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We illustrate the necessity of convergence across biological contexts and analytic models – including quantitative trait loci and CRISPR-based systems – to translate risk variation into mechanistic insights. Chapter 2 presents a transcriptome regulatory atlas of the developing human neocortex, integrating bulk RNA-sequencing and genotyping from 672 samples (post-conception weeks 4-39). We map expression and splicing QTLs specific to early brain development, demonstrating that neuropsychiatric heritability is enriched for isoform-level QTLs over gene-level QTLs and enriched for the first trimester (PCW 1-13). Chapter 3 leverages long-read sequencing to resolve the full-length isoform landscape of the developing neocortex during the progenitor-to-neuron transition. We catalog 106,245 transcript isoforms across 13,349 protein-coding genes – the majority unannotated – and develop IsoScaler to identify coordinated isoform usage. We find that progenitor isoQTLs and isoform switching across this transition are enriched for neurodevelopmental and ASD risk genes, demonstrating that isoform-level resolution captures risk mechanisms masked at the gene level. Chapter 4 extends this framework to the population scale, characterizing genetic risk across 93,936 participants in the UCLA ATLAS Community Health Initiative. Phenome-wide association studies identify 19,431 variant-phenotype associations – 39.5% previously unreported – with 76% replicating in independent biobanks. Exome-wide burden testing of predicted deleterious variants uncovers novel gene-disease associations and ancestry-specific pharmacogenomic enrichments. Ultimately, this body of work demonstrates that fully deciphering how genetic variation shapes neuropsychiatric disease requires coupling large-scale genomic investigations, like those from biobanks and GWAS, with isoform-level resolution from early developmental samples to trace genetic risk from its earliest molecular perturbations in the developing brain to its clinical consequences across diverse human populations.NeurosciencesBioinformaticsGeneticsbiobank genomicsgenome-wide association studiesisoform expressionneurodevelopmentneuropsychiatric geneticstranscriptomicspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7k53f4sjetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9w2885wn2026-06-16T06:37:19Zqt9w2885wnLinker Design for Therapeutic BioconjugatesFu, ZihuanMaynard, Heather D2026-06-12Protein and peptide therapeutics are a unique modality of pharmaceuticals that have played a crucial role in the treatment of various diseases. This class of therapeutics has gained popularity in the recent years due to their high selectivity and efficacy. Bioconjugation is a powerful tool to further enhance their capabilities by covalently attaching synthetic or natural substrates to the biomolecules. This technique can impart new properties to these biomolecules such as improved stability, selectivity, and pharmacokinetics. Connecting biomolecules and their substrates, linkers play a central role in controlling the stability, release behavior, and physicochemical properties of therapeutic bioconjugates.One important class of bioconjugates is protein-polymer conjugates. Conjugating polymers to therapeutically relevant proteins often results in increased stability and circulation time in vivo. However, the addition of polymers can lead to a significant or complete loss of activity compared to the native proteins. Therefore, the Maynard group developed a class of hydroxybenzylamine traceless linkers that can reversibly conjugate to amine residues on proteins. This unstable, reversible linkage allows for stimuli-responsive recovery of proteins’ activity.Initial work focused on increasing the release rate of this class of traceless linkers to further expand their utility (Chapter 2). DFT calculations demonstrated that the amine release is reversible and thus dictates the release kinetics. In collaboration with a computational chemist, we discovered that using a polycyclic core for the linker stabilizes the quinone methide intermediate and accelerates the rate significantly. With this mechanistic understanding, a panel of polycyclic hydroxybenzylamine linkers was synthesized. Kinetic studies demonstrated that 1,4-naphthalene linkers had a release half-life of 6 hours, similar to the fastest linker reported in the previous study, while 1,4-anthracene-based linkers had a release half-life of 18 minutes, which is 20 times faster. Employing heteroaromatic linkers further expanded the range of release half-lives, ranging from 18 minutes to 350 hours. This work demonstrates another avenue to tune the release profiles of hydroxybenzylamine traceless linkers and highlights the computational and experimental synergy available in this field.During the development of this class of traceless linkers, we observed that using the same linker, small molecules exhibited a significantly faster release rate (t1/2: 6 hours vs. 4 days). Therefore, a series of small molecule-, peptide-, insulin-, and lysozyme-PEG conjugates was synthesized, using a variety of PEG sizes. The release rates of these conjugates were measured, demonstrating that the release kinetics of hydroxybenzylamine traceless linker are governed by the relative sizes of payload and polymer, as well as solvent polarity (Chapter 3).Antibody-drug conjugates are another powerful therapeutic modality capable of tissue-specific delivery of highly potent cytotoxic warheads. One of the key challenges of ADCs is their hydrophobicity. The conjugation of hydrophobic cytotoxins to an antibody alters the ADC’s physicochemical properties resulting in decreased stability and poor pharmacokinetics. To address this challenge, we developed the synthesis of alternating iterative exponential growth (IEG) oligomers bearing orthogonal allyl and protected thiol functionalities (Chapter 4). Compared to previously reported hydrophilic ADC oligomer linkers, where the linkers themselves provide the hydrophilicity, these IEG oligomers can serve as a versatile platform for the facile installation of various combinations of hydrophilic moieties and cytotoxic payloads onto their side chains. Using these linkers, two linker-payloads with different hydrophilic motifs and payloads were synthesized and conjugated to trastuzumab. Incorporation of hydrophilic groups partially offsets payload hydrophobicity, yielding ADCs with improved overall hydrophilicity (Chapter 5).ChemistryPharmaceutical sciencesBiochemistrypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w2885wnetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6vs6d75d2026-06-15T06:43:44Zqt6vs6d75dSpeciation and Reactivity of Nickel Complexes Relevant to Cross-Coupling CatalysisRaab, Thomas JudahDoyle, Abigail Gutmann2026-06-11Chapter 1 describes an oxidation protocol using tribromide salts that allows for the generation of a well-defined nickel(I) precursor, [Ni(COD)Br]2 (COD =1,5-cyclooctadiene), as well as several new Ni(I) complexes. Included among them are complexes bearing bulky monophosphines, for which structure–speciation relationships are established and catalytic reactivity in a Suzuki–Miyaura coupling (SMC) is investigated. Notably, these routes also allow for the synthesis of well-defined monomeric bipyridine-bound Ni(I) complexes, which has not previously been achieved. These complexes, which react with aryl halides, can enable previously challenging mechanistic investigations and present new opportunities for catalysis and synthesis.
Chapter 2 describes the speciation and reactivity of well-defined low-valent (bipyridine)Ni complexes to better understand their behavior in catalytic systems. Spectroscopic and stoichiometric studies were used to identify a solvent dependence on rates of the irreversible dimerization of (t-Bubpy)NiBr (t-Bubpy = 4,4′-di-tert-butyl-2,2′-bipyridine), measured rates for the activation of aryl halides and alkyl halides by (t-Bubpy)Ni(I) and (t-Bubpy)Ni(0), and found that the reduction of (t-Bubpy)NiBr to Ni(0) is inefficient with common heterogeneous metal reductants. Taken together, these studies enabled us to propose a general mechanism for cross-electrophile coupling reactions.
Chapter 3 describes the design of a bisphosphine, DiploPhos, that outperforms state-of-the-art ligands for Ni to achieve sterically hindered Ni SMCs. Catalyst speciation studies revealed the hemilabile nature of DiploPhos, which improves reactivity relative to stronger chelating ligands but also leads to the formation of less-active DiploPhos-bridged aggregates. Lewis basic functionality (present on substrates or additives) was found to promote the disaggregation of these species and led to increased SMC yields. This observation is contrary to most other systems in which Lewis basic substrates inhibit Ni-catalyzed SMC reactions. Ligand exchange studies demonstrated that despite its hemilability, DiploPhos is more resistant to displacement by heterocycles than similar bisphosphines. Together, these properties led to best-in-class reactivity for sterically hindered, Lewis base-rich Ni SMCs. 第一章描述了一种利用三溴化物盐的氧化方法，该方法能够制备结构明确的镍(I)前体 [Ni(COD)Br]2（其中 COD = 1,5-环辛二烯），以及多种新型镍(I)配合物。其中包括含有大位阻单膦配体的配合物；针对这些配合物，本章确立了其结构与物种形态之间的构效关系，并考察了其在 Suzuki–Miyaura 偶联反应（SMC）中的催化活性。值得注意的是，这些合成路线还能制备结构明确的单体双吡啶配位镍(I)配合物，而此类配合物的制备在此前尚未实现。这些配合物能够与芳基卤化物发生反应，从而为此前极具挑战性的机理研究提供了可行途径，同时也为催化与合成领域带来了新的机遇。 第二章描述了结构明确的低价（联吡啶）镍配合物的物种形态及反应活性，旨在加深对其在催化体系中行为的理解。通过光谱学和化学计量学研究，我们确定了溶剂对 (t-Bubpy)NiBr（其中 t-Bubpy = 4,4′-二叔丁基-2,2′-联吡啶）不可逆二聚反应速率的影响；测定了 (t-Bubpy)Ni(I) 和 (t-Bubpy)Ni(0) 活化芳基卤化物及烷基卤化物的反应速率；并发现利用常见的非均相金属还原剂将 (t-Bubpy)NiBr 还原为 Ni(0) 的过程效率低下。综合上述研究结果，我们提出了一种适用于交叉亲电偶联反应的普适性机理。 第三章描述了一种双膦配体 DiploPhos 的设计；该配体在镍催化体系中的性能超越了现有的最先进配体，从而成功实现了空间位阻较大的镍催化 SMC（Suzuki-Miyaura 偶联）反应。催化剂物种形态研究揭示了 DiploPhos 具有“半易变”特性（hemilabile nature）；这一特性在提升反应活性的同时（相较于螯合能力更强的配体），也会导致形成活性较低的 DiploPhos 桥联聚集体。研究发现，路易斯碱性官能团（存在于底物或添加剂中）能够促进这些聚集体的解聚，进而提高了 SMC 反应的产率。这一观察结果与大多数其他催化体系的情况截然相反，因为在那些体系中，路易斯碱性底物往往会对镍催化的 SMC 反应产生抑制作用。配体交换研究表明，尽管 DiploPhos 具有半易变特性，但相较于其他同类双膦配体，它在面对杂环化合物的取代进攻时表现出更强的抵抗能力。综合上述特性，DiploPhos 在针对空间位阻大且富含路易斯碱性官能团的底物所进行的镍催化 SMC 反应中，展现出了同类体系中首屈一指的反应活性。Inorganic chemistryOrganic chemistryChemistrycatalysiscross-couplingnickelorganometallics催化镍publiceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vs6d75detdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt40t3s0332026-06-15T06:43:39Zqt40t3s033Allele-specific splicing modulates protein isoforms and Alzheimer’s riskKing, Alison JoyceXiao, Xinshu2026-06-11Despite growing catalogs of genetic variation linked to human traits and diseases, the functional impact of most genetic variants remains poorly understood. Alternative splicing, particularly in the human brain, represents a key layer of post-transcriptional regulation that may mediate genetic effects on gene expression and protein diversity. In this study, we systematically map allele-specific alternative splicing (ASAS) events in postmortem brain tissues from the Mount Sinai Brain Bank cohort, identifying hundreds of genetically regulated splicing events across four brain regions. Using a concordance-based method, we nominate over 500 putative functional SNPs associated with ASAS, many of which overlap splicing QTLs (sQTLs), RNA-binding protein binding sites, and GWAS loci for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), brain traits, and immune phenotypes. ASAS events are enriched in genes involved in mitochondrial function and frequently occur in 5′ untranslated regions (5′ UTRs), where they are associated with protein quantitative trait loci (pQTLs), alternative start codons, and isoform-specific domain changes – highlighting an underappreciated mechanism through which noncoding variants can influence translation and proteome complexity. Importantly, we also identify a subset of ASAS events exhibiting disease-specific splicing patterns in AD brains, including functional SNPs with opposing splicing effects between AD and control groups in genes implicated in mitochondrial function and neuronal signaling. Together, our results provide a brain-specific, splicing-resolved map of regulatory variation and uncover novel mechanisms linking genetic variation to transcript and protein-level changes in AD. This work highlights the importance of allele-specific splicing analysis for interpreting noncoding variation in complex human disorders.BioinformaticsGeneticsNeurosciencesAlzheimer's Diseasegenetic riskisoformsplicingpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/40t3s033multimediaoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2bs6j37j2026-06-15T06:43:34Zqt2bs6j37jAccelerated Prediction of Inertial Particle Transport in Viscous Streaming FlowsWu, QiyuanEldredge, Jeffrey D2026-06-11Viscous streaming fows, generated when a body oscillates at moderate Reynolds number, produce cellular structures that trap and transport inertial particles—a mechanism with applications in microfuidic sorting and targeted drug delivery. Predicting mean particle trajectories in these flows is computationally challenging because the transient from rest to a periodic steady state must be resolved at the much smaller viscous time scale, creating a bottleneck for exploring the large parameter space of body geometry and oscillation conditions.We develop a frequency-domain fnite-element framework that bypasses this transient entirely. The governing equations are recast in time-harmonic form, replacing time-marching with two sparse linear solves: a complex-valued unsteady Stokes problem for the oscillatory frst-order fow and a steady Stokes problem for the second-order mean streaming feld. An iterative multipole far-feld boundary condition, ftted from the computed interior solution, truncates the infnite fuid domain compactly without sacrifcing interior accuracy. Together, these formulations replace the O(103) time steps a time-domain method needs to march through the startup transient with two sparse solves per confguration. The framework is discretized with Taylor–Hood P2–P1 fnite elements on body-ftted unstructured meshes, and superconvergent patch recovery provides the smooth velocity gradients required by the Stokes drift and Safman lift. Once the streaming feld is in hand, particle trajectories for any combination of particle parameters are obtained by integrating the Lagrangian-mean velocity feld at negligible additional cost.We verify the method against the closed-form analytical solution for an oscillating cylinder at Re = 20, 40, and 80, and demonstrate it on a tilted ellipse, a flleted square, and a three-cylinder array driven by sequential single-body actuation. The results confrm the method’s accuracy, geometric fexibility, and efciency.Aerospace engineeringFluid mechanicsApplied mathematicsFinite element methodFrequency-domain methodInertial particle transportMicrofluidicsMultipole boundary conditionViscous streamingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2bs6j37jhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2bs6j37j/qt2bs6j37j.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt51k614ps2026-06-15T06:43:30Zqt51k614psInterfacial and Thermo-Mechanical Characterization of Flux-less AgIn2-coated Indium Thermal Interface Material for High-Performance ComputingOh, JiseongIyer, Subramanian S2026-06-11This thesis presents the interfacial and thermo-mechanical characterization of a next-generation flux-less Indium thermal interface material (TIM) architecture utilizing an AgIn2 intermetallic compound (IMC) passivation layer, specifically developed to mitigate severe thermal bottlenecks in high-power density heterogeneous integration and large-area wafer-scale integration for high-performance computing (HPC). To overcome the inherently high interfacial thermal resistance and operational failure risks—such as material pump-out and leakage short-circuits—associated with conventional carbon-based TIMs and liquid metals, this thesis introduces an oxygen-suppressing AgIn2-coated Indium preform tailored for reliable bonding on optimized Cu/Ni/Au metallization substrates without the organic flux residues. Experimental characterization demonstrates that the proposed flux-less AgIn2-coated Indium TIM bonding sample effectively eliminates volatile organic outgassing, securing a continuous metallic joint with an initial void fraction of 1.12% and an exceptionally low interfacial thermal resistance (RTIM) of 3.7 mm2·K/W. Furthermore, accelerated aging via 100 cycles of the temperature cycling test (TCT) confirms long-term thermo-mechanical reliability; while the flux-based sample showed a 27.3% thermal resistance increase due to the entrapped flux residue expansion, the flux-less AgIn2 joints restricted their thermal resistance increase to a negligible 5.4% (3.9 mm2·K/W) and confined mechanical shear strength degradation to just 1.7% through a precipitation hardening mechanism. Furthermore, Ansys 3D thermal simulations indicate that under a peak workload of 4900 W, the flux-less AgIn2-coated Indium TIM suppresses the maximum junction temperature to a stable 80.3°C, completely preventing the thermal runaway (165.93°C) induced by traditional thermal grease. Remarkably, this compliant 150 µm-thick Indium joint matches the ideal thermal baseline of direct Cu-Cu thermal compression bonding (TCB) joint within a minimal margin of 4.73°C.Ultimately, this research demonstrates that the optimized flux-less AgIn2-coated Indium TIM successfully overcomes the critical challenges of large area Cu-Cu TCB for heat sink, including severe manufacturing complexities, high thermal budgets, and non-reworkable constraints. By establishing a highly scalable, mechanically compliant, and robustly reworkable engineering foundation, this developed packaging methodology serves as a viable, ultimate thermal management solution for next-generation advanced high-power computing ecosystems.EngineeringMaterials scienceThermodynamicsMechanical engineeringCu-Cu Thermal Compression Bonding (TCB)Indium TIMThermal Interface Material (TIM)Thermal ResistanceWafer Scale IntegrationpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/51k614psetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0jc1q0p52026-06-15T06:43:24Zqt0jc1q0p5Inflammation as a key player in the deleterious effects of dim light at night in a mouse model of autismStark, GemmaBlock, Gene DColwell, Christopher S2026-06-11Individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), such as intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD), exhibit disturbances in their daily cycles of sleep and wake. It has also been documented that many young people with NDD spend prolonged time in front of electrical screens at night. Using the Contactin-associated protein-like 2 knockout (Cntnap2 KO) mouse model of ASD, that recapitulates several symptoms of this disorder including altered sleep/wake cycles, we investigated how an environmental circadian perturbation, such as exposure to light at nighttime, may synergistically or not affect genetically predisposed individuals. We have previously reported that exposure to dim-light at night (DLaN) for two weeks worsens the activity rhythms and repetitive behavior of these mutants and elicitsan increased expression of cFos in a glutamatergic cell population in the basolateral amygdala (BLA), an area associated with repetitive behavior along with the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In addition, an increase in the number of microglia, the immune resident cells of the CNS, was
triggered by DLaN in the PFC along with cytomorphological changes. Given these findings, my thesis project aimed at exploring whether DLaN affects microglia in the BLA and if this cell type, and consequent (neuro)inflammation, act as a key mediator of the DLaN-driven effects in both the PFC and BLA, two regions closely tied to the abnormal behaviors observed in individuals affected by ASD. These findings suggest that DLaN exposure may provoke an inflammatory cascade in these brain areas, with the Cntnap2 KO mice exhibiting a heightened vulnerability to this neuroimmune response compared to their wild-type counterparts.PhysiologyCellular biologyNeurosciencesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jc1q0p5https://escholarship.org/content/qt0jc1q0p5/qt0jc1q0p5.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6sr7284k2026-06-15T06:43:19Zqt6sr7284kThe Role of Hippocampus in Navigational Learning and Decision MakingWang, ShiyunBlair, Hugh2026-06-11Navigation requires animals to learn where they are, predict where actions will lead, and choose actions according to expected outcomes. The hippocampus has long been associated with navigation through its spatial representations, but its precise role in value-based decision making remains unresolved. This dissertation examines hippocampal contributions to navigational learning and decision making through the framework of reinforcement learning, with particular attention to the distinction between model-based and model-free control.Chapter 1 reviews how reinforcement learning concepts can be applied to spatial navigation. It first defines navigational states, actions, rewards, and values, and then considers how hippocampal place cells may contribute to state representation in both spatial and non-spatial domains. Evidence from win-stay/win-shift tasks, water mazes, plus mazes, and computational models suggests that hippocampal involvement cannot be explained simply by labeling behaviors as model-based or model-free. Instead, the hippocampus may contribute whenever allocentric or relational state representations are behaviorally useful. The chapter further considers how hippocampal theta sequences and sharp-wave ripple replay may support encoding, retrieval, planning, value propagation, and updating of state relationships. Chapter 2 experimentally tests whether hippocampal-dependent navigation necessarily implies outcome-sensitive, goal-directed control. Rats learned a two-outcome spatial decision task in which identical turning actions led to different rewards depending on choice-point location. Some task conditions required hippocampal-dependent spatial discrimination, whereas others allowed hippocampal-independent performance. After extensive training, rats showed outcome-insensitive choice behavior even when accurate task performance depended on the hippocampus. However, explicit revaluation training produced outcome-sensitive behavior, demonstrating that the task could reveal revaluation sensitivity under appropriate conditions. These findings show that hippocampal representations can support navigational decisions under both value-sensitive and value-insensitive control. Together, this dissertation argues that use of a hippocampal cognitive map does not by itself define goal-directed behavior; rather, outcome sensitivity depends on how hippocampal state representations are coupled to systems that encode and update reward value.PsychologyNeurosciencesBehavioral sciencesAnimal sciencesCognitive psychologyDecision makingHabitHippocampusNavigationReinforcement Learningapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sr7284khttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6sr7284k/qt6sr7284k.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8wp2b7cs2026-06-15T06:43:14Zqt8wp2b7csEnhancing Labor Management Through Evidence Based Care: A Nurse-led Educational InterventionSubedee, PratimaChen, Wei Ti WTC2026-06-11Background: Cesarean birth rates, particularly among low-risk nulliparous, term, singleton, vertex pregnancies, remain a major perinatal quality concern. Although cesarean delivery is lifesaving when clinically indicated, unnecessary primary cesareans are associated with increased maternal morbidity, complications in future pregnancies, and higher healthcare costs. Nationally, the NTSV cesarean rate remains above the Healthy People 2030 target of ≤23.6%, and substantial variation across hospitals suggests that practice differences, not patient risk alone, contribute to avoidable cesarean births. At the project site, the NTSV cesarean rate was consistently higher exceeding national benchmarks. Labor and delivery nurses are central to evidence-based intrapartum care due to their continuous bedside presence, clinical judgment, patient advocacy, and implementation of physiologic labor support strategies. However, inconsistent knowledge, confidence, and application of standardized labor management practices may contribute to variation in care. This Doctor of Nursing Practice quality-improvement project implemented a structured, nurse-led educational intervention to enhance labor nurses’ knowledge and self-efficacy in applying evidence-based intrapartum practices, supporting guideline-concordant care and foundational efforts to reduce unnecessary primary cesarean births. Objectives: To evaluate the impact of a structured, nurse-led educational intervention combining a PowerPoint presentation and hands-on practice improved labor and delivery nurses’ knowledge and self-efficacy in applying evidence-based intrapartum labor management compared with a PowerPoint presentation alone over a 4-week implementation period. Methods: This quality-improvement project used a quasi-experimental pre–post design to evaluate the effect of a structured, nurse-led educational intervention on labor and delivery nurses’ knowledge and self-efficacy in evidence-based intrapartum care. The intervention included a standardized voice-over PowerPoint module aligned with CMQCC and ACOG guidelines, with an optional hands-on practice component focused on maternal positioning, labor-support tools, and case-based applications. A convenience sample of 68 labor and delivery nurses completed pre- and post-intervention surveys over a 4-week implementation period. Knowledge was assessed using investigator-developed items, and self-efficacy was measured using the validated Self-Efficacy Labor Support Scale. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, paired t-tests, Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, Cohen’s d, and Cronbach’s alpha. Results: Knowledge and self-efficacy improved significantly following the intervention. Mean knowledge scores increased from 78.31% to 92.46%, t(67) = −4.36, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 0.52. Mean self-efficacy scores increased from 5.81 to 6.59, t(67) = −5.42, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 0.66. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests confirmed significant improvements in both outcomes. Secondary analysis showed no significant difference in knowledge gains between PowerPoint-only and PowerPoint plus hands-on groups; however, self-efficacy gains were significantly greater among nurses who completed both didactic and hands-on training (p = .002). Exploratory analyses indicated that less experienced nurses demonstrated greater gains, while education level and work shift were not significantly associated with outcomes. Conclusion: This DNP project demonstrated that a structured, nurse-led educational intervention is a feasible strategy to improve labor and delivery nurses’ knowledge and self-efficacy in evidence-based intrapartum care. Although outcomes were limited to nurse-level measures, these competency gains support readiness for guideline-concordant practice and future perinatal quality improvement efforts. The findings highlight bedside nurses’ critical role in promoting safe, consistent, and patient-centered maternity care.NursingEducationObstetricsHealth care managementCesarean sectionEvidence based practiceLaborLabor managementNTSVNurseapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wp2b7cshttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8wp2b7cs/qt8wp2b7cs.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2613z91d2026-06-15T06:43:09Zqt2613z91dStained in Blood: Desire and the Sacred Male Torso in Italy, c.1500Glaser, Rachel MarielWIlson, Bronwen2026-06-11By the early sixteenth century, the unclothed sacred body had become a mainstay in Christian art. The popularity of the religious nude raised questions about what the sacred body should look like: should it stress the suffering of Christ by presenting an emaciated, bloody body as it did in the late medieval period, or his ultimate triumph over suffering in the form of a beautiful, unblemished body as reformed by Michelangelo? Both approaches to representations carried the potential to undermine Christ’s divinity – the former by overemphasizing his human suffering, the latter by inspiring lust in its viewers. This thesis investigates this long-standing debate using three distinctive, but anomalous, artworks in which attempts to realize the idealized sacred body are undercut by their representational idiosyncrasies— Fra Bartolomeo’s St. Sebastian with an Angel (c. 1514-1516), Andrea del Castagno’s Crucifixion (c. 1447), and Donato Bramante’s Christ at the Column (c. 1490–99). The histories of these paintings suggest that all three paintings raised, and continue to raise, questions about the nude male in devotional painting, even while they show that such arguments about the religious nude and the presence of blood may be largely theoretical.Art historyFine artsGender studiesDivinityAndrea del CastagnoDonato BramanteEarly ModernFra BartolomeoGenderRenaissancepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2613z91detdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6wh8m0v42026-06-15T06:43:04Zqt6wh8m0v4The Spirit of White American Femininity: The (Implicit) Politics of Competition Dance in Louisville, KentuckyRoth, Samantha RaeBanerji, AnurimaRazack, Sherene2026-06-11This dissertation is the first critical ethnographic study of competition dance, one of the most prevalent types of formal dance training for US youth, which emerged in the late 1970s. Competition dance is overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, practiced by young, white, middle-class girls. Competition choreographies regularly feature Black popular dances and other culturally specific movement forms; yet they are largely performed according to Euro-American aesthetic values. Beginning with, yet departing from, this demographic dominance and the practice’s politics of representation, this dissertation analyzes the bodily aesthetics, physical movements, interpersonal expectations, and political economic infrastructures of competition dance practices in Louisville, Kentucky and the surrounding areas. The project uses multiple methods including immersive ethnographic fieldwork (participant-observation and qualitative interviews), archival research, discourse analysis, and choreographic analysis. Employing an interlocking analytic, which posits that systems of oppression function through each other rather than merely intersecting, the dissertation then shows how local competition dance practices often tacitly perpetuate historical forms of gendered, racial, class, and colonial violence.Within this analysis, the dissertation particularly centers gendered choreographies of racial power, denoting how White American Femininity functions as a performative social construction, rather than essentialized identity, that consists of kinesthetic, aesthetic, and affective norms, which anyone can (aspire to) enact. The project traces the reification and reproduction of idealized and (de)sexualized tropes and historical roles in exciting and energetic performances (that dominate others), unwavering commitments to dance studios and teams despite personal costs, and never-ending labor done for the good of children. The project argues that competition dance in Louisville performs and disseminates the spirit of White American Femininity—the affective and ideological fictions that sustain white supremacy, capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy—as a giving ethos, a divine athleticism, team loyalty, and an emotional wage that are haunted by and spectacularize the violence of US empire.DanceEthnic studiesGender studiesPolitical scienceWomens studiesAmerican studiescisheteropatriarchycompetition danceLouisville KentuckyWhite American Femininitywhite supremacypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wh8m0v4etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8x8843052026-06-15T06:42:59Zqt8x884305The Ballad’s Racial Borders: Race, Nationalism, and Imperialism in the Nineteenth-Century BalladFebo, VanessaCohen, Michael C.2026-06-11The Ballad’s Racial Borders takes the ballad genre as a lens through which to examine how nineteenth-century poems engage with developing nationalisms in extant and former colonies of the British Empire. It focuses on the ballad’s racial foundations, rooted in Anglo-Saxonism and White Britishness, which shape this discourse. For those in the nineteenth century, the ballad was a relic of England’s supposed cultural origins; the genre’s contours were defined by the numerous collectors and writers who documented, categorized, and anthologized old ballads. Poets who wrote new ballads during this period connected with this ancient English culture, helping to construct a new British nationalism. However, this dissertation contends that while the ballad genre engages with cultural and political formations, it is also defined by its ties to Anglo-Saxonism and British Whiteness. The racial underpinnings of the ballad are most clear when one explores poets writing from the peripheries or borders of the empire. Thus, this project examines poets writing from three different countries, each location having a different degree of connection to Britain: Toru Dutt and Rudyard Kipling writing from India; E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) and Duncan Campbell Scott writing from Canada; and Frances E.W. Harper and Margaret J. Preston writing from the southern United States. Through the ballad lens, Dutt’s Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan and Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses help us to better understand the temporal and racial relationship between India, Scotland, Ireland, and England. Ballads from Johnson’s The White Wampum and Scott’s New World Lyrics and Ballads connect indigeneity to the construction of a Canadian national identity after Confederation. The third chapter departs from countries under British imperialism. Instead, Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life and Preston’s Colonial Ballads, Sonnets, and Other Verse reveal how ballads from the United States’s Reconstruction era develop a postbellum nationalism that might draw from or refute claims to an Anglo-Saxon cultural legacy.LiteratureAmerican literatureBritish & Irish literatureBalladNineteenth CenturyPoetryTransatlantic LiteraturepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8x884305etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9xs2b9kf2026-06-15T06:42:55Zqt9xs2b9kfCompilation and Architecture Design for Quantum ComputingLin, Wan-HsuanCong, Jason JC2026-06-11Quantum Computing has the potential in achieving exponential speedup in classical intractable problem. However, under current technology, quantum computers are still prone to errors caused by environment noises. Therefore, quantum error correction (QEC) protocol is necessary to realize large scale computation. Without enough qubits, e.g., 10,000 qubits, to perform full fault tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) experiment, we perform noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computation, which characterizes by quantum processors with up to a thousand of qubits, or partial FTQC computation by selectively protecting operations with a few thousands of qubits. In this region, to fully utilize the power of quantum computer, having a high quality compilation tool is crucial.Among all compilation stacks, quantum layout synthesis has a big impact on circuit fidelity. Quantum layout synthesis (QLS) is the process to map program qubits in a circuit to the target hardware and arrange the gate execution while satisfying different hardware constraints for different technologies. For example, a fix-connectivity architecture such as super conducting qubit platform provides a fixed qubit interaction once the chip is fabricated, and only support nearest-neighbor two-qubit interaction, while in the circuit, such interaction can happen on any pair of qubits. Therefore, QLS should accommodate the circuit connectivity to the hardware limitation by SWAP insertion. QLS for dynamic architectures such as neutral atom imposes different constraints. In such architecture, the qubit connectivity can be reconfigured by physical movement. Thus, instead of SWAP gates, QLS inserts physical movement to enable entanglement gates. In this dissertation, we focus on developing high-quality and scalable QLS tools for both fix and dynamic architectures and perform architecture evaluation and optimization.In addition to NISQ compilation, demonstrating quantum advantage before large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers become practical remains a central challenge. Early fault-tolerant quantum computing (EFTQC) addresses this gap by combining limited quantum error correction with resource-efficient execution. In this dissertation, we develop a real-time compilation framework for EFTQC architectures characterized by staged execution, online resource coordination, and probabilistic operations. The framework jointly coordinates resource preparation, assignment, routing, teleportation scheduling, and correction handling to exploit hardware reconfigurability and execution parallelism under dynamic runtime conditions. We demonstrate the framework on the neutral-atom STAR architecture and further show that the same compiler abstractions naturally extend to fault-tolerant execution based on T cultivation. This unified compilation approach improves execution efficiency while enabling architecture studies across both partially fault-tolerant and fully fault-tolerant quantum computing systems.Building on the compilation results, we perform an architecture study covering fixed-connectivity, dynamic, and partial-FTQC designs. For NISQ devices, careful architectural choices can substantially improve circuit fidelity. For fault-tolerant systems, forward-looking evaluation of which architectural components provide the greatest benefit is crucial to guide future hardware development.Computer scienceComputer engineeringArchitectureCompilationCustomized ArchitectureQuantum Computingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xs2b9kfhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9xs2b9kf/qt9xs2b9kf.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3cg1t4qj2026-06-15T06:42:50Zqt3cg1t4qjNanoscale Characterization and Hydrothermal Synthesis of Egyptian Blue for Fluorescence Cooling ApplicationsKim, Isabella JhaeunDunn, Bruce2026-06-11Egyptian blue (CaCuSi4O10, cuprorivaite) is the world's oldest known synthetic pigment, first produced in ancient Egypt approximately 5,000 years ago. Beyond its historical significance, Egyptian blue represents a case where past and present technology could mutually benefit each other. Modern characterization technology has shed light on the details of ancient production, while the near-infrared (NIR) photoluminescence of Egyptian blue has opened new avenues in applications. This dissertation is organized around the idea of linking past, present, and future by (1) examining archaeological samples of Egyptian blue, (2) improving the modern synthesis, and (3) exploring the potential of Egyptian blue in passive cooling applications.The first part of the dissertation presents a sub-micron scale analysis of Hellenistic Egyptian blue samples from Delos and Amathus, revealing information about ancient production technology that is inaccessible through bulk characterization alone. Thick amorphous intergranular films (AIFs) in the Delos ingot could suggest prolonged annealing. Grain size and high-density stacking faults in the Amathus paint provide evidence of mechanical grinding. CaSn3 nanoparticles in the glass phase of the same sample indicate localized reducing conditions.The second part of the dissertation investigates the hydrothermal synthesis of Chinese blue (BaCuSi4O10) and Egyptian blue as a low-temperature alternative to conventional synthesis. For Chinese blue, increasing the Si precursor ratio resulted a morphological progression from thin nanosheets to nanoscrolls to thicker plate-like structures, consistent with proposed rolling mechanism of nanoscroll formation. Egyptian blue was successfully synthesized at 350°C, showing the same trend of increasing nanostructure thickness with silica ratio.The third part of the dissertation provides preliminary results for the passive cooling potential of Egyptian blue’s NIR photoluminescence. Kubelka-Munk-based mixing models successfully predicted the pigment to barium sulfate ratios required to achieve chromatic matching across seven blue pigments. Under direct solar irradiance, Egyptian blue panels were consistently cooler than other chromatically equivalent alternatives throughout the day, with a temperature differential of up to 7°C.Together, these results show that Egyptian blue links archaeomaterials science, nanomaterial synthesis, and passive cooling, with a significance stretching from the ancient world to modern applications.Materials scienceEngineeringPhysical chemistryNanotechnologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cg1t4qjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3cg1t4qj/qt3cg1t4qj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4sq4f1xp2026-06-15T06:42:44Zqt4sq4f1xpFundamental Study on the Nanotechnology-Enhanced Castability of High-Performance Aluminum AlloysChen, Guan-ChengLi, Xiaochun2026-06-11High-performance aluminum alloys are widely used in aerospace, automotive, energy, and consumer electronic applications because of their high specific strength, heat-treatability, corrosion resistance, and good surface finishing capability. However, these alloys are traditionally processed through wrought routes because they are difficult to cast into complex geometries. Their wide freezing ranges, low fluidity, poor feeding behavior, and high susceptibility to hot cracking, shrinkage porosity, and rough surface formation limit their use in near-net-shape casting. This dissertation investigates nanoparticle-enhanced processing, or nano-treating, as a manufacturing strategy to improve the castability of high-performance aluminum alloys while maintaining their desirable material properties.The first part of this work examines the effect of TiC nanoparticles on the fluidity and solidification behavior of wrought aluminum alloys such as AA2024, AA6063, and AA7075. Vacuum fluidity testing showed that small additions of TiC nanoparticles significantly increased flow length and effectively reduced or eliminated hot cracking in all three alloy systems. Microstructural characterization revealed that untreated alloys formed coarse dendritic grains that interlocked at the flow front and stopped melt flow, while nano-treated alloys developed fine, equiaxed grains that formed a weaker semi-solid network and allowed the remaining liquid to continue flowing. Thermal analysis further confirmed that nanoparticles delayed solidification, postponed the formation of a coherent grain network, and maintained a higher liquid fraction during the final stages of solidification. These results demonstrate that nano-treating enhances castability by modifying the flow stoppage mechanism through grain refinement, delayed solidification, and improved liquid feeding. The second part of this dissertation investigates nanoparticle-induced interfacial energy modification and its role in thin-wall casting. Thermodynamic analysis showed that TiC nanoparticles tend to segregate to the metal-mold interface, reducing the effective solid-liquid interfacial energy and lowering the contact angle between molten aluminum and the ceramic mold surface. This improved wettability reduces capillary back-pressure, which becomes increasingly important in sub-millimeter casting cavities. Thin-wall investment casting of AA7075 confirmed that nano-treated alloys achieved better filling in 0.4 mm and 0.3 mm thick strips than untreated AA7075. In addition, nano-treated AA7075 exhibited lower surface roughness, refined equiaxed subsurface microstructure, and significantly reduced shrinkage porosity. For 2 mm thick strips, the porosity level decreased from 9.14% in untreated AA7075 to 0.29% in nano-treated AA7075. The improved surface and subsurface integrity also enabled a more uniform anodization result compared with untreated AA7075 and commercial A383 casting alloy. A predictive model was then developed to quantify the filling aspect ratio of thin-wall castings. The model couples pressure head, capillary back-pressure, melt velocity, and thermal stop time, with the nanoparticle effect introduced through contact angle changes derived from interfacial energy analysis. After calibration using the untreated AA7075 baseline, the model accurately predicted the aspect ratio trend for low and moderate TiC additions (e.g. less than 0.5 vol.%) in 0.3 mm strips. Deviations at higher nanoparticle content were attributed to increased apparent viscosity, particle-fluid interaction, and nanoparticle accumulation near the advancing flow front. Parametric studies further showed that both casting temperature and mold temperature improve filling capability, with mold temperature having a stronger effect. A thickness-limit study demonstrated that nano-treated AA7075 could fill a 0.2 mm cavity while untreated AA7075 could not, although both alloys remained unable to fill a 0.1 mm cavity under the present casting conditions. Finally, the practical capability of nanoparticle-enhanced casting was demonstrated through casting of parts with complex geometries. Nano-treated AA7075 successfully produced thin-wall turbine and smartwatch enclosure structures by rapid investment casting. For the turbine geometry, nano-treated AA7075 achieved a filling percentage of 96.44%, compared with 64.06% for untreated AA7075. The smartwatch enclosure study showed that nano-treated AA7075 can produce thin-wall structures with defect-free surfaces suitable for cosmetic applications after process optimization. This work was also extended to a nano-treated Al-Mn-Mg alloy system for gyroid heat exchanger structures. The optimized Al-3.5Mn-1Mg-NT alloy achieved higher strength and hardness than commercial AA3004 while maintaining comparable ductility, and it completely filled 0.5 mm-wall gyroid structures that AA3004 could only partially fill. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that nano-treating improves castability through three coupled mechanisms: solidification control, interfacial energy modification, and microstructural refinement. These mechanisms enhance fluidity, suppress hot cracking and shrinkage porosity, improve surface integrity, and enable the casting of thin-wall and complex geometries. By bridging the traditional gap between high material performance and manufacturability, nanoparticle-enhanced casting provides a pathway for producing lightweight, complex, and high-quality alloy components through efficient near-net-shape manufacturing.Mechanical engineeringMaterials scienceNanotechnologyAluminum alloyCastingManufacturingMetallurgyNanotechnologypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sq4f1xpetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4p4134hx2026-06-15T06:42:39Zqt4p4134hxModeling Microglia-Neuronal Crosstalk in Neuropsychiatric DisordersHawken, Natalie MarieGeschwind, Daniel H2026-06-11Extensive study of autism (ASD) and schizophrenia (SCZ) genetics has resulted in our understanding of these disorders as extremely heritable conditions. While genetic risk for these neuropsychiatric disorders (NPDs) mainly implicates genes expressed in pre-natal neurons, both conditions are associated with altered neuroimmune transcriptomic signatures. The development of stem cell differentiation protocols that recapitulate cell types present in the human brain has transformed and elevated in vitro modeling of NPDs. As a result, further mechanistic understanding of how NPD genetic risk and microglia, the brain’s resident macrophages, can be uncovered though stem cell-derived culture systems. In this dissertation, I combine validated differentiation protocols, NPD risk gene mutation, and transcriptomic analysis to learn more about prenatal neuron-microglia crosstalk in ASD and SCZ. First, I assess the transcriptomic and phenotypic validity of stem-cell derived microglia as a model for NPD biology. I confirm the compatibility of this system for co-culture modeling and identify the transcriptomic and cytokine signaling overlap with in vivo microglia. I find this model to superiorly model in vivo microglia compared to other available protocols. Second, I characterize the effects of ASD risk gene CHD8 haploinsufficiency on these microglia. I identify reduced immune response pathways and dampened cytokine signaling in CHD8+/- microglia consistent across multiple stem cell backgrounds. This work emphasizes how ASD genetic risk does not solely affect neuronal populations. Finally, I assess the genome-wide impact of NPD gene knockout in stem cell-derived neurons co-cultured with microglia. I pinpoint changes in neuronal apoptosis, synaptic organization, and proteostasis due to gene KO that are also modulated by microglia presence in culture. I connect drivers of transcriptomic changes in microglia and neurons to in vivo biology from studies of post-mortem NPD cortex. In sum, this work illustrates a comprehensive picture of the interplay of NPD genetic risk and neuroimmune communication and identifies potential neurodevelopmental mechanisms to explain microglia alterations in autism and schizophrenia.NeurosciencesCellular biologyGeneticsImmunologyautismmicroglianeuroimmuneschizophreniastem cell culturepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4p4134hxetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9vg8s5qw2026-06-15T06:42:34Zqt9vg8s5qwMachine Learning Analysis of Case Clearance in Los Angeles Violent Crimes, 2020 to 2024Hong, ShuWu, Yingnian2026-06-11This thesis explores whether the information contained in initial police reports can help predict whether a crime will be solved. I employed two different definitions of "case clearance": a broad definition, under which any form of case closure is considered a clearance; and a strict definition, which counts a case as cleared only if an arrest is made. I ran three predictive models under each of these two definitions, using data on 20,553 violent crimes recorded by the LAPD between 2020 and 2024. Among three, Gradient Boosting method achieves the best calibration and lowest Brier score. A single behavioral indicator, showing whether the victim knew the suspect, accounted for roughly a third of total feature importance. Interestingly, victim descent contributed close to zero and observed group level disparities tracked the distribution of crime types rather than any learned ethnic pattern.StatisticsArtificial intelligenceEnvironmental lawCriminologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vg8s5qwhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9vg8s5qw/qt9vg8s5qw.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4zv5269k2026-06-15T06:42:29Zqt4zv5269kReducing Polypharmacy in Older Adults Through Personalized Pharmacological Care: A Quality Improvement InitiativeArakelian, MelanieSong, Yeonsu2026-06-11Background: Polypharmacy, commonly defined as the concurrent use of five or more medications, is increasingly prevalent among older adults and contributes to adverse drug events, medication nonadherence, falls, cognitive decline, and increased healthcare utilization. Despite evidence-based deprescribing guidelines, structured medication reconciliation and deprescribing interventions remain inconsistently implemented in primary care settings. Objectives: To evaluate whether personalized pharmacologic care using medication reconciliation and deprescribing interventions reduce potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) and improve patient-reported outcomes among older adults aged 65-75 years in a primary care clinic.
Methods: This quasi-experimental quality improvement project was conducted in a Southern California primary care clinic and included adults aged 65-75 years with polypharmacy and multiple chronic conditions (n = 24). The 12-week intervention incorporated comprehensive medication reconciliation, application of AGS Beers Criteria and STOPP/START criteria, deprescribing interventions, patient education, and structured safety monitoring. Outcome measures included PIM counts, quality of life measured using the EQ-5D-5L visual analog scale, and medication adherence measured using the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale-8 (MMAS-8). Wilcoxon signed-rank tests evaluated pre- and post-intervention changes. Results: Median total medication count decreased from 8.0 (interquartile range [IQR] = 6.75–9.0) at baseline to 7.0 (IQR = 5.75–8.0) following the intervention. Median PIM count decreased from 1.0 (IQR = 1.0–2.0) to 0.0 (IQR = 0.0–1.0). Quality of life, measured using the EQ-5D visual analog scale, improved from a median of 63.5 (IQR = 50.0–68.25) to 72.5 (IQR = 65.0–75.25), while median MMAS-8 medication adherence scores improved from 2.0 (IQR = 1.5–2.5) to 3.0 (IQR = 2.5–3.5). Wilcoxon signed-rank testing demonstrated statistically significant improvement across all outcomes (p < .001). No adverse drug withdrawal events, medication-related urgent care visits, or emergency department visits were reported during the intervention period. Conclusion: Structured medication reconciliation and deprescribing interventions were feasible and effective in reducing medication burden and PIMs while improving quality of life and medication adherence among older adults in primary care. Findings support integration of evidence-based deprescribing workflows into routine primary care practice to improve medication safety and patient outcomes among older adults.GerontologyPharmacologyHealth care managementHealth sciencesNursingDeprescribingMedication OptimizationMedication ReconciliationOlder adultsPolypharmacyPrimary careapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4zv5269khttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4zv5269k/qt4zv5269k.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0mb268652026-06-15T06:42:24Zqt0mb26865On Applications of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence in Intelligent Tutoring SystemsKarbasi, KiaPottie, Gregory J2026-06-11Intelligent tutoring systems adapt instruction by estimating what a student understands, selecting what the student should encounter next, and delivering interventions that support learning. Natural language processing and artificial intelligence offer new ways to improve this loop because tutoring systems are built around linguistic and educational artifacts: questions, hints, explanations, standards, knowledge components, and student histories. This dissertation studies where those techniques help, where they fail, and how they should be connected to specific tutoring functions.
The dissertation examines five research directions across intervention generation and student modeling. First, it shows that structured multi-agent collaboration can improve the pedagogical quality of automatically generated mathematics questions. Second, it analyzes Deep Knowledge Tracing and argues that the relations learned by the model are better interpreted as prerequisite-like dependencies than as generic exercise associations. Third, it tests whether pretrained semantic representations can improve knowledge tracing by initializing knowledge-component inputs, finding that semantic similarity alone does not reliably improve performance. Fourth, it shows that text embeddings can be more useful when they reorganize the knowledge-component space itself, improving downstream knowledge tracing under the right data conditions. Finally, it introduces ReasonKT as a preliminary framework for reasoning-based knowledge tracing and evaluates a prompt-only instantiation that produces above-chance ranking signal and inspectable reasoning traces.
Across these studies, the dissertation argues that NLP and AI techniques are useful in intelligent tutoring systems when their representational, generative, or reasoning capabilities are tied to a concrete educational role. Language is not uniformly beneficial as an added feature; it becomes useful when it helps model student knowledge, interpret educational structure, generate instructional interventions, or connect these components into a more coherent adaptive system.Educational technologyComputer scienceArtificial intelligenceComputer engineeringInformation technologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mb26865https://escholarship.org/content/qt0mb26865/qt0mb26865.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4090b46h2026-06-15T06:42:18Zqt4090b46hComputational Tools for Biomedical Research in Statistical Genetics, Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Graphs, and Machine LearningSteinecke, DylanBenjamin, Daniel J.Turley, Patrick2026-06-11The contemporary era has seen a dramatic increase in the availability of biomedical data and computing power. Such data is available in millions of open access research articles spanning hundreds of diseases, online knowledge bases and ontologies covering multi-omic and medical entities, as well as national biobanks containing the genetic and phenotypic information of hundreds of thousands of human volunteers. However, to benefit biology and medicine, this data must be translated into knowledge. To do this, effective computational tools suited for each data modality and scientific analysis must be developed and employed. To this end, we developed computational tools in data science and machine learning for natural language processing (NLP), knowledge graphs, and statistical genetics. First, we developed and applied tools in NLP relevant for identifying disease biomarkers such as proteins, genes, and molecular processes. Second, we developed a knowledge graph benchmark to support graph learning for drug discovery and real-world biomedical science. Third, we developed and applied tools to measure the causal effects of genetic variation on phenotypic variation in human populations—estimating heritability, partitioned heritability, and genetic correlation in biobank data. Our methods—spanning machine learning, data science, statistical analysis, causal inference, data engineering, and other informatic approaches for biomedical science—are useful for translating data into generating biomedical hypotheses and/or understanding human biology.BioinformaticsBiomedical engineeringArtificial intelligenceBioinformaticsKnowledge GraphsMachine LearningMedical InformaticsNatural Language ProcessingStatistical GeneticspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4090b46hetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5b3206jq2026-06-15T06:42:13Zqt5b3206jq(Ware)Housework: The Politics and Poetics of Carceral Social Reproduction in CaliforniaStockton, RosieKyungwon Hong, GraceHaley, Sarah2026-06-11(Ware)Housework: The Politics and Poetics of Carceral Social Reproduction in California brings the critical study of the California carceral state into conversation with queer and trans interventions into the field of Social Reproduction Theory to examine the relationship between racialized state violence, capitalist surplus management, and the reproduction of social life and resistance under conditions of captivity. Motivated by ongoing debates in feminist, abolitionist, and carceral studies concerning how to theorize the dual crises of anti-Black racial and gender violence alongside the state’s management of surplus populations, I argue that the role of the contemporary prison in late capitalism cannot be fully grasped without centering the socially reproductive labor it both criminalizes, detains, and exploits. I term these labors of carceral social reproduction “(Ware)Housework,” which refers to the reproductive labor, care, and lifemaking practices done by women, trans, and nonbinary people serving extreme sentences in California women’s prisons that paradoxically reproduce both the carceral institution, capitalist value, yet also anticarceral life and resistance.Through an analysis of previously undocumented raced and gendered carceral labor and care formations, this dissertation advances three interconnected claims. First, it demonstrates how the sexual politics of extreme sentencing laws function as a mechanism through which the carceral state manages the reproduction of criminalized surplus populations. Second, it traces the informal reproductive labor practices that sustain alternative kinship formations, collective survival, and abolitionist politics within California women’s prisons. Third, it interprets creative production of incarcerated poets as forms of epistemological sabotage that unsettle dominant conceptions of freedom, humanity, and value that underpin carceral governance and capitalist accumulation.Drawing on a decade of abolitionist feminist organizing with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, the dissertation centers the knowledge production of people serving extreme sentences to engage four primary archives: California state policies expanding criminal liability through aiding-and-abetting statutes; court transcripts from cases involving women sentenced to life without the possibility of parole between 1978 and 1995; collectively authored abolitionist feminist organizing toolkits; and oral histories and poetry produced by people incarcerated in California women’s prisons over the past three decades. Throughout the dissertation, I engage with poetics as a critical method for indexing how the labor of love exceeds the grammars of both captivity and liberal emancipation, opening instead to alternative horizons of freedom.Gender studiesBlack studiesLGBTQ studiesSexualityCarceral StudiesGender and SexualityPoetryPrison AbolitionQueer and Trans StudiesSocial ReproductionpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5b3206jqetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9442m9022026-06-15T06:42:08Zqt9442m902Cavity Engineering and Characterization Tools for High Resolution THz QC-VECSEL Frequency CombsMattia, MichelaWilliams, Benjamin S2026-06-11Since their first demonstrations in the early 2000s, terahertz (THz) quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) have established themselves as a leading chip-scale semiconductor-based source of coherent THz radiation, driving advances in high-resolution spectroscopy, frequency-comb based metrology, and nondestructive imaging. More recently, THz quantum cascade vertical external cavity surface emitting lasers (QC-VECSELs) have been gaining momentum as a compelling QC architecture, where agile control over metasurface design and external cavity geometry enables scalable milliwatt-to-watt output powers, high-quality beam profiles, and advanced frequency selection and tunability. These properties also make QC-VECSELs an attractive platform for THz frequency comb generation, for which initial demonstrations based on RF harmonic injection locking have already been reported. This work presents two main contributions toward advanced development and characterization of THz QC-VECSEL frequency combs.First, I expand upon the design, implementation, and experimental validation of a custom-built hybrid Fourier Transform Spectrometer / Shifted Wave Interference Fourier Transform Spectrometry (FTS/SWIFTS) measurement platform offering interferometric-based spectral reconstruction at sub-GHz resolution extended to full phase-sensitive spectral and temporal frequency comb characterization. Then, I introduce a novel folded hemispherical QC-VECSEL external V-cavity design aimed at exploring RF-driven comb operation in cavities with a free-spectral range (FSR) (i.e. comb tooth spacing) reduced to ~2 GHz from our group’s previously published work at 3.8 GHz. Representative preliminary results are reported, including extended multimode QC-VECSEL operation in pulsed mode centered around 3.85 THz that covers an appreciable bandwidth between 100 and 200 GHz with 2 to 2.1 GHz longitudinal mode spacing. I highlight the advantages and prospective applications of this reduced FSR cavity, from easier access to low RF frequencies with modest instrumentation to flexible integration of intracavity elements in the ~10 cm long optical cavity for dispersion compensation or narrow, on-demand frequency selection.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringApplied physicsLaser cavity designTHZ QC-VECSELTHz QCLVECSELapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9442m902https://escholarship.org/content/qt9442m902/qt9442m902.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt90k5p7sh2026-06-15T06:42:03Zqt90k5p7shComputational Explorations of Organic Reaction Mechanisms and Protein-Ligand AssociationKim, JunyoungHouk, Kendall N2026-06-11Computational methods, such as density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD) methods, have proven very useful in the probing of various small molecule and biochemical systems. Among other uses, the insights gained from these computational methods can be leveraged to predict the binding affinity of protein-ligand interactions, rationalize reaction outcomes in organic syntheses, and provide novel insights into the thermodynamic properties of materials. This thesis explores the application of DFT and MD to answer outstanding questions in three different contexts: The differential binding of cannabinoids to the main cannabinoid receptors in humans, the periselectivity and stereoselectivity found in the intramolecular cycloadditions of alkenylheptafulvenes, and the effects of different substitution patterns on the efficacy of anthracene-based systems for solar energy storage.The first chapter of my thesis explores why certain cannabinoid ligands bind differently to the primary cannabinoid receptors, CB1 and CB2. As cannabis has increased in popularity in the United States, the prevalence of novel cannabinoids whose interactions with CB1 and CB2 are unknown has risen drastically. The first chapter of my thesis leverages MD methods to explain why cannabinoids’ binding to CB1 and CB2 vary, and explains what structural motifs are likely to cause differential binding.The second chapter of my thesis pivots to the analysis of alkenylheptafulvenes and their intramolecular cycloadditions. The diastereoselectivity and periselectivity of alkenylheptafulvenes’ intramolecular cycloadditions were studied experimentally by the Houk Group in 1983, but the chemical rationale for the reaction’s diastereoselectivity and periselectivity at different reaction temperatures was not explored. Thus, this chapter utilizes DFT to identify the factors that govern the periselectivity and stereospecificity of intramolecular [8+2] cycloadditions of alkenylheptafulvenes.The final chapter of my thesis analyzes how substituent effects in anthracenes affects their ability to be used as molecular solar energy (MOST) compounds. In the fight against climate change, renewable sources of energy, such as solar power, are being increasingly relied on to reduce the amount of global greenhouse gases emitted from the burning of fossil fuels. However, one limitation of solar energy is that it is intermittent, as such, effective energy storage and release systems are required to facilitate consistent power delivery using solar energy. Molecular solar energy storage (MOST) compounds are one such way to store and release energy, and one such class of compounds that have shown promise as a MOST system is substituted anthracenes. As such, the final chapter of my thesis discusses the substituent effects that modify the effectiveness of 9/10-substituted anthracenes’ effectiveness as molecular solar energy storage (MOST) compounds.ChemistryPhysical chemistryClimate changeChemical Biologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/90k5p7shhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt90k5p7sh/qt90k5p7sh.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3qf5c5092026-06-15T06:41:58Zqt3qf5c509Lab-on-a-Particle Platforms for Wide-Range Colorimetric and Droplet-Free Digital ImmunoassaysArnheim, Alyssa Dawn MichikoDi Carlo, Dino2026-06-11Protein biomarkers are central to disease diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic monitoring, yet no single assay format is optimal across the full range of biomarker concentrations, sample types, and clinical use settings. Highly sensitive assays often depend on specialized instrumentation and complex workflows, while accessible point-of-care formats typically sacrifice sensitivity, multiplexing, or quantitative performance. This dissertation explores how hydrogel microparticles can be engineered as tunable assay materials that bridge these extremes by controlling molecular transport, signal localization, and readout modality.First, I establish formulation-level design rules governing the accumulation of proteins and nanoparticles in PEG hydrogel microparticles. By systematically varying PEG molecular weight, polymer weight percent, and UV crosslinking conditions, I show that hydrogel network structure strongly influences the uptake and retention of large probes. More permissive formulations support the accumulation of proteins and gold nanoparticles, providing a materials basis for particle-based colorimetric assays and more broadly informing hydrogel design for applications where macromolecular transport is critical.Second, I investigate precipitation-based colorimetric signal generation on hydrogel particles and define practical design principles for quantitative particle-based color readout. Screening multiple enzyme-substrate systems demonstrates that substrate choice strongly affects signal localization, particle-to-particle crosstalk, and usable dynamic range. These studies identify conditions under which hydrogel particles can support localized and quantifiable colorimetric signal, advancing their potential for accessible diagnostic assays.Finally, I demonstrate a fully aqueous, droplet-free digital immunoassay on hydrogel particles that utlizes standard ELISA reagents and common laboratory equipment, including pipettes, centrifugation, and flow cytometry. In this system, horseradish peroxidase turnover of ADHP unexpectedly generates localized and persistent resorufin fluorescence on hydrogel particles, enabling digital enzyme counting without droplet generation or microwell compartmentalization. Using C-reactive protein as a model analyte, I show sensitive detection in buffer, diluted serum, and patient samples.Together, this work establishes hydrogel microparticles as a versatile platform for both accessible colorimetric assays and ultrasensitive digital biomarker detection, and demonstrates that co-design of material properties and signal-generation chemistry can expand the capabilities of lab-on-a-particle diagnostics.Biomedical engineeringHealth sciencesCellular biologyBiochemistryImmunologyColorimetric readoutDiagnosticDigital assayLab-on-a-particleMicrofluidicPoint-of-carepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qf5c509etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7zg2q5vk2026-06-15T06:41:52Zqt7zg2q5vkToward Multimodal AI for the Physical World: Perception, Generation, and ReasoningVilesov, AlexanderKadambi, Achuta2026-06-11Human intelligence is inherently multimodal. We combine vision, language, embodied experience, memory, and other streams of information into a coherent understanding of the physical world. These signals are used seamlessly to perceive our surroundings, plan actions, communicate ideas, create new concepts, and reason about events unfolding around us. This ability is not simply a matter of receiving many inputs; it depends on knowing what each signal reveals, what it obscures, and how different forms of evidence should be combined. Modern AI systems are moving in a similar direction. Today’s models increasingly combine vision, language, video, 3D structure, and other forms of data in an effort to reproduce human-like multimodal abilities while also extending beyond the human sensory envelope. Yet major challenges remain across the spectrum of multimodal AI: how to sense the right information, how to generate physically coherent content, and how to reason across visual, linguistic, spatial, and temporal representations. This dissertation presents a body of work toward multimodal AI for the physical world organized around three key pillars: perception, generation, and reasoning. In perception, we study cases where the data observed by a system places an upper bound on downstream inference. Through multimodal camera-radar sensing for remote heart-rate estimation, we show that complementary sensors can improve robustness and equity when vision alone is limited by the physics of light transport. For security, we motivate the use of multimodal sensor systems by showing that a monocular RGB camera, even when paired with cryptographic security measures and deepfake or recapture detectors, is not sufficient for verifying the realness of an image. In generation, we discuss how language and image diffusion models can be connected to structured 3D representations, enabling more controllable and compositional text-to-3D scene creation. In reasoning, we show that despite recent progress, state-of-the-art vision-language models still struggle to reason reliably over space and time. We extend this observation to coding agents in computer vision settings, where solving and debugging tasks often requires multimodal feedback, and show that current agents still struggle to incorporate visual evidence effectively. Together, these works contribute to improving the multimodal AI pipeline for the physical world, while also creating frameworks for probing its weaknesses and revealing where current systems still struggle to unify different modalities.Electrical engineeringComputer scienceArtificial intelligenceComputer VisionMultimodal AIapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zg2q5vkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7zg2q5vk/qt7zg2q5vk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6kj6f2vh2026-06-15T06:41:47Zqt6kj6f2vhOvercoming Sequential Bottleneck in Hardware AccelerationLo, MichaelCong, Jingsheng JasonChang, Mau-Chung Frank2026-06-11Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) have enabled many complex algorithms to be accelerated with a customized architecture that is specifically tailored to them. Besides being able to run the accelerator at high frequencies, these speedups usually come from customizable pipelines and exploiting explicit parallelism. However, some algorithms contain dependencies rendering them to appear sequential-like, limiting their acceleration potential. This dissertation aims to show that we can overcome mainly the dependency of memory and still benefit from hardware acceleration.This work focuses on accelerating different kinds of sequential-like workloads from many application domains onto FPGAs, specifically, genomics, file checksum, compression, internet protocol lookups, and boolean satisfiability (SAT). These workloads are considered hard to parallelize using central processing units (CPUs) or graphics processing units (GPUs) due to their fixed architecture. However, mapping the algorithm as is to an FPGA without program restructuring incurs limited or no performance gain and we demonstrate restructuring methods that are hardware accelerator friendly. These techniques include achieving initiation interval of one for data and control dependent loops, partial unrolling for data dependent loops, reorganizing shared memory to enable task parallelism, and hiding communication overhead between host and accelerator.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringInformation technologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kj6f2vhhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6kj6f2vh/qt6kj6f2vh.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt96t5g5xw2026-06-15T06:41:42Zqt96t5g5xwTransient real-gas thermodynamic and species transport modeling of ortho–para hydrogen in a closed-outlet cooling systemPanse, Aneesh SachinManousiouthakis, Vasilios2026-06-11High-pressure hydrogen cooling is important in storage and refueling systems where rapid pressurization can produce strong changes in temperature, density, and flow behavior. This thesis develops a transient COMSOL-based model for an ortho–para hydrogen mixture in a closed-outlet cylindrical cooling system. The geometry is represented as a two-dimensional axisymmetric domain consisting of an inner hydrogen region and a surrounding solid wall, with the heat removed through a prescribed low-temperature CO2-side cooling boundary. The outlet is kept closed throughout the simulation, while the inlet condition is activated using a time-dependent valve ramp. This configuration represents a transient filling and cooling of a confined heat-exchanger volume rather than a steady flow through an open exchanger.Hydrogen is modeled as a real gas using the Peng–Robinson equation of state (PR-EOS). Ortho-hydrogen and para-hydrogen are retained as separate transported species, but catalytic ortho–para conversion is not included because no catalyst is present and the cooling temperature remains in the sub-cryogenic range. The model solves transient mass, momentum, energy, solid-wall heat conduction, and species-transport equations in cylindrical coordinates. The species formulation includes Maxwell–Stefan-based transport, pressure-dependent diffusivity, and a retained thermal-diffusion contribution. The results show that the closed-outlet system undergoes a clear transient sequence. During inlet activation, hydrogen enters the fixed volume, then the axial velocity increases, and pressure rises rapidly. After the pressure field approaches, a high-pressure state, the velocity decays toward zero, confirming the closed-outlet behavior. The temperature response is governed by the competition between incoming 350 (K) hydrogen and heat removal through the 220 (K) cooling boundary. Upstream and centerline locations experience the strongest temporary thermal disturbance, while near-wall regions remain colder because of the radial heat transfer through the solid wall. The real-gas analysis shows that the ideal-gas behavior is acceptable only at a low pressure. At high pressure, the Peng–Robinson compressibility factor deviates significantly from unity, leading to substantial ideal-gas density overprediction. Therefore, the real-gas thermodynamic closure is necessary for a consistent pressure, density, velocity, and thermal-response prediction. Since the system is non-catalytic and cooled only to approximately 220 (K), large para-hydrogen enrichment is not expected. The main contribution of this work is a coupled real-gas thermodynamic and species-transport modeling framework for a closed-outlet high-pressure ortho–para hydrogen cooling.Chemical engineeringPhysical chemistryThermodynamicsclosed-outlet pressurizationCOMSOL Multiphysicshydrogen coolingMaxwell–Stefan diffusionortho–para hydrogenPeng–Robinson equation of statepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/96t5g5xwmultimediaoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt377651nf2026-06-15T06:41:37Zqt377651nfExamining Computational Thinking Instruction in Introductory Computer Science: A Lecture Analysis and Classroom InterventionSimon, BrookeJun, Eunice2026-06-11In the past two decades, computational thinking (CT) skills have been widely adopted and deemed necessary for students. CT skills are not clearly defined, but common skills across frameworks include abstraction, algorithmic thinking, and debugging, to name a few. Despite mass integration of these skills into classrooms, research on CT in higher education computer science classes remains limited.This thesis presents two studies bridging these research gaps. First, a lecture analysis of computational thinking skills in introductory computer science recursive lecture content to identify gaps in which CT skills are taught, and how. Second, the design and implementation of a single-session classroom intervention aimed at filling the gaps identified in study one and a student assessment to gauge student perceptions of these skills. Study one found that the CT skills taught in classrooms span a narrow band of CT skills, were primarily taught via example and not by direct instruction or active practice, and that there is little institutional consensus on what CT skills are taught. Study two found that although student perceptions positively increased after the intervention, a single session is likely insufficient to significantly improve student’s knowledge of these skills.Computer scienceEducational psychologyScience educationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/377651nfhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt377651nf/qt377651nf.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt04k4b8sm2026-06-15T06:41:32Zqt04k4b8smGeometric and Learning-Based Methods for Modeling Soft Robots and Flexible StructuresLahoti, Radha ManojKhalid Jawed, Mohammad2026-06-11Soft robots and flexible structures undergo large deformations involving bending, twisting, buckling, folding, and snap-through instabilities. Simulating these systems is challenging because models must be both physically accurate and computationally efficient enough to support design, analysis, and control. A central difficulty is that their mechanics are governed by two coupled sources of nonlinearity: geometric nonlinearity, arising from large rotations, finite deformations, and slender or thin structural geometry; and material or effective constitutive nonlinearity, arising either from the underlying material response or from reduced-dimensional descriptions of three-dimensional bodies. This dissertation develops geometric and learning-based simulation methods that address these challenges within a unified energy-based framework.The first part develops a modular discrete-differential-geometry-based simulator for soft robots and flexible structures. Within this framework, rods, shells, and hybrid rod–shell assemblies are represented in a shared global state, and contact, external forces, actuation, and feedback control are incorporated through modular energy and force contributions. This formulation supports geometrically exact large-deformation modeling while allowing new physical effects to be added without changing the core solver. The simulator combines vectorized assembly with implicit time integration and sparse nonlinear solves, supports both hinge-based and mid-edge-normal shell bending models, and includes smooth self-contact and friction for rod-rod, rod-shell, and shell-shell interactions. Simulation studies demonstrate passive deformation, actuation, self-contact, and control across examples including pneumatic actuators, parachutes, swimming and crawling soft robots, knotting, folding, and gripping. Numerical comparisons show that the implicit, vectorized implementation achieves comparable accuracy to established rod simulators while providing substantial speedups in stiff regimes.The second part develops HoDEL, a Homotopy-inspired Differentiable Energy Learning framework for discovering nonlinear constitutive models from equilibrium observations. Instead of requiring direct stress-strain labels, HoDEL learns a local strain-energy density by placing it inside the mechanical solver and requiring its equilibria to match observed shapes and, when available, reaction forces. Continuation in the loading parameter improves robustness in stiff and unstable regimes, while implicit differentiation through the converged equilibrium equations provides memory-efficient gradients. Structured neural energy architectures, physics-informed priors, and Hessian spectral regularization improve identifiability, generalization, and solver conditioning.Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, reduced finite-element systems, and real-world robotic deformation data show that equilibrium-based learning can recover reusable constitutive laws rather than memorized load-to-shape maps. The results identify when displacement observations are sufficient and when reaction-force supervision is necessary, and they show that physics-embedded energy models can capture nonlinear stiffening, Brazier-type softening, and snap-through. Together, the simulator and learning framework provide an end-to-end approach for modeling soft structures whose behavior is nonlinear in both geometry and material response, bridging predictive mechanics, data-driven constitutive modeling, and soft-robot design and control.Mechanical engineeringRoboticsMaterials scienceMechanicsDiscrete differential geometryLearning based constitutive modelingRods and ShellsSoft roboticsSoft structuresapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/04k4b8smhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt04k4b8sm/qt04k4b8sm.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5s2575d02026-06-15T06:41:27Zqt5s2575d0Learning under Imperfect Actions and MeasurementsKarakas, MerveFragouli, Christina P2026-06-11Distributed and embodied learning systems—drone fleets coordinated over wireless links, micro-robots actuated through biological media, sensor networks of cheap acoustic nodes—interact with their environments along two physically distinct interfaces: a central learner sends commands to remote agents, and it collects observations from remote sensors. In modern deployments neither interface is reliable: commands can be delayed, corrupted, or erased, and observations are noisy, partial, and expensive to acquire. Classical theories of sequential decision-making and signal processing tend to average these imperfections away, but in such deployments they are the dominant constraint, and algorithms that ignore them can fail catastrophically. This dissertation studies sequential decision-making when the channels that connect a learner to its environment are unreliable, treating two complementary settings as a single subject: an action pillar, in which a central learner running a bandit algorithm communicates intended arms to distributed agents over noisy channels, and a measurement pillar, in which a learner localizes a target through noisy, resource-limited sensor measurements.
The action pillar studies multi-armed bandit problems in which arm commands are conveyed over erasure channels to distributed agents; when commands are lost, agents persist with their last-received arm, and the learner cannot tell which arm generated the observed reward. Without accounting for this mismatch, classical bandit algorithms can incur linear regret. We first study the no-feedback regime, developing a generic redundancy wrapper for arbitrary bandit algorithms, a dedicated algorithm with matching upper and lower regret bounds, and a scheduling mechanism for multi-agent systems with heterogeneous erasure channels. We then introduce one-bit erasure acknowledgments and prove that feedback does not change the minimax regret order, but enables substantially more efficient algorithms in communication, energy, and data. Finally, beyond erasures we begin to study fixed-confidence best-arm identification over general discrete memoryless actuation channels, where the gap to the noiseless benchmark depends on graph-theoretic invariants of the channel, with zero-error capacity emerging as the natural threshold.
The measurement pillar studies target localization in distributed sensor networks where individual observations are noisy and only a limited number of sensors can be activated at any time. We develop two complementary tools: a noisy binary-search framework with overlapping partitions, which injects controlled redundancy so that a single noisy step cannot permanently exclude the true target, with exact error-probability characterizations and a Voronoi-geometry analysis of the per-step error event; and a top-p sensor-selection formulation, which produces a set-valued candidate list rather than a single best guess, with exact Gaussian error analysis, geometry-aware Bayesian algorithms exploiting spatial structure, and validation on a real outdoor acoustic testbed.
Taken together, the two pillars surface cross-cutting themes that neither side makes obvious in isolation: information-theoretic quantities — erasure probabilities, zero-error capacities, Gaussian error tails—repeatedly determine fundamental limits in problems whose surface formulation is purely algorithmic, and auxiliary information such as feedback changes what is comfortably achievable without changing what is fundamentally possible.Computer scienceElectrical engineeringComputer engineeringbanditserasure channelsinformation theoryresource-constrained learningapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5s2575d0https://escholarship.org/content/qt5s2575d0/qt5s2575d0.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7dd9b9392026-06-15T06:41:22Zqt7dd9b939Libraries, Literature, and Archives: How the United Daughters of the Confederacy preserved the Lost Cause ideology in California from 1944-1969Wright, Katelyn SaraPosner, Miriam2026-06-02This thesis addresses the work undertaken by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in California by analyzing the use of libraries, archives, and literature to preserve and disseminate narratives of the Lost Cause. The actions of the Daughters are framed through an information science lens by drawing on the archival concepts of appraisal and document strategy, as well as a further exploration of the intersection of race and gender in information institutions. I conducted research utilizing chapter meeting minutes, treasurer books, California and General Division Yearbooks, and other related materials from archival collections documenting the Emma Sansom chapter of Santa Ana and the Sterling Price chapter of Stockton. Using the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a case-study, this paper highlights the ways in which information institutions and the people that encompass them are subject to biases, which directly contradicts the inherent neutrality that has long governed perceptions of libraries and archives. This thesis is interested in gaining a deeper insight into the complex relationships between the United Daughters of the Confederacy and information institutions; thereby, providing insight into the ways in which narratives of the Lost Cause have been integrated into the collective memory of the United States.Library scienceHistoryInformation scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dd9b939https://escholarship.org/content/qt7dd9b939/qt7dd9b939.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5dg0b8dr2026-06-15T06:41:17Zqt5dg0b8drUnderstanding the Capabilities and Limitations of DFT for Simulating Hydrated ElectronsBorrelli, William RoccoSchwartz., Benjamin J2026-06-11Hydrated electrons (e− hyd’s) are excess electrons solvated in bulk water. Despite being the simplest possible anion in solution, e− hyd’s participate in complex solvation dynamics, chemistry, and spectroscopy, making them fundamentally interesting species to study. However, spectroscopic and thermodynamic experiments are unable to probe the solvation structure of this species directly, prompting researchers to use theoretical simulation to build an atomistic picture of e− hyd chemistry. Simulation models of the hydrated electron, spanning levels of theory, all give largely mixed agreement with experimental observables. To more rigorously delineate between these models and understand which methods are most applicable to this system, I present the calculation of numerous quantitative thermodynamic quantities, predictions for spectroscopic experiments that go beyond the current state-of- the-art, as well as methodological studies attempting to understand errors made by ab initio density functional theory (DFT) when simulating e− hyd.Chapter 2, reprinted with permission from William R. Borrelli, KennethJ. Mei, Sanghyun J. Park, and Benjamin J. Schwartz. “Partial Molar Solvation Volume of the Hydrated Electron Simulated Via DFT" J. Phys. Chem. B 2024, 128, 10, 2425–2431, calculates the partial molar volume (VM) of the DFT-based hydrated electron at multiple system sizes. The experimental VM for the hydrated electron is known to be 26±6 cm3/mol.[3] We utilize Kirkwood-Buff theory[7] to compute VM from the electron-water radial distribution function (RDF) and show that DFT underestimates this quantity at all system sizes. Moreover, it is unlikely that the VM is adequately converged with respect to finite size effects at the current accessible limits of system size.Chapter 3, reprinted with permission from William R. Borrelli, Xiaoyan Liu, and Benjamin J. Schwartz “The Solvation Entropy of Different Simulation Models of the Hydrated Electron" J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2026, 17, 7, 1899–1906, presents calculations of the entropy of solvation (ΔSsolv) for the hydrated electron, which is known to be large and positive from experiment.[5] Using a combination of statistical mechanics, alchemical simulation, and machine-learned interatomic potentials,[1] we compute the solvation entropy for three one-electron models of the hydrated electron and DFT (PBE0). We highlight that the two cavity-forming one-electron simulation models, which produce relatively unstructured RDF’s, yield a qualitatively correct entropy of solvation. Conversely, a non-cavity one-electron model as well as DFT (PBE0) give negative entropies of solvation. We corroborate our computed values by investigating water structure and dynamics near each of these hydrated electrons, as well as contextualize our results in terms of the Hofmeister series.[2]Chapter 4, reprinted with permission from William R. Borrelli, José L.Guardado Sandoval, Ken J. Mei, and Benjamin J. Schwartz “Roles of H-Bonding and Hydride Solvation in the Reaction of Hydrated (Di)electrons with Water to Create H2 and OH–" J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2024, 20, 16, 7337–7346, studies the dielectron hydrogen evolution (DEHE) reaction instigated by a so-called dielectron. Dielectrons form when two hydrated electrons undergo recombination into a single intermediate, and these species are known to react with water to form H2 with a rate that is diffusion-limited.[ 6] Our work uncovers the atomistic mechanism behind this reaction process, showing that the two proton transfers which form the H2 product can occur sequentially or concertedly, depending on solvation effects.Chapter 5, reprinted with permission from William R. Borrelli and BenjaminJ. Schwartz “Theoretical Prediction of the 2-Dimensional Electronic Spectrum of Different Simulation Models of the Hydrated Electron" J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2026, presents the first theoretical prediction of the two-dimensional electronic spectrum (2DES) of the hydrated electron. We show that the dynamics of the 2DES unambiguously distinguish between two one-electron models of the hydrated electron which yield nearly identical one-dimensional absorption spectra. Our work not only functions as a prediction for future experiments, but also highlights specific analyses that experimentalists could do in order to extract the underlying correlation function dynamics out of the spectral signal.Chapter 6, reprinted with permission from William R. Borrelli, José L. Guardado Sandoval, and Benjamin J. Schwartz “Using Density-Corrected DFT to Understand Density-Driven and Functional-Dependent Errors in Ab Initio Simulations of the Hydrated Electron" J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2026, 22, 5, 2550–2561, leveraged density-corrected DFT (DC-DFT) to understand density-driven errors in DFT-based simulations of the hydrated electron. We analyze density-driven errors through both energy versus charge curves as well as energy error decomposition analysis. Our work shows that although DC does alleviate density errors for the hydrated electron, functional dominant errors are actually the dominant error source. Unexpectedly, DC-DFT also breaks a fortuitous cancellation of errors present in the PBE0 functional when the self-consistent density is used.Chapter 7, reprinted with permission from William R. Borrelli, Xiaoyan Liu, and Benjamin J. Schwartz “How the choice of exchange–correlation functional affects DFT-based simulations of the hydrated electron" J. Chem. Phys. 162, 110901 (2025), studies the density functional approximation (DFA) dependence for equilibrium properties of the DFT-based hydrated electron. Many functionals produce a localized hydrated electron, particularly those with modest amounts of exact Hartree-Fock exchange, however some either do not localize the electron or promote over-reactivity with water. We show that the rigid solvation structure seen in early simulations employing the PBE0 DFA are remarkably consistent across families of functionals. A comparison of time-dependent DFT (TD-DFT)-based methods for computing hydrated electron spectroscopy highlights that periodic Tamm- Dancoff Approximation TD-DFT introduces a large spectral blue-shift relative to using non-periodic TD-DFT with a range-separated hybrid functional.Chapter 8, reprinted with permission from William R. Borrelli, XiaoyanLiu, and Benjamin J. Schwartz “Evaluating the Chemical Reactivity of DFT Simulated Liquid Water with Hydrated Electrons via the Dual Descriptor" J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2024, 20, 21, 9571–9579, studies the reactivity of hydrated electrons to bulk water using a conceptual DFT (CDFT) tool known as the Dual-Descriptor (DD).[4, 8] The DD uncovers regions of high nucleophilicity and electrophilicity through computing Fukui functions. We show that a functional that produces a hydrated electron that is over-reactive towards water is easily detected by studying only the bulk water of that functional with the DD.As a whole, this work fundamentally advances the hydrated electron simulation literature through the calculation of novel experimental observables, theoretical predictions for future experimental work, and investigations of DFT as a method for simulating this species.ChemistryThermodynamicsArtificial intelligenceDFThydrated electronmachine learningmolecular dynamicsstatistical mechanicsthermodynamicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dg0b8drhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5dg0b8dr/qt5dg0b8dr.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2qm0x8xm2026-06-15T06:39:43Zqt2qm0x8xmGlobally Optimal-Solution Method for Robust Optimization and Application Case Study on State-Task Network Scheduling of Batch Plants with Yield UncertaintyJIA, RUIManousiouthakis, Vasilios I2026-06-10Chemical production scheduling under parameter uncertainty has been studied extensively, but most existing robust formulations treat uncertainty as a generic perturbation around nominal values, with little connection to the underlying physical and chemical behavior. This thesis develops a robust scheduling framework that explicitly links macro-level scheduling decisions to a micro-level mechanism, using catalyst deactivation in a multipurpose batch plant as the concrete setting. Building on the State-Task Network (STN) representation and a continuous-time formulation, we model uncertainty in task output coefficients as it enters inequality constraints, and prove an equivalence theorem under explicit structural assumptions that reformulates the resulting robust mixed-integer program into a single-level Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) whose global optimum coincides with that of the original problem. In a case study, three polyhedral uncertainty sets are then constructed and compared: the standard rectangular and budget sets, and a physically motivated refined set that encodes one-sided yield deviations together with time-smoothness constraints reflecting the gradual nature of catalyst aging. We show that these sets are strictly nested, guaranteeing that the refined set is no more conservative than the budget set and strictly less whenever the smoothness constraint is active. Numerical experiments on a benchmark STN process quantify the cost of conservatism through feed consumption and assess out-of-sample demand satisfaction via Monte Carlo sampling. The refined approach reliably meets demand under physically plausible degradation while consuming significantly less feed than budget and rectangular solutions, and the time-smoothness parameter provides a mechanism-rooted tuning knob along the cost-robustness frontier.Chemical engineeringIndustrial engineeringOperations researchGlobal OptimizationMixed-Integer Linear ProgrammingPolyhedral Uncertainty SetRobust OptimizationSchedulingState-Task NetworkpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2qm0x8xmetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6873n00r2026-06-14T05:34:47Zqt6873n00rQuantum Transport in Two-Dimensional (2D) van der Waals heterostructuresBokka, Anand JohnsonWang, Kang Lung2024-01-01This work explores two key areas in the study of van der Waals heterostructures: their utilization in developing quantum tunneling devices and the observation of time-reversal symmetry breaking within superconductors.In the first part, the research focuses on Quantum tunneling devices utilizing van der Waals heterostructures. These devices have garnered significant attention due to their ability to elucidate the nature of quasi-particle excitations and energy states through inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (IETS). Specifically, graphite-based tunnel junctions with insulating barriers like hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) are pivotal in understanding quantum phenomena in non-magnetic tunnel junctions. Recent device-oriented studies on magnetic tunnel junctions indicate that Landau levels and magnon excitations play a role when electrons tunnel between graphite layers. However, to thoroughly investigate the tunneling mechanisms involving Landau levels and excitations, a comprehensive study involving magnetic field and temperature dependencies through IETS is essential. In this context, we fabricated tunnel junction devices with graphite electrodes and thin h-BN/MoS2 as insulating barriers, conducting extensive transport measurements. Our low-temperature findings revealed trivial phonon excitations without signs of magnon or Landau levels in these non-magnetic tunnel junctions. This study aims to understand quasiparticle behavior and spin-polarized Landau levels for enhancing the performance and reliability of magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs), with applications in spintronics and quantum sensing.In the second part, we move beyond the proximity effect to the direct study of time-reversal symmetry breaking in superconductors intrinsically, where van der Waals heterostructures have shown significant potential for applications involving stacking and twisting of layers. Concurrently, Iron-based d-wave superconductors have been realized to exhibit topological surface superconductivity. However, previous studies have predominantly been restricted to bulk characterizations and lack comprehensive device-oriented investigations. Here, for the first time, we demonstrate the evolution of symmetry breaking coexisting with superconductivity at the interface of twisted thin van der Waals Iron Selenide Josephson Junctions. A post-fabrication free approach for ultra-clean interface has been implemented. Twisting the bottom layer approximately 6 degrees in the vertically stacked Junction has displayed the emergence of ferromagnetism in addition to superconducting d-wave symmetry below the critical temperature. Further, the current trainable sequence by modulating the Josephson phase particle between the two superconducting degenerate ground states confirmed the spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking in the system.Materials ScienceFerromagnetismJosephson JunctionSuperconductivityTime-reversal symmetry breakingTunnel Junctionvan der Waals heterostructuresenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6873n00rhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6873n00r/qt6873n00r.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt61p8p4jd2026-06-14T05:34:46Zqt61p8p4jdDesign and Analysis of Novel Limb and End-effector Mechanisms for a Highly Capable Quadruped RobotRafeedi, FadiHong, Dennis W2024-01-01Quadruped robots are versatile locomotion platforms capable of a variety of manipulation tasks. For each operating environment, the quadruped's choice of kinematic design, actuators, and end-effectors requires tuning and optimization. This research introduces geometrically enhanced designs for limb mechanisms and magnetic variable stiffness end-effectors for a ship-board quadruped platform, SORREL. The choice of kinematics in quadrupeds is highly dependent on the gait and certain leg designs might be more prone to waste power. Traditional robots, design their kinematics based on the actuator being a single unit consisting of a motor and a gearbox, overlooking the effects of their relative positions on the limb kinematics. A new method was developed for designing the leg kinematics by decoupling the design of the gearbox and the motor. This method gives more freedom in the design of the kinematics and allows for a wider range of configurations best fit for the required task. The quadruped leg design presented in this work has both actuators collocated at the hip in a parallel configuration; however, the gearbox of the knee motor is relocated from the hip to the knee joint. This seemingly simple modification significantly reduces the mechanical antagonism and motor losses and increases the stiffness of the leg.
Quadrupeds perform manipulation and grasping through task-specific actuators. These actuators need to interact with the environment safely while maintaining accurate force control capabilities. More specifically, SORELL needs to be equipped with gripper modules to deal with varying tasks such as typing on keyboards, precision manipulation of electronics, and general pick and place. Most grippers used in manipulators are based on stiff positioned-controlled actuators which provide accuracy but require bulky and expensive Force/Torque (FT) sensors for force control. Additionally, traditional grippers struggle with delicate handling tasks and pose safety risks due to their inherent high stiffness. By employing compliant actuators, namely nonlinear series elastic and variable stiffness actuators, robotic platforms can circumvent such limitations while maintaining the accuracy and stability of the end-effector. As such, a family of actuators based on magnetic and electromagnetic forces was developed and tested to improve the safety of manipulation and grant accurate force control. The actuators presented use series elastic (SEA) and variable stiffness (VSA) concepts. Two actuators use passive nonlinear springs with constant stiffness profiles based on permanent magnet arrangements. These passive nonlinear SEAs, designed for lightweight and low-cost grippers, can achieve both stiff and soft behavior and have a higher capacity for energy storage than linear springs. With accurate spring modeling, these nonlinear SEAs can change the force control problem into a position control problem avoiding the use of FT sensors. Since passive SEAs use springs with fixed stiffness curves, their stiffness cannot be controlled independently. Moreover, changing the stiffness online is desirable in some grasping tasks that require adjustment in grip strength and compliance. Hence, two actuators that have active stiffness variation (VSA) capabilities through mechanical and electromagnetic means were developed. These actuators, while more complex and costly, give a wider range of stiffness and the ability to tune their stiffness curves. These actuators are studied and categorized for the intended manipulation tasks encompassing those required on the SORELL platform. Through these designs, multiple unique features were studied and observed such as water-cooled electromagnetic coils, eddy current damping for shock absorption, and the use of negative stiffness for fast explosive motion of gripper fingers. Mechanical engineeringRoboticsActuatorsQuadruped robotsSeries elastic actuatorsVariable stiffness actuatorsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/61p8p4jdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt61p8p4jd/qt61p8p4jd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5cj0q8jc2026-06-14T05:34:45Zqt5cj0q8jcA Arte em Movimento: Desvendando o Potencial Transformador do Entretenimento de Impacto Social no Setor Audiovisual BrasileiroRamos, ClaudioBergero, Adriana JLino, Patricia M2024-01-01This dissertation rigorously examines the transformative potential of Social Impact Entertainment (SIE) within the Brazilian audiovisual sector, focusing on the work of Maria Farinha Filmes as a pivotal case study. It interrogates the integration and efficacy of social impact messages across cinematic productions and evaluates the nuanced receptions by what is termed the 'contemporary spectator.' These individuals are characterized not merely as passive consumers but as active social participants, whose interactions with media are deeply informed by their diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, personal experiences, and the surrounding social realities. A core aspect of this investigation is the profound influence of technological advancements on SIE, particularly how these innovations have reshaped both the production mechanisms and distribution strategies of content. The analysis delves into the ramifications of such shifts for audience engagement and content accessibility. By employing a multidisciplinary approach that combines content analysis, theoretical exploration, and empirical data, the study maps the thematic trajectories and social resonances embedded in the body of work of Maria Farinha Filmes. Notable productions such as The Beginning of Life (2016) and Aruanas (2019) are scrutinized for their thematic depth, narrative strategies, and impact effectiveness. The dissertation advances the discourse on SIE by articulating its capacity to act as a catalyzing agent for social awareness and change, both within national borders and on the global stage. It posits SIE not only as a reflection of societal issues but as a proactive participant in societal transformation. This is achieved through a structured examination of the interplay between filmmaker intent, narrative execution, and audience interpretation, supported by a comprehensive review of secondary literature and primary case studies. Ultimately, this study aims to elevate the academic understanding of SIE, proposing a nuanced framework for assessing its impact on contemporary social issues through the lens of Brazilian cinema, thereby positioning SIE as a critical tool in the arsenal of social innovation and public pedagogy.Film studiesptapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cj0q8jchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5cj0q8jc/qt5cj0q8jc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3944p74f2026-06-14T05:34:44Zqt3944p74fDevelopment and Testing of Prototype Single Stage Electrocatalytic Unit for the Sustainable Production of Liquid Fuels from CO2, Water and Renewable EnergyReyes Lopez, Eber DanielMorales-Guio, Carlos G.2024-01-01As of 2023, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have surged to unprecedent levels, compelling urgent action for large-scale carbon removal to combat climate change. Amidst this pressing need, exploring alternative technologies such as electrocatalytic CO2 reduction to generate liquid fuels emerges as a promising avenue. This approach not only offers the potential to store renewable electricity but also significantly mitigate carbon emissions. However, the scalability of this technology presents many challenges, notably in controlling reaction kinetics and mass transport within electrochemical reactors. Overcoming these obstacles requires efforts towards enhancing catalyst design, refining mass transport mechanisms, and implementing scalable manufacturing methods. In this context, the following research focuses on the development and refinement of a 100 cm2 active electrode area electrocatalytic unit tailored for sustainable CO2 reduction. Its aim is to provide a scalable solution for producing synthetic fuels by converting CO2 exhaust gases from power plants into ethanol, propanol, and butanol using electricity from the grid. This technology would be applied directly at the source of flue gases, contributing to global efforts to combat climate change and transition to a sustainable energy future, while circumventing the land requirement issues often faced when applying similar technologies. Chemical engineeringenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3944p74fhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3944p74f/qt3944p74f.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2dq2v5vk2026-06-14T05:34:43Zqt2dq2v5vkAutomated Detection and Mitigation of Vulnerabilities in Single Sign-on ImplementationsRahat, Tamjid AlTian, Yuan2024-01-01Single Sign-on (SSO) protocols play a critical role in operating secure systems, granting access and privileges to authenticated entities. However, logical mistakes in their implementation that violate the standard specification expose them to various security threats that can compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive user resources. SSO protocols are complex as they involve interactions between multiple parties (e.g., service providers, relying parties, and users) and such interactions result in diverse security requirements for different platforms. Unfortunately, the standard specification is written in hundreds of pages of English documents and the security properties are often not well-defined, leading the protocol developers to make severe mistakes. These mistakes can completely compromise the security of the protocol and they have been exploited many times in recent years to conduct severe attacks, including identity theft and complete account or system takeover. In this dissertation, we aim to identify, analyze, and mitigate security threats and vulnerabilities that impact the SSO-based authorization and authentication protocols. To achieve this goal, we incorporate static analysis, formal verification, and program synthesis techniques to design and implement a toolchain to 1) identify logical security errors in the client and server-side implementations of the SSO protocols, 2) provide safety guarantee with respect to the standard specification, and 3) automatically generate patches for the detected buggy implementations. We further propose specification languages to allow developers to formally express the SSO security requirements that can be checked across large-scale SSO implementations on diverse platforms. We evaluate our proposed approaches on 600 widely used relying party applications and the 25 most popular SSO service providers. Our experiments uncover 40 previously unknown vulnerabilities (i.e., zero-days), which have been acknowledged and fixed by the developers after our responsive disclosure. Furthermore, eight classes of these vulnerabilities lead to new entries in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database.Computer engineeringComputer scienceAuthenticationOAuthOpenIDSecuritySSOenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2dq2v5vkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2dq2v5vk/qt2dq2v5vk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1wj571hc2026-06-14T05:34:42Zqt1wj571hcWhat Sustains Youth Activism? A Short-Term Longitudinal Analysis of Factors Shaping Indian Young Adults’ Climate ActivismWilf, SaraWray-Lake, Laura2024-01-01Millions of young people have risen up to fight the growing climate crisis through youth-led climate movements. Several factors are associated with youths’ engagement in climate protest, such as a desire to be with like-minded people and direct experience with the climate crisis. However, longitudinal research is needed to understand what sustains youth climate activism over the short-term. This dissertation uses three waves of original data collected from a sample of 193 young (18-24 years old) climate activists in India over 6 weeks in 2023. Multinomial logistic regression was used to examine the associations between seven factors (personal growth, sense of community, individual and collective agency, seeing tangible achievements, political repression, climate anxiety, and online and in-person harassment) and changes in youths’ level of climate activism (increased, stable, or decreased) cross-sectionally within each wave, and longitudinally across each pair of waves. The predictors were developed based on an inductive qualitative study (Wilf et al., under review). A Youth Research Advisory Board of 6 young Indian activists supported survey development and recruitment. Cross-sectional results showed that heightened personal growth, collective agency, and seeing tangible achievements from activism were associated with youths’ increased and stable compared with decreased activism, and that social media and in-person harassment were negatively associated with youth reporting stable compared with increased climate activism. Youth with heightened individual agency (power) were less likely to report increased or stable compared with decreased activism. Longitudinally, agency (competence) was positively associated with youths’ increased versus decreased activism, and negatively associated with youths’ stable versus increased activism. Across analyses, school and family responsibilities were significant deterrents to youths’ increased and stable activism, and religious minority youth were less likely to report stable compared with increased and decreased activism. In cross-sectional analysis, men were more likely to report increased and stable compared with decreased activism than women. Few of the results were consistent across waves, or in both cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis, and therefore should be interpreted with caution. This study provides insights into the factors that may shape short-term youth climate activism, with implications for scholars, climate movements, and youth-focused practitioners.Social workAdolescentsClimate activismEnvironmental protestIndiaSocial movementsYouthenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wj571hchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1wj571hc/qt1wj571hc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt05j2230m2026-06-14T05:34:42Zqt05j2230mJourneys of Latina/o Undocumented Students: A Critical Historical Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin, 2001–2013Sanchez Castillo, MarisolGarcia, David G2024-01-01As a continuation of Mexican American education history and building on the research on undocumented students’ experiences in higher education, this dissertation uses history methods to examine the experiences of Latina/o undocumented students at the University of Texas Austin (UT Austin) between 2001 and 2013. During this time frame, important immigration and education legislation at state and federal levels was introduced or implemented, directly impacting undocumented students nationwide. Using a theoretical framework of critical race theory, Latina/o critical theory with a LatCrit Consciousness, this study centers race and immigration and challenges ahistoricism. Drawing on testimonios, institutional archives, newspapers, focus groups, personal collections, and social media posts, this dissertation’s findings reveal that (a) UT Austin did not foster an actively inclusive environment for Latina/o undocumented students; (b) Latina/o undocumented student activism at UT Austin evolved to a transformative resistance movement; and (c) the institution engaged in institutional neglect of Latina/o undocumented students, leading to significant challenges for this student population in navigating the university. Lastly, this dissertation explores Yosso’s Chicana/o Undergraduate “Stages of Passage” and adds dimensions to capture the experiences of Latina/o undocumented students in higher education.Higher educationcampus racial climateeducation historyundocumented studentsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/05j2230mhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt05j2230m/qt05j2230m.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9wm1f0jb2026-06-14T05:03:48Zqt9wm1f0jbIdentification of Small Molecules as Novel Adipogenic Enhancers for Edible Adipose TissuesXie, QingwenRowat, Amy C2024-01-01With the global population projected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, there is a critical need for sustainable and innovative food sources. Cultured meat, an innovative and sustainable approach to food production that allows the production of meat by cultivating animal cells in vitro, exhibits the potential to circumvent the challenges associated with traditional animal agriculture. A key to the success of cultured meat is developing adipose tissue, crucial for achieving the desired taste, texture, and nutritional quality. Accelerating adipogenesis has the potential to improve production efficiency, making large-scale cultured meat manufacturing more viable and cost-effective. This study aims to identify small molecules that accelerate adipogenesis for edible fat tissue production using a high-throughput screen. Our findings identified magnolol and dicoumarol as effective natural compounds that promote lipid accumulation in differentiating mouse, rabbit, and porcine preadipocytes. These compounds have also demonstrated a synergetic effect in accelerating adipogenesis, which highlights the potential of novel treatments in effectively promoting adipocyte differentiation across various species. Cellular biologyBioengineeringFood scienceenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9wm1f0jbhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9wm1f0jb/qt9wm1f0jb.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt93c596cx2026-06-14T05:03:44Zqt93c596cxAdvancing Platinum-Based Catalysts for Efficient Hydrogen Release from Liquid Organic Hydrogen CarriersKorra, Adityaraj ChowhanHuang, Yu2024-01-01The rising global energy demand and the pressing requirement to decrease greenhouse gasemissions require the creation of sustainable and effective energy storage systems. Hydrogen,
due to its substantial energy density and widespread availability, emerges as a highly promising
environmentally friendly fuel. Nevertheless, the preservation of this substance presents notable
difficulties because of its low density and elevated reactivity. This thesis investigates the
enhancement of platinum (Pt)-based catalysts supported on different substrates to improve the
efficiency of hydrogen release from liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). The specific
focus is on indoline, tetrahydroquinoline, tetrahydroisoquinoline, 6-methyl-tetrahydroquinoline,
and 12H-N-ethylcarbazole (12HNEC).An investigation was conducted on the synthesis, characterisation, and catalytic performance ofPt/Al2O3, Pt/TiO2, and Pt/SiO2 catalysts. The direct impregnation approach was used to achieve a
0.2 wt% platinum loading on the supports. The resultant catalysts were studied using
transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry
(ICP-MS). The investigation determined that Pt/Al2O3 demonstrated the highest efficiency in
releasing hydrogen. This can be due to the even distribution and distinctive cuboctahedron shape
of the Pt particles on the surface of the substrate. This catalyst exhibited a hydrogen release
efficiency of around 5%, which was notably superior to that of Pt/TiO2 and Pt/SiO2.12HNEC had the greatest effectiveness as a liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC), releasingaround 5% of hydrogen when dehydrogenated with Pt/Al2O3. The improved hydrogen release
ability of 12HNEC compared to other examined compounds can be attributed to its structural and
morphological benefits, as well as its interaction with the highly-dispersed Pt particles.This study highlights the crucial importance of carefully choosing the material on which achemical reaction takes place and designing an effective catalyst in order to maximize the release
of hydrogen from liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). The results emphasize the
capability of Pt/Al2O3 catalysts and 12HNEC for real-world hydrogen storage uses, opening the
path for the creation of effective and expandable hydrogen energy systems. Future research
should prioritize strengthening the stability and endurance of these catalysts and investigating
sophisticated computational and in situ characterization approaches to further enhance their
performance.NanoscienceMaterials ScienceChemistry12HNECcharacterisationHydrogenLiquid Organic Hydrogen CarriersPlatinum-Based CatalystsPt/Al2O3enapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/93c596cxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt93c596cx/qt93c596cx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8z3213qr2026-06-14T05:03:41Zqt8z3213qrThe Riot and the Didactic: Radical Instruction in British Romantic PoetryWhittell, Jesslyn ClarkNersessian, Anahid JMakdisi, Saree2024-01-01This dissertation investigates the historical and present relationship of didactic poetry to the political thought of radical communities. Poetry from the Romantic period to the present is often seen as the valence of lyric and personal registers of thought, and its political utility is typically equated with the extent to which it resists concretized meaning and refuses interpretation. Didactic poetry is typically seen as a bastardization of these disruptive tendencies, as an attempt to comb theoretical and personal contradictions into straightforward conclusions and to similarly amalgamate diverse beings, people, and needs into neatly packaged political agendas. Romanticism is understood as a knee-jerk reaction against didactic and instructive styles of writing. Through case studies of Romantic poets writing on the margins and three contemporary authors invested in protest and urban space, I argue that in the hands of certain authors writing within and against systems of early carcerality, imperial warfare, and sexual control, didacticism becomes a means of imagining strange, intimate, and unstable political collectives that take shape through the communal mode of the didactic. As such, I argue that didacticism functions as both a kind of resistance/refusal and a means of exposing, exploring, and refuting the logics of usefulness, surveillance, and carceral instruction. It is, I claim, always balancing the threat of instruction tipping over into coercion with the importance of naming, teaching, and remembering marginal political histories. In Chapter 1, I discuss the problem of “utility” in the poems and allegories that Thomas Spence wrote for his periodical Pigs’ Meat; Lessons for the Swinish Multitude. While Spence wants his work to be instructive, he also actively resists the easy categorization of things and people as “useful” or “not useful” that appears in both conservative poetry by Hannah More and in British vagrancy laws. In Chapter 2, Anna Barbauld and John Thelwall use the didactic poem to think through the larger problem of teaching literature, with each arguing that literary education is a key tool for developing political collectives. Their approaches resist traditional models of literary education and criticism, models which, I argue, operate in tandem with carceral and imperial thinking. In Chapter 3, I consider the role of embodied instruction in Percy Shelley’s Laon and Cythna, taking up the poem’s formal motif of endurance. I show how moments of embodied instruction correspond with queer challenges to gender and sexual norms that reimagine learning as, instead of the transmission of information in service of clear futures, a form of material care that resists easy resolution into useful data. The final chapter jumps forward to discuss three contemporary poets—Sean Bonney, Wendy Trevino, and Diane di Prima—who adopt didactic poetry for their writing about riots. I claim that in contemporary poetry, didacticism creates a transparent subjectivity that can navigate and survive violent systems of policing. English literatureBritish Romanticismcontemporary poetrydidactic poetryimperialismpoetryurban humanitiesenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z3213qrhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8z3213qr/qt8z3213qr.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8xs758312026-06-14T05:03:37Zqt8xs75831Attitudes of Loss: A Phenomenological Analysis of Identity and Renewal Among the Unserdeutsch German Creole CommunityBelletto, Vincent MaxwellThroop, Christophr J2024-01-01This dissertation presents an in-depth anthropological investigation into the Unserdeutsch German Creole community (Vunapope mixed-race Germans), focusing on the intricate processes of identity formation as they are mediated through historical consciousness and cultural memory. Utilizing a phenomenological framework, the research explores how colonial legacies, cultural formations, and subjective experiences converge to shape and renew a variously shared sense of Unserdeutsch identity. This study seeks to provide a historically grounded ethnographic account of the particular world in which Unserdeutsch lived experiences are situated and unfold, offering new perspectives on identity formation, cultural resilience, and the complex legacies of colonialism. Through detailed ethnographic analysis and a robust theoretical framework, the research illuminates the dynamic and evolving nature of identity, contributing to a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between history, culture, and self in the context of colonial and postcolonial realities.This dissertation aims to address the significant gap in ethnographic literature on the Unserdeutsch community. The study's novelty lies in its emphasis on the personal narratives of community members, illuminating the subjective experiences and affective dimensions of identity formation often overlooked in linguistic and historical studies. By weaving together primary data with historical events and policies, the analysis provides a comprehensive view of how colonial and postcolonial contexts have shaped the Unserdeutsch community's identity. The research highlights the community's resilience and adaptability in maintaining their cultural identity amidst changing socio-political landscapes, particularly evident in their migration to Australia and the subsequent renegotiation of their identity in a new environment. This focus on lived experiences underscores the importance of recognizing the dynamic interplay between histories, societal constructs, and subjective agency in the formation of identity
The dissertation opens with an introduction that lays the groundwork for an anthropological exploration of the phenomenological underpinnings of identity formation, positioning the Unserdeutsch community as a case study. By examining colonial legacies and their intersection with cultural formation processes, the first chapter provides a foundational understanding of how local identities are both mediated through and shape historical circumstances. This chapter introduces the primary dataset as well as the methodological framework employed for data analysis, This dataset spans four generations, capturing the personal experiences of community members across different historical contexts. Built upon the works of scholars such as Gadamer, Stewart, Hollan, Bhabha, and Glissant, the theoretical framework emphasizes the dynamic interplay between historical consciousness, cultural memory, and individual agency in the construction of identity. The chapter also provides a scholarly overview of the Unserdeutsch community, discussing how language and cultural practices serve as symbols of resistance, resilience, and cultural continuity.
The second chapter offers a historical demographic analysis of the Melanesian region, contextualizing historical demographic records through the primary dataset to gain clearer insights into the ethnographic record. This chapter examines the interplay between historical events, demographic changes, and social structures to provide a nuanced understanding of the circumstances surrounding the genesis and diaspora of the Unserdeutsch community. By analyzing various demographic and sociohistorical factors such as cultural practices, intergroup relations, social mobility, and political participation, the chapter sheds light on the social experiences and adaptations of the Unserdeutsch community across time and space. This approach emphasizes the importance of considering the broader sociohistorical contexts that impact identity formation and expression within the community. The chapter also highlights the community's experiences under German and British colonial rule, emphasizing the resilience and adaptability of the Unserdeutsch people in navigating the complex dynamics of colonial and postcolonial environments.
The third chapter delves into an exegesis of colonial ideological thought and praxis in Melanesia, situating the ethnogenesis of the Unserdeutsch community and their shared sense of identity both historically and into the postcolonial moment. This chapter explores the divergent colonial ideologies and their impacts on the Unserdeutsch community, contrasting the relatively inclusive approach of German colonial rule with the strict racial segregation and cultural imposition of the British regime. The analysis focuses on how these differing colonial practices influenced the community's sense of identity, leading to a complex process of cultural hybridization and identity formation. The chapter also discusses the concept of 'plural Westernities' in greater detail, deconstructing the presumption of a unified Western identity and acknowledging the diversity and syncretism inherent to Western colonial practices. By examining the community's experiences through the lens of colonial ideology, the chapter provides insights into how historical narratives, power dynamics, and ideological perspectives shape identity formation and expression within the Unserdeutsch community.
Central to this research is the examination of how the Unserdeutsch community's language and cultural practices serve as symbols of resistance, resilience, and cultural continuity across generation and historical contexts. The clandestine use of the Unserdeutsch language among community members, particularly under British rule, highlights how cultural aesthetics can act as a vessel for historical consciousness, fostering solidarity and a sense of belonging. The research questions addressed in this dissertation revolve around understanding how historical narratives, ideological perspectives, and power dynamics influence identity formation and expression within the Unserdeutsch community. It seeks to explore the role of language and cultural practices in shaping the community's sense of self and to examine the broader sociohistorical contexts that impact their identity. By bridging the gap between linguistic analysis and lived experience, this research offers valuable insights into the complex relationship between language, affect, history, and identity.
This study contributes to contemporary scholarship by providing a nuanced examination of identity formation through historical and cultural lenses. It highlights the multifaceted nature of identity, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between collective experiences and individual agency. By focusing on the Unserdeutsch community's experiences under German and British colonial rule, the research underscores the diverse and often conflicting ways in which colonial powers shaped and influenced cultural identities. By deconstructing the notion of a monolithic West, the dissertation challenges conventional portrayals of Western hegemony and opens up discussions on the varied impacts of Western colonial practices.
The research also addresses the broader implications of colonialism and its lasting impact on cultural identities, contributing to the growing body of literature on postcolonial studies. By examining the resilience and adaptability of the Unserdeutsch community in preserving their unique cultural heritage amidst changing circumstances, the study underscores the importance of recognizing the diverse ways in which communities negotiate their histories, realities, and futures within a globalized and interconnected world. The methodological innovations introduced in this dissertation, particularly the use of phenomenological frameworks for qualitative data analysis, offer valuable tools for researchers interested in exploring the lived experiences and cultural expressions of marginalized communities.
Sociolinguisticsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xs75831https://escholarship.org/content/qt8xs75831/qt8xs75831.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7x12n2xn2026-06-14T05:03:20Zqt7x12n2xnUtilizing Machine Learning and Technology-Based Intervention for Intimate Partner Violence and HIV Prevention Among Young Sexual Minority MenHong, ChenglinHolloway, Ian W.2024-01-01Young sexual minority men (SMM) experience higher rates of intimate partner violence (IPV) compared to their heterosexual counterparts, and these experiences were associated with adverse health and mental health outcomes including HIV, substance use, and psychological distress. However, little is known about the association between IPV victimization and HIV prevention services such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). This dissertation aimed to describe the prevalence of IPV victimization, perpetration, and bi-directional violence among a sample of cisgender young SMM who use substances. It examined the associations between different types of IPV victimization and PrEP utilization, explores the mediating effects of PrEP stigma and alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use on the relationship between IPV and PrEP utilization, and built and verified a machine learning model to predict self-reported IPV victimization using social media and mobile phone use data. The study found alarmingly high rates of IPV victimization, perpetration, and bi-directional violence among a sample of cisgender young SMM recruited from 2021 to 2023, particularly emotional IPV. The results indicated that experiencing emotional, monitoring, and controlling IPV victimization were associated with suboptimal PrEP utilization, such as lower likelihood of using PrEP for HIV prevention and suboptimal PrEP adherence. Additionally, the study found that PrEP stigma and nicotine use mediate the relationship between IPV victimization and PrEP use and adherence. Finally, social media data and mobile phone use activities can be used to predict self-reported IPV victimization through machine learning techniques when adequate data is available. These findings highlight the elevated vulnerabilities of cisgender young SMM to IPV and underscore the need to promote IPV screening and services across different settings. Future research is necessary to understand the longitudinal impact of IPV experiences on PrEP utilization and to explore the underlying mechanisms. There is potential to utilize machine learning, social media data, and mobile phone activities to identify young SMM who experience or are at risk of IPV, indicating opportunities for integrated eHealth and technology-based IPV services and interventions.Social workPublic healthHIVIPVsexual minority menstigmasubstance useenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7x12n2xnhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7x12n2xn/qt7x12n2xn.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6cr575zg2026-06-14T05:03:01Zqt6cr575zgIncorporating Color- and Light-Producing Reactions with the Lateral-Flow Immunoassay for Improved Quantitative CapabilitiesChen, Kyle JantanKamei, Daniel T2024-01-01In order to more effectively diagnose and treat both communicable and non-communicable diseases, it is crucial to develop diagnostic tests that are accessible at the point of care. This is especially pertinent in resource-limited settings areas, where there is a need for affordable, rapid, and robust diagnostic tests due to limited access to healthcare services and laboratory-based tests. One diagnostic modality that is well-suited for these settings is the lateral-flow immunoassay (LFA), which saw widespread use during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the applicability of the conventional LFA to other diseases and conditions is limited by its inability to provide a quantitative readout, which this thesis aims to address.First, we sought to improve the quantitative capabilities of the LFA by utilizing the multicolor etching of gold nanorods (GNRs). As a proof-of-concept, our group had previously combined the LFA with GNR etching in suspension to produce a multicolor readout that quantifies the concentration of digoxin in human serum. To make the assay more point-of-care friendly, we expanded upon this work in this thesis by adapting the workflow to be fully paper-based, which involved designing an all-in-one 3D-printed casing that combined both LFA detection and GNR etching via novel color-changing GNR pads. The resulting color hues from the GNR pads are easily distinguishable by the naked eye, thereby enabling a workflow that easily and quickly quantifies target biomarker concentrations in point-of-care settings.Next, we turned to utilizing the chemiluminescence reaction of luminol as another method to improve the quantitative capabilities of the LFA. After detecting the target biomarker using the LFA, the light output generated from the chemiluminescence reaction can be quantified using a smartphone-based reader to determine the concentration of the target biomarker in the patient sample. To assist with the development of this assay, a mathematical model of the chemiluminescence reaction in the presence of phenolic enhancers—reagents that can significantly increase the light output of the reaction—was developed in MATLAB to optimize the reaction parameters and conditions.Bioengineeringchemiluminescencediagnosticsgold nanorodlateral-flow immunoassayMATLABquantitative outputenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cr575zghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6cr575zg/qt6cr575zg.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5bj5g7b02026-06-14T05:02:38Zqt5bj5g7b0Voltage-controlled writing and spin-to-charge-conversion-based reading in spintronics devicesHe, HaoranWang, Kang Lung2024-01-01Spintronics, or spin electronics, utilizes the spin property of electrons alongside their charge to enhance data processing and storage capabilities. This field has transformed from early magnetic navigation tools to foundational technologies in modern storage solutions like Hard Disk Drives and Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM). Furthermore, the development of Magnetoelectric Spin-Orbit (MESO) devices extends the utility of spintronics into logic operations, leveraging high-efficiency processes that could drastically reduce power consumption in future computing systems. MRAM is recognized as a promising non-volatile storage solution for mobile devices and microcontrollers, possibly replacing traditional memory types like last-level cache due to its speed and density. However, conventional Spin-Transfer-Torque (STT) MRAM is hindered by slow and energy-intensive writing operations. To overcome these limitations, we propose using Voltage-Controlled Magnetic Anisotropy (VCMA) for writing. Our research, through a collaboration between foundry and lab, has successfully integrated VCMA-based MRAM with CMOS technology, demonstrating ultra-fast switching times of 0.7 ns with a 1.8V write voltage and achieving read times of 8.5 ns with endurance exceeding 1011 cycles, validating VCMA-MRAM as a viable non-volatile memory option.
Further, our study advances VCMA-based True Random Number Generators (TRNGs), crucial for cryptography. We have developed TRNGs that operate without the traditionally required external in-plane magnetic field by applying a 1.7 V, 5 ns pulse. This method meets the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards for randomness and introduces a novel mechanism that allows for faster relaxation times compared to superparamagnetic systems, paving the way for TRNGs that are fast, compact, energy-efficient, and highly reliable.
Additionally, MESO devices face challenges with spin-to-charge conversion efficiency. Topological insulators (TIs), with their unique topology-protected surface states, present a promising solution to enhance this efficiency. Our study identified that a Ru layer insertion between the TI and the magnet can boost conversion efficiency by 60%, highlighting the significant role of interface engineering. Additionally, we proposed and validated a physical model for the conversion between spin and charge in topological insulators, which can guide the further enhancement of efficiency. This research establishes a solid foundation for advancing spin-to-charge conversion technologies, opening new possibilities for their integration into future electronic devices.
EngineeringElectrical engineeringMagnetMRAMSpintronicsTopological InsulatorVoltage controlledenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bj5g7b0https://escholarship.org/content/qt5bj5g7b0/qt5bj5g7b0.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt54h2k1x32026-06-14T05:02:34Zqt54h2k1x3Monolithically Integrated Terahertz Optoelectronics Based on Quantum Well StructuresZhao, YifanJarrahi, Mona2024-01-01Terahertz waves can be used for many potential applications including security screening, chemical sensing and medical diagnosis. However, the practical applications are limited by the size, cost and complexity of terahertz systems. This is due to the lack of monolithically integrated terahertz optoelectronic devices. During my doctoral studies, I have extensively explored the possibility of using quantum well structures as a platform for monolithic integration of terahertz optoelectronics. Based on a GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well structure operating at ~800 nm wavelength, high performance SOA-integrated terahertz photomixers are demonstrated and characterized as both terahertz transmitter and receiver. An in-depth theoretical model is given to predict the performance of the fabricated terahertz transmitter and receiver prototypes, accounting for the optical absorption, RC parasitics and ultrafast carrier dynamics. Terahertz transmitters with radiation power levels of –10, –20, –26, and -35 dBm are demonstrated at 140, 310, 400, and 500 GHz and show record-high optical-to-terahertz conversion efficiencies of 2% at 140 and 230 GHz. With the same device structure, terahertz receivers with noise equivalent power levels of 2.3, 8.1, 13.7, 15.1, and 93 pW/Hz0.5 are demonstrated at 140, 250, 310, 400 and 500 GHz, which are equivalent or better than the state-of-the-art room temperature terahertz receivers. The wafer structure can be modified to further improve the device performance. The presented scheme is compatible with photonic integrated system foundry processes, e.g., InP based processes, which could enable fabrication of compact, low-cost, scalable terahertz systems with high volumes.Electrical engineeringintegrated terahertz optoelectronicsmonolithic integrationquantum wellterahertz receiverterahertz transmitterenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/54h2k1x3https://escholarship.org/content/qt54h2k1x3/qt54h2k1x3.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3dd477hm2026-06-14T05:02:17Zqt3dd477hmNext-Generation Wireless Systems: High-Efficiency Adaptive Multi-Tap Self-Interference Cancellation and Broadband Phase Shift Keyed Direct Antenna ModulationBhakta, Kamal DWang, Yuanxun (Ethan)2024-01-01The development of simultaneous transmit and receive (STAR) architectures necessitates advancedreceiver isolation techniques to handle the growing demands for frequency agility and RF
bandwidth while safeguarding sensitive front-end components. One key challenge in these systems
is mitigating self-interference, which can significantly degrade performance. Self-interference
cancellation (SIC) has emerged as an effective solution to suppress leakage signals, facilitating
full-duplex operation in a wireless system.
In this work, a novel adaptive self-interference canceller has been developed using a unique
transversal filter architecture for true time delay cancellation. This new design addresses the inherent
architecture losses found in traditional transversal filters, thereby achieving tremendous
flexibility and therefore, superior cancellation performance in multiple path scenarios with strong
leakage signals. The innovation lies in replacing conventional amplitude and phase weighting
components with tunable reflective discontinuities. This approach enables the implementation
of fundamentally lossless passive methods for leakage signal cancellation, which significantly enhances
the dynamic range and spectral efficiency of STAR systems, especially in space-constrained
environments.
Parallel to advancements in SIC for STAR systems, the integration of Electrically Small Antennas (ESAs) in high-bandwidth communication systems presents another significant challenge.
Space constraints in deployable systems, governed by the sizes that are smaller than 0.1λ, limit
the radiation bandwidth of an ESA. The effectiveness of an ESA’s efficiency-bandwidth product
is directly related to its quality factor as defined by Chu’s Limit. Despite these limitations, there
is a growing need for ESA integration in applications in cellular networks, biomedical implants,
unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, and internet-of-things devices, where required conventional
antenna dimensions that comparable to the wavelength of operation are impractical.
To address performance trade offs set by space constraints, an improved efficiency-bandwidth
product has been demonstrated using an approach called Direct Antenna Modulation (DAM). A
capacitively loaded loop antenna (CLLA), is strategically designed to radiate high-bandwidth signals
through a precisely synchronized time-varying antenna impedance boundary condition. To
effectively implement synchronization, the CLLA employs a dual-pole dual-throw (DPDT) switch
configuration with high figure of merit (FoM) transistors. This novel DAM topology enables the
ESA to radiate high-bandwidth phase-modulated signals efficiently, despite its defined size constraints.
Compared to a time-invariant CLLA of the same form factor, the DAM implementation
significantly enhances the efficiency-bandwidth product by minimizing the impact of switch technology
efficiency while maintaining DAM synchronization.
Overall, these advancements in adaptive self-interference cancellation and efficiency-bandwidth
product of an ESA design through DAM contribute to the enhancing performance of our next generation
wireless systems with maximal flexibility in platform integration.Electrical engineeringEngineeringAnalog Self Interference CancellationChu's LimitDirect Antenna ModulationEfficiency-Bandwidth ProductElectrically Small AntennasSimulataneous Receive and Transmitenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3dd477hmhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3dd477hm/qt3dd477hm.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt35w177s22026-06-14T05:02:12Zqt35w177s2Machine learning guided synthetic immunology and microbiologyde Anda, JaimeWong, Gerard C.L.2024-01-01This dissertation covers the implementation of computational algorithms to the area of microbiology and immunology. In chapter 1 and 2, we focus on the dynamic flagellar motilities performed by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Using a combination of physical simulations and computer vision microscopy routines, we explore the diverse modes of individual and collective translation, not limited to free planktonic “swimming”. We show how bacteria can use their flagellar motor to explore surfaces and predict that flagellar instabilities may play an important role on surface detachment. Additionally, we interrogate the two stators, MotAB and MotCD, flagellar motor system of P. aeruginosa. We show how these homologous proton- driven stators set up flagellar intermittencies that affect the collective motility characteristic of P. aeruginosa. Beyond single cell motility propulsion, the stators may play a key role on intricate signaling network implemented by bacteria to sense its environment and decision making to transition from planktonic motility to biofilm formation. In chapter 3 and 4, we implement machine learning routines to identify antimicrobial peptide like, xenoAMP, motifs in enterotoxins, TcdA and TcdB, from Clostridioides difficile with immunomodulatory and membrane remodeling properties. Our results support a mechanism in which the large GTD participate on its own translocation in synergy with other domains including the DRBD. In addition to their membrane remodeling activity, we show that such toxin-derived peptides can organize dsDNA into pro-inflammatory complexes to trigger an amplified TLR9-meditated inflammatory response. Using a machine learning aided phylo-functional analysis, we find that TcdB variants from hypervirulent strains share similarities and high prediction scores at such xenoAMP motifs. Finally in chapter 5, we explore the world of milk proteins. We identify an immunomodulatory motif, AS2C30, in the αS2-casein protein fraction of cow and camel that is absent in human breast milk. The cow’s milk peptide presents antimicrobial and pro-inflammatory properties, by forming TLR3-agonist complexes with dsRNA. In contrast, the camel’s milk homolog displays anti-inflammatory properties by disrupting the formation of LL37-dsRNA pro-inflammatory complexes and sequestering the TLR3 agonist into non-amplifying complexes. These results postulate camel’s milk as an alternative to cow’s milk for individuals with milk protein sensitivity, especially for preterm infants.ImmunologyMicrobiologyCaseinMachine LearningPseudomonas aeruginosaSwarmingTcdA TcdBToll-like receptorsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/35w177s2https://escholarship.org/content/qt35w177s2/qt35w177s2.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt17g7f1p22026-06-14T05:01:29Zqt17g7f1p2Toward an Improved Understanding of Juvenile Alpha-Synuclein Inclusions: The Impact of Lysosomal Storage Disease-Implicated Lipids on the Acceleration of Alpha-Synuclein PathologyHeredia, AndrésRodriguez, Jose A.2024-01-01Amyloid inclusions—typical of synucleinopathies such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease—have been identified for the past two decades within the brains of infants and young children afflicted by lysosomal storage diseases. Lysosomal storage diseases are a family of seventy rare monogenic disorders, many of which involve nonfunctional mutations in enzymes pertaining to lysosomal degradation pathways. A sizable proportion of these cases presenting amyloid inclusions have involved lysosomal storage diseases characterized by aberrant sphingolipid metabolism, in which specific sphingolipids accumulate due to particular hydrolases being rendered nonfunctional. These findings strengthen the emerging relationship between early-onset lysosomal storage diseases and late-onset neurodegenerative diseases initially established by the identification of lysosomal storage disease-implicated genes as risk factors that lead to a more severe and earlier onset form of Parkinson’s disease. More generally, these lysosome-related genetic risk factors point to a link between metabolic dysfunction and proteopathic aggregation that has implications for not only these rare diseases but also prevalent neurodegenerative diseases as well. Here, I review what is currently understood about the role of the lysosome within alpha-synuclein pathology setting up the presentation of my thesis research: an investigation of how disease-implicated lipids may directly contribute to the pathogenesis of a-syn inclusions. With Thioflavin-T fluorescence kinetic assays and negative-stain electron microscopy, I found that psychosine, glucopsychosine, and sphingosine greatly reduce the lag phase---representative of amyloid nucleation---of recombinant alpha-synuclein aggregation in vitro when compared to other disease-implicated lipids. My experimental findings prove that the effect of these sphingolipids is specific and not solely due to molecular crowding. Together with recent literature findings, these results suggest that the primary amine group of these three lipids of interest influences the propensity of alpha-synuclein to form fibrils. The kinetic evidence put forth by this research serves as a foundation on which further studies can be built to understand the consequences of these lipids on the resulting structural and functional properties of the proteopathic aggregates within their relevant disease contexts. This will ultimately support future therapeutic intervention strategies for neurodegenerative diseases that span the age spectrum. BiochemistryMolecular biologyAlpha-SynucleinAmyloid InclusionsGaucher DiseaseKrabbe DiseaseLysosomal Storage Diseaseenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/17g7f1p2https://escholarship.org/content/qt17g7f1p2/qt17g7f1p2.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0gk3z8pg2026-06-14T05:01:19Zqt0gk3z8pgSinography’s Allure: Language and Performance in Imperial Japan and Early Colonial Taiwan, 1895–1927Lin, Fang-RuEmmerich, Michael2024-01-01This dissertation argues that the lingering influence of the literary Sinitic tradition destabilized the colonial construction of language-based identities while simultaneously precluding further possibilities for localized development. The Literary Sinitic writing system, with its non-phonographic properties, invites a unique form of engagement that differs from the subscription to a specific spoken language. This distinction raises questions about the relationship between writing and speech, and how this dynamic shapes cultural and political imaginaries. Central to the allure of Literary Sinitic is the concept of “immunity to speech”—a fantasy that arises from the writing system’s detachment from direct phonetic representation. By not explicitly representing a particular speech form, Literary Sinitic allows for a certain degree of abstraction and universality in its expression. This distance from the immediacy of spoken language has contributed to a particular politicality, one that promised to transcend the boundaries of regional languages and vernacular forms. This study argues that the non-phonographic nature of Literary Sinitic had implicit implications for how literary and oral cultures were imagined. It examines how this tradition established a hierarchy in which the written form was elevated as a stable, enduring medium, while the spoken language was relegated to a secondary status, subject to the vagaries of regional variation and historical change. This perception shaped the very concept of language itself, emphasizing the primacy of the written character over the ephemerality of speech. Through the framework of “the first Sinographic sphere” and “the second Sinographic sphere,” the dissertation investigates three main implicit influences during the colonial context: the local reluctance to prioritize spoken languages, the emphasis on sensory and affective dimensions over communicative intelligibility, and the delocalized cultural emphasis.
By situating an understanding of colonial conditions in East Asia within the scope of influence of the literary Sinitic tradition, this work contributes to a more dynamic understanding of regional cultural history. The analysis of the distinct colonial context of Taiwan within imperial Japanese history sheds light on how the Japanese Empire grappled with deconstructing the literary Sinitic tradition and the variations in each colony’s relationship with locality, writing, and language.
Asian literatureComparative literatureAsian historyColonial TaiwanEast Asian ColonialismJapanese EmpireLiterary SiniticMeiji JapanSinographyenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gk3z8pghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0gk3z8pg/qt0gk3z8pg.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt08q9q5k12026-06-14T05:01:14Zqt08q9q5k1Exploring the Use of Magnetic Domain Walls and Skyrmions in Beyond-CMOS Memory and Computing DevicesDai, BingqianWang, Kang K.L.2024-01-01The remarkable advances in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) electronics have driven significant technological achievements. However, challenges arise from the exponential growth in computational power demanded by artificial intelligence and increasing data volumes. CMOS technology is constrained by the limits of transistor miniaturization and the high energy costs of volatile memory. Spintronics, a Beyond-CMOS technology, leverages the electron’s spin and charge to overcome these limitations, offering non-volatility, fast dynamics, energy-efficient switching, high endurance, and scalability. This positions spintronics as a promising solution for next-generation magnetic memory and logic devices. Magnetic domain walls and skyrmions are topological excitations that extend beyond the uniform ferromagnetic background. These spin textures inherit the notable advantages of spintronics and function effectively as solitonic information carriers for memory and computing applications. Moreover, they provide significant improvements in energy and area efficiency compared to traditional uniform magnetization-based spintronics. Driven by these motivations, my doctoral study focuses on developing domain wall- and skyrmion-based memory and computing devices. In this dissertation, we explore the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, which is the fundamental mechanism underlying domain walls and skyrmions. We present our development of the voltage-controlled Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and utilize this effect to control skyrmion motion, addressing the challenge of the skyrmion Hall effect in skyrmion racetrack memory. Additionally, we delve into physically-inspired non-Boolean computing paradigms, utilizing the spintronic mechanism of domain wall motion to create magnetic convolution hardware and demonstrating its algorithmic implementations. Furthermore, we have discovered a transient antiskyrmion state in an isotropic Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction system and have clarified its underlying mechanism. Leveraging the stochastic nature of this state, we demonstrate the potential for developing a true random number generator.Condensed matter physicsApplied physicsNanoscienceenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/08q9q5k1https://escholarship.org/content/qt08q9q5k1/qt08q9q5k1.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7wt5p6qv2026-06-13T05:33:57Zqt7wt5p6qvExploiting Electrochemical Processes for Advanced Water Treatment ApplicationsLam, KenjiJassby, David2025-01-01Freshwater scarcity continues to intensify due to climate change, industrial expansion, and growing population demands. As reliance on alternative water sources such as brackish groundwater and industrial wastewater increases, membrane-based desalination, particularly reverse osmosis (RO) has become central to water reuse strategies. However, RO systems face challenges related to membrane scaling and the persistence of emerging contaminants like short-chain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are difficult to remove using conventional methods.This dissertation investigates two critical challenges in advanced water treatment: (1) the mitigation of RO membrane scaling via a modular electrocoagulation-ultrafiltration (EC-UF) pretreatment system, and (2) the selective removal of anionic surfactants using pulsed electrosorption.
In the first component, an EC-UF system was applied to cooling tower blowdown (CTBD) water to reduce scaling precursors including calcium, magnesium, and silica. The hybrid EC-UF process demonstrated enhanced removal efficiencies of up to 90% for calcium and 40% for magnesium, while silica removal exceeded 99% at high charge loadings. This led to significant reductions in the saturation index for calcite, gypsum and amorphous silica at the modelled RO membrane surface. An economic analysis further explored the integration of hydrogen recovery into the EC system, leveraging hydrogen gas generation at the cathode as a value-added co-product. Under favorable conditions such as renewable electricity supply and high hydrogen selling prices, the EC-UF system achieved cost savings of up to $0.12/m³, even when compared to the lowest cost brine disposal option, seawater discharge (SWD). This highlights its potential as a sustainable and economically viable platform for both water treatment and resource recovery.
The second component focused on the removal of anionic surfactants, using sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) as a proxy compound for short-chain PFAS. Electrosorption experiments with carbon fiber (CF) electrodes under pulsed electric fields (500 mV, 10 Hz) showed enhanced SDS removal via combined electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions. Kinetic modeling revealed surface-controlled adsorption behavior, with optimal conditions balancing field-induced transport and surface regeneration. This approach offers a promising alternative for the selective capture of otherwise hard to remove contaminants.
Together, these studies demonstrate the potential of electrochemical systems to address both inorganic and organic contaminant water treatment challenges. By advancing modular and electrified water treatment processes, this work contributes to the development of resilient, selective, and resource-efficient strategies for sustainable water reuse
Environmental engineeringenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wt5p6qvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7wt5p6qv/qt7wt5p6qv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7d43m7q32026-06-13T05:33:57Zqt7d43m7q3Smoothness-Driven Metrics for Data Quality in Imitation LearningKulkarni, Soham ShaileshCui, Yuchen2025-01-01In imitation learning, the quality of demonstration data is critical to policy performance.However, real-world datasets often contain suboptimal, noisy, or inconsistent trajectories due
to human error and procedural variability. Existing data filtering techniques typically require
extensive manual annotation or substantial computational cost, limiting their scalability.
We propose rinse (Ranking and INdexing Smooth Examples), a general-purpose method
for filtering demonstration data based on trajectory smoothness. rinse evaluates each
trajectory using both Cartesian and frequency-domain smoothness metrics, ranking and
selecting high-quality demonstrations for training. This approach enhances policy robustness
and reduces the amount of data needed for effective learning. We validate rinse in both
simulated imitation learning environments and on a real-world robotic platform. Our results
demonstrate that rinse enables more efficient and reliable policy learning from imperfect data.
Furthermore, rinse assigns dataset quality scores that correlate strongly with downstream
performance and can be used to monitor the data collection process.Computer scienceRoboticsBehaviour CloningData QualityImitation LearningRobot Learningenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7d43m7q3https://escholarship.org/content/qt7d43m7q3/qt7d43m7q3.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2nv915fz2026-06-13T05:33:55Zqt2nv915fzTamoxifen does not induce widespread gene expression changes in the mouse arcuate nucleus or medial preoptic area: and, creating novel tools for estrogen signaling detectionRobbins, Nathaniel Richardvan Veen, John EdwardCorrea, Stephanie2025-01-01Reproductive steroid hormones such as estrogen coordinate a wide array of physiological processes, linking reproductive state to metabolism, thermoregulation, neural function, and behavior. These effects are primarily mediated through nuclear hormone receptors that bind DNA and regulate transcription. However, current methods for studying steroid hormone signaling are limited. Most rely on static measurements of hormone levels or receptor expression, which fail to capture the dynamic, cell-specific transcriptional responses that drive hormone function. Compounding this gap is a limited understanding of how pharmacological interventions, such as selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs) like tamoxifen, impact hormone-sensitive neural circuits. There remains a critical need for more precise tools and mechanistic insight into both endogenous and therapeutic steroid signaling.This thesis addresses these challenges through two complementary approaches. First, I developed a suite of genetically encoded molecular reporters – the SeeER toolkit – which dynamically track estrogen receptor activity in specific cell types using Cre-lox–based targeting. These tools use a destabilized GFP under the control of multiple estrogen response elements (EREs), enabling high-resolution detection of real-time estrogen-driven transcription. Variants were optimized for neuronal, astrocytic, or flexible cell-type-specific expression, and for compatibility with calcium imaging platforms. Preliminary in vivo validation has revealed that the tool can reliably report time-dependent estrogen receptor activation, highlighting the toolkit’s power to dissect hormone signaling with temporal precision. Second, I investigated the molecular mechanisms of tamoxifen-induced hot flashes, a common side effect in breast cancer therapy. Although tamoxifen produces thermoregulatory symptoms that resemble estrogen withdrawal, transcriptomic profiling of the arcuate nucleus and medial preoptic area showed no major changes in gene expression. The findings suggest that tamoxifen may disrupt thermoregulation through non-genomic or circuit-level mechanisms, distinct from classical estrogen withdrawal pathways. These studies offer new tools and perspectives for probing steroid hormone action in the brain and periphery. They advance our ability to monitor estrogen signaling in vivo and open new directions for understanding how therapeutic hormone modulation shapes neural and physiological systems.PhysiologyNeurosciencesEndocrinologyCreestrogenhot flashsignalingtamoxifentoolkitenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2nv915fzhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2nv915fz/qt2nv915fz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0ph1h9mx2026-06-13T05:33:53Zqt0ph1h9mxData-Driven Analytics in Public Health: Equitable and Interpretable ApproachesHu, JingyuanBravo, FernandaLong, Elisa2025-01-01Recent public health crises, notably the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid epidemic, have exposed critical weaknesses and persistent inequities in healthcare delivery systems. At the same time, the growing availability of diverse healthcare data — coupled with advances in data analytics and decision modeling — has created new opportunities to inform policy and operational decisions in this high-stakes sector. This dissertation develops and applies two data-driven decision frameworks to address challenges in healthcare resource allocation and risk prediction, with the overarching goal of supporting decisions that are not only effective but also equitable and interpretable. The first part of the dissertation addresses geographic and socioeconomic disparities in access to healthcare services by developing a structural estimate-then-optimize (SETO) framework for spatial resource allocation. Motivated by the operational challenges of the COVID-19 vaccination rollout and the empirical challenge of limited data availability, this approach integrates demand estimation — using a modified Berry-Levinsohn-Pakes (BLP) approach that accounts for provider capacity and individual heterogeneity — with a choice-based facility location optimization model for healthcare service network design. Relying only on aggregate data, the framework enables policymakers to identify and address gaps in healthcare access, providing prescriptive recommendations that outperform common heuristics and lead to more efficient and equitable service delivery. This framework is illustrated through a case study of the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program in California and offers generalizable insights for improving healthcare access. The second part of the dissertation develops an interpretable machine learning model to predict the risk of long-term opioid use among opioid-naive patients based solely on their prescription history. Using over 13 million records from California’s prescription drug monitoring program, we design a sparse, point-based risk scoring model — Long-Term Opioid Use Risk (LTOUR) — that balances predictive performance with interpretability and usability. LTOUR selects six key features to construct a simple additive scoring table. Despite its simplicity, the model achieves strong, well-calibrated predictive accuracy, rivaling more complex machine learning methods. Its transparency and ease of use make it well-suited for clinical integration, enabling earlier intervention and informing both practice and policy decisions. Together, these studies advance the methodological frontier at the intersection of healthcare operations, data analytics, and policy design. By illustrating the benefits of integrating structural estimation, optimization, and machine learning, this dissertation offers systematic frameworks for promoting equity, interpretability and effectiveness in healthcare decision making.ManagementOperations researchEconomicsHealthcare OperationsMachine LearningOptimizationPublic PolicyStructural Estimationenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0ph1h9mxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0ph1h9mx/qt0ph1h9mx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9p01k6xd2026-06-13T05:03:40Zqt9p01k6xdCollagen XVIII Alpha 1 Regulates Cardiac Fibrosis and Vascular Remodeling Following Ischemic InjuryLiu, JiajiaQuijada, Pearl J2025-01-01Background: Excessive fibrosis post-myocardial infarction (MI) impairs cardiac healing. Previously, we identified Collagen type XVIII alpha 1 (COL18A1), encoding anti-angiogenic peptide endostatin, in embryonic cardiac development1. Understanding COL18A1’s role in adult cardiac fibrosis and vascular remodeling after MI may improve recovery and patient outcomes. Methods: We studied cardiac recovery post-MI using mice lacking COL18A1 (Col18a1-/-) and compared them to normal wild-type mice (Col18a1+/+). We measured fibrosis-related gene expression using qPCR. Echocardiograms tracked heart function, and tissue analysis evaluated scar formation and blood vessel regeneration. Results: Col18a1-/- mice showed a modest decrease in fibrosis-related gene levels and slightly improved vessel density compared to Col18a1+/+, although these changes were subtle and not statistically significant. Echocardiography indicated minimal functional differences between groups. Discussion: COL18A1 deletion subtly modulates fibrosis and vascular remodeling in adult hearts post-MI. Further research into COL18A1 and its downstream signaling pathways could reveal therapeutic opportunities for enhancing cardiac recovery after MI.PhysiologyBiologyCardiac fibrosisCollagen XVIIIEndostatinExtracellular matrixMyocardial infarctionVascular remodelingenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p01k6xdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9p01k6xd/qt9p01k6xd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8rr5x0572026-06-13T05:03:31Zqt8rr5x057Extracellular Matrix Remodeling and Mechanotransduction in the Pathogenesis of Muscular DystrophyKannan, PranavCrosbie, Rachelle H2025-01-01Fibrosis is a defining pathological feature of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), drivenby excessive extracellular matrix (ECM) accumulation and progressive skeletal muscle
degeneration. Central to this fibrotic process are fibro/adipogenic progenitors (FAPs), stromal cells
that orchestrate ECM deposition in response to tissue injury and disease. Despite their central role,
the molecular mechanisms by which FAPs sense and respond to their mechanical cues within the
dystrophic environment—and how this response contributes to persistent fibrotic signaling—
remain insufficiently understood.
In this study, we investigated the bidirectional regulation between ECM remodeling and
FAP behavior in the mdx mouse model of DMD, with a focus on the role of Yes-associated protein
1 (YAP1), a key effector of mechanical signaling. Using an integrative multi-modal transcriptomic
approach—including bulk RNA sequencing, single-cell RNA sequencing, and spatial
transcriptomics—we uncover elevated Yap1 expression and activation of mechanosensitive
transcriptional programs in mdx FAPs. Spatial transcriptomic analyses further revealed that
regions with high YAP1 activity coincide with enriched expression of fibrotic ECM genes such
as Col1a1 and other fibrillar collagens, suggesting that YAP1 acts not only as a sensor of ECM
stiffness but also as a positive regulator of ECM remodeling, establishing a feed-forward loop to
amplify fibrosis.
To explore the functional relevance of this axis, we pharmacologically inhibited YAP1
signaling in mdx mice with Verteporfin, a selective blocker of YAP-TEAD interaction. YAP1
inhibition resulted in a significant reduction in collagen type I deposition, with no adverse effects
on myofibers or muscle regeneration, indicating a fibrosis-specific role for YAP1 in FAPs.
Collectively, these findings define a bidirectional feed-forward circuit in which ECM
remodeling activates YAP1 signaling in FAPs, which in turn drives further ECM deposition and
fibrosis. Disrupting this feedback loop by targeting YAP1 offers a mechanistically grounded
therapeutic strategy for attenuating fibrosis in DMD and may hold broader relevance for other
myopathies characterized by aberrant stromal remodeling.Physiologyenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rr5x057https://escholarship.org/content/qt8rr5x057/qt8rr5x057.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt85t9c2fc2026-06-13T05:03:24Zqt85t9c2fcUsing morphological variation of the skull to understand evolutionary trends across taxonomic scales in CarnivoraJacquemetton, ChristianeVan Valkenburgh, Blaire2024-01-01Carnivorans are historically well-studied because of their extensive fossil record in North America and their great morphological and ecological diversity. To understand evolutionary trends with carnivorans, it is useful to turn to features of the skull and teeth, which are documented proxies for broader ecological categories such as body mass and diet. For example, the correlation between the lower first molar length and body mass is well documented. Other features of carnivoran skulls remain unexplored in terms of the types of variation present and the functional implications of that variation. For example, domestic dogs exist in a distinct morphological space given the intense artificial selection they have undergone. Therefore, I used the carnivoran skull to ask questions about the variation and evolutionary plasticity of certain features, the functional implications of this variation, and how carnivorans have shifted across different functional categories over time. In Chapter 1 I studied the variation of the 3D shape of the cribriform plate in domestic dogs, as it is closely associated with the olfactory nerves and found its shape varies with the dramatic changes in skull shape across domestic dog breeds. In Chapter 2 I quantified dental variation in domestic dogs as a model of how variability in tooth shape and number is generated under conditions of minimal selection pressure and compared that variation to other canid species and found that there is greater variation across a suite of dental features in domestic dogs when compared to Canidae more broadly. In Chapter 3 I used dental measurements to estimate body mass and diet for North American fossil carnivoran species over the past 40 million years to analyze trends and shifts in the distribution of species across these categories and compared these shifts to climatic events and taxonomic turnover. I found that carnivorans have moved through distinct ecological regimes and that diet diversifies before body mass.Evolution & developmentEcologyMorphologycarnivoracribriform platedomestic dogsevolutionmorphologyskullenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/85t9c2fchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt85t9c2fc/qt85t9c2fc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt81c0x99v2026-06-13T05:03:22Zqt81c0x99vExternalized Bodies: Migration, Affect, and the Politics of Care in the Mexican Refugee SystemRuiz, SiennaDe León, Jason2025-01-01Mexico is a deadly transit corridor where the severity of state surveillance, criminal activity, and resource deprivation causes thousands of people migrating northwards to die each year. And, as of recently, Mexico has become one of the top countries for refugee petitions in the world. That hundreds of thousands of people now seek protection from the Mexican state does not indicate that the material conditions of migration have changed. Rather, I contend that it is the affective charge of migration that has. This change is critical to understanding how the strategies of U.S. border externalization, in which the state transfers the duty of migrant detention, deportation, and acceptance to Mexico, functions through altering people’s bodies. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in a Mexican refugee shelter, I first describe how the refugee system builds upon past migration policing between the U.S. and Mexico that used affect to implement both carceral and humanitarian reform. In turn, migrants adapted their embodied presentations according to the dominant policies of the state. Within newly emergent refugee structures, migrants do the same as they must clearly display deference, injury, and intent for permanent resettlement to be considered refugees. However, the dissonance between this performance and people’s true goals and experiences binds people in an agonizing melancholic state. I then describe how, in response, refugee institutions push migrants towards the family and psychiatry, objects of care that can re-orient melancholy to the social connections and behaviors aligned with national integration. Amidst legal norms, state bureaucracies, and humanitarian institutions that use bodily signs to differentiate migrants from refugees, the ways that people care for the body indicates the contradictions inherent to the project of transforming a country of transit to one of refuge. As countries in the Global North escalate the exportation of their borders, the bodies of migrants-turned-refugees in Mexico signal the emergent strategies for surviving increasingly externalized worlds. Cultural anthropologyAffectBorder externalizationCareMexicoMigrationRefugeeenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/81c0x99vhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt81c0x99v/qt81c0x99v.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5z3917s22026-06-13T05:02:44Zqt5z3917s2A Comprehensive Investigation of Human Developmental Myogenesis Uncovering Novel Mechanisms involved in Human Skeletal Muscle MaturationGIBBS, DEVIN EricCrosbie, Rachelle HPyle, April D2025-01-01Skeletal muscle is a highly specialized, plastic tissue that plays a central role in movement, body position maintenance, and metabolic regulation. Skeletal muscle comprises more than 40% of total body mass in healthy adults. Beyond its mechanical functions, skeletal muscle has the remarkable ability to adapt and regenerate in response to various physiological and pathological stimuli, such as exercise, aging, and disease. At the cellular level, skeletal muscle is composed of multinucleated muscle fibers formed by the fusion of myogenic progenitor cells during development. These fibers are maintained and repaired throughout life by a resident population of muscle stem cells known as satellite cells.The formation of skeletal muscle during embryonic development, known as developmental myogenesis, encompasses a highly coordinated series of events that transform undifferentiated mesodermal progenitors into mature, contractile myofibers. This complex process is orchestrated by a dynamic interplay between transcriptional regulators, extracellular cues, and cellular interactions, which together ensure the proper specification, proliferation, differentiation, and organization of muscle precursor cells known as skeletal muscle progenitor cells. Developmental myogenesis is temporally regulated, occurring in distinct waves that contribute to both embryonic and fetal muscle formation. Embryonic myogenesis establishes the initial musculature, whereas fetal myogenesis contributes to muscle growth and the establishment of satellite cells. Understanding these mechanisms not only provides insight into normal embryonic development but also has far-reaching implications for regenerative medicine, congenital myopathies, and muscle-wasting diseases
A comprehensive understanding of human developmental myogenesis is critical not only for elucidating the processes of tissue formation but also for informing disease progression and the generation of humanized models. Despite significant advances in our understanding of animal model myogenesis, many aspects of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that govern early muscle development in humans remain poorly understood. Additionally, a lot of modern work investigating developmental myogenesis combine the mechanisms of all model organisms in their understanding of myogenesis, convoluting our understanding of the precise events and mechanisms involved specifically in human myogenesis. This thesis aims to explore the regulatory pathways, lineage relationships, and developmental events that shape human skeletal muscle development, drawing on insights from prior human investigation, model organisms and in-vitro models, and utilizing recent technological innovations in genetics, imaging, proteomics, and stem cell biology.
Here, in chapter 2, we first describe the different myogenic capabilities of human skeletal muscle progenitors and satellite cells isolated from different stages of development both when cultured in-vitro and when engrafted into model organisms in-vivo. We also identify a potential transient regenerating or developing human myofiber that may act as part of a developmental progenitor cell niche that potentially supports PAX7 SMPCs.
In Chapter 3 we generated the first complete proteome of human skeletal muscle development, spanning embryonic, fetal, and adult stages. From this dataset, we identified Collagen VI α6 (ColVI α6) as a dynamically regulated ECM component that increases during development, with peak expression during fetal Stage 4 and acts as a spatial and temporal checkpoint for each wave of human developmental myogenesis. Lastly, we show that ColVI α6 is a key component of the developing T-tubules and remains present in the T-tubules throughout childhood.
Finally, in Chapter 4, we present a short preliminary study demonstrating the feasibility of generating human-mouse skeletal muscle xenografts using developing human skeletal muscle. This has the potential to be used to model and study human developmental myogenesis.
By dissecting the processes that underlie human myogenic specification and differentiation, this work seeks to contribute to a deeper mechanistic understanding of human skeletal muscle development and to highlight conserved and divergent processes between humans, in-vitro models and other model organisms. In doing so, it provides a developmental framework for interpreting human skeletal muscle biology in health and disease.
Developmental biologyCellular biologyBiochemistryExtracellular MatrixFetalProteomicsSatellite CellsSkeletal MuscleT-tubuleenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5z3917s2https://escholarship.org/content/qt5z3917s2/qt5z3917s2.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5p99f2vj2026-06-13T05:02:39Zqt5p99f2vjDeveloping Strategies and Materials for Control of Magnetism in NanostructuresEstoque, KatherineTolbert, Sarah H2025-01-01 Dynamic control magnetism is critical for a wide variety of applications such as magnetic memory, magnetic separations technologies, and magnetic mechanical actuation. However, as technologies become smaller, resistive losses in standard electromagnets make them a less attractive choice. Here, we explore materials and methods that may be used to control magnetism in alternative ways. In the first part of this thesis, we demonstrate a new form of granular multiferroic composite in which we control dipole coupling between magnetic nanocrystals to create switchable magnetic properties. We embed superparamagnetic CoFe2O4 nanocrystals into both porous and dense ferroelectric BaTiO3 films. By biasing the ferroelectric, we change the dielectric environment of the composite, and thus the interparticle magnetic dipole-dipole coupling. Various magnetic measurements confirm a decrease in dipole coupling upon application of an electric bias. The changes are more dramatic in porous composites, showing changes of 50% in saturation magnetization and 60K in blocking temperature upon biasing.
Next, we further explore the synthesis of porous BaTiO3 films and optimize parameters for their use in magnetoelectric composites. Using polymer templating to generate porous oxide perovskites presents unique challenges due to the high annealing temperatures required and the associated grain growth. We compare BaTiO3 films made using different templating polymers, casting solvents, and annealing conditions. Finally, we synthesize an optimized porous composite with magnetic nanocrystals, using a poly(styrene-block-ethylene oxide) template.
Finally, we turn our attention to chemical control of magnetic properties. Atoms and ions such as hydrogen can be chemically inserted into magnetic crystals, and their insertion can change magnetic behavior. Here, we examine the hydrogenation of the hard rare-earth magnet SmCo5. We synthesize SmCo5 nanocrystals and compare their behavior to bulk SmCo5. By measuring magnetization of these materials before and after exposure to a hydrogen-saturated solvent, we demonstrate a decrease in coercivity for both. However, nanoparticles see a much larger reduction in coercivity, showing a 100% decrease to become superparamagnetic. The nanoparticles also show partial reversibility of these magnetic changes a few hours after removal from the hydrogen environment, while changes are much slower in the bulk material, which shows no change over 12 hours.NanoscienceMaterials SciencePhysical chemistryFerroelectricHydrogenationMagnetismMultiferroicNanoparticlePorousenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5p99f2vjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5p99f2vj/qt5p99f2vj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt51n216v42026-06-13T05:02:36Zqt51n216v4K-pop Fandom(s): Divergent Understandings of Narrated AuthenticityBerbiguier, Mathieu ThomasHanscom, Christopher P2024-01-01This dissertation analyzes power dynamics within K-pop fandom(s)—a term encompassing fans within and beyond Korea—and examines how these dynamics contribute to nuanced perceptions of authenticity. Situated at the intersection of Media Studies, Area Studies, Gender Studies, Digital Humanities, and Ethnomusicology, this project employs online and offline ethnographic methods. By gathering insights from fans and professionals, my dissertation exemplifies a humanistic social science arguing for a nuanced understanding of cultural phenomena. In contrast to the dominant framework of the “Korean Wave,” which leverages K-pop's global popularity for nationalist ends and risks exoticizing Korean popular culture by often omitting the national context, this research project uses a combination of global and national perspectives as its main theoretical framework. It argues that the various perceptions of K-pop within its fandom(s) converge toward an imaginary concept of what “authentic” K-pop is. Utilizing its interdisciplinary framework, my ambition is to assert K-pop as a legitimate object of study within Korean Studies.Asian studiesGender studiesMass communicationAuthenticityFandom RelationshipsK-popKorean Fandom CultureNarrativeProducing Processenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/51n216v4https://escholarship.org/content/qt51n216v4/qt51n216v4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3hn7d9sr2026-06-13T05:02:31Zqt3hn7d9srMultiscale Micromechanical Framework for Mechanical Properties of Nano-Silica Incorporated Cementitious CompositesMan, XiaoyanJu, Jiann-Wen2025-01-01Nano-incorporated cementitious composites enable the nano-optimization of cement gels, e.g., nano-silica incorporated concrete, leading to improved mechanical and durability properties. Replacing cement with nano-silica can also produce “greener” concrete by reducing CO2 emissions. However, precise multiscale nano-micro-structure correlation and function optimization mechanisms were not well established.Driven by the demand for multiscale analysis of nano-incorporated cementitious composites, this dissertation presents a comprehensive multiscale and multiphysics investigation into the mechanical and thermal behavior of nano-silica incorporated cementitious composites. To capture the effects of nano-silica addition across different length and time scales, a series of modeling frameworks were developed, validated, and applied.
A multiscale micromechanical framework was first proposed to predict the effective elastic properties of nano-silica incorporated cementitious composites, incorporating the pozzolanic reaction and microstructural evolution induced by nano-silica. Numerical results demonstrated that appropriate nano-silica incorporation significantly improves the stiffness of cement paste, mortar, and concrete by increasing the volume fraction of high-modulus hydration products.
To describe nonlinear mechanical behavior of nano-silica incorporated concrete, an energy-based isotropic elastoplastic damage model was formulated and implemented on realistic three-phase mesostructures. The model effectively captured the stress-strain responses and damage evolution under uniaxial loading, revealing that nano-silica enhances both elasticity and strength, while excessive content may increase brittleness. The influence of ITZ thickness was also examined and shown to have minor impact on elasticity but a notable effect on strength reduction.
Furthermore, a multiscale chemo-micromechanical framework was developed to quantify the degradation of elastic properties and the evolution of thermal damage under elevated temperatures. The model accounts for dehydration kinetics, porosity growth, microcracking, and interfacial debonding. Results revealed that nano-silica enhances thermal stability and stiffness retention, especially at moderate temperatures, while lower water-to-cement ratios significantly reduce thermal damage.
Finally, a coupled thermo-elastoplastic-damage model was developed and implemented to simulate the mechanical behavior of nano-silica incorporated concrete at high temperatures. The model captures the coupled effects of thermal degradation and mechanical loading and shows strong agreement with experimental data. Parametric studies indicated that a 4% nano-silica content offers an optimal balance between performance enhancement and practical feasibility.
Overall, this work provides a comprehensive and validated multiscale micromechanical framework for predicting and investigating the mechanical and thermal performance of nano-modified cementitious materials. The findings offer valuable insights into the design, optimization, and application of durable and thermally resilient cementitious materials in next-generation infrastructure.Civil engineeringenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hn7d9srhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3hn7d9sr/qt3hn7d9sr.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2zq1w54k2026-06-13T05:02:25Zqt2zq1w54kUtilizing High-Pressure Studies to Understand the Structure and Mechanical properties of Superhard Metal BoridesHamilton, Spencer GeorgeTolbert, Sarah HKaner, Richard B2025-01-01Materials with high hardness have always been sought after in industrial machining applications due to their ability to resist wear with use and therefore reduce tool turnover rates. While diamond and cubic boron nitride have long been used in these applications, their high temperature and pressure syntheses dramatically increase their costs. Metal borides are a promising alternative to these materials due to their high implicit hardness and ability to be synthesized using scalable and ambient pressure techniques such as arc-melting. The combination of high-electron density metals such as tungsten or rhenium with a network of short, covalent boron-boron and boron-metal bonds is able to emulate aspects of the structure of diamond, resulting in high hardness. Importantly, hardness in these materials can be further improved through techniques such as solid-solution hardening, precipitation hardening and dislocation-grain boundary interactions. In this thesis, the application and effects of these hardening strategies were investigated in a range of metal boride materials including metal diborides (MB2), metal tetraborides (MB4) and metal dodecaborides (MB12). Specifically, high-pressure radial X-ray diffraction experiments in a diamond anvil cell are conducted on these materials to study the deformation mechanisms and intrinsic hardening of metal borides in a lattice specific manner. This work begins with an introduction to hardness and the techniques utilized in this dissertation to study it (Chapter 1). The following chapters involve the investigation of the effect of grain size refinement on the hardness of rhenium diboride and tungsten diboride (Chapters 2 and 3), a structural study into a wide range of solid solutions and compositionally complex metal dodecaborides (Chapter 4), and the synthesis and thermodynamic discussion of molybdenum tetraboride and molybdenum-tungsten tetraboride solid solutions (Chapter 5). A novel technique for the investigation of materials using high-pressure and high-temperature radial X-ray diffraction is also introduced (Chapter 6). Finally, potential directions for future study into superhard materials synthesis and high-pressure experimentation are presented in the final chapter (Chapter 7).ChemistryMaterials ScienceMetal boridesRadial diffractionSuperhard materialsUltra-incompressibleenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zq1w54khttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2zq1w54k/qt2zq1w54k.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2v43c0p12026-06-13T05:02:19Zqt2v43c0p1Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Methods Comparison and Applications: Immune Profiling in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and Keloid-Prone TissuesEspinoza, AlejandroPellegrini, Matteo2025-01-01Single-cell RNA sequencing is a powerful tool to understand transcripts of specific cell types. As new technologies emerge, we compare to previous platforms to understand benefits and potential drawbacks. Additionally, this dissertation leverages advancements in single-cell RNA sequencing to improve characterization of immune response and deeper understanding of complex diseases at a single cell level. In the first part, we compare the 10X Genomics platform to Parse Biosciences single-cell sequencing. By comparing these two platforms in PBMCs and CD8+ TEMRA cells, we provide insights to their respective transcript capture and the implications these differences can have in downstream analysis. This comparison aims to provide a resource to the benefits and drawbacks of each platform within the context of these two sample types.
The second chapter characterizes the immune response of five DMD patients treated with AAV9-mini dystrophin from a clinical trial. We perform single-cell RNA sequencing and TCR sequencing to study cell type composition and their respective T cell receptors in PBMCs pre and post treatment. We demonstrate genes upregulated associated to viral response in different T cell subtypes without affecting their overall cell type proportions. Additionally, we demonstrate certain expanded clonotypes to be associated to post-treatment individuals associated to HHV. These insights provide markers for future studies associated to the immune response in DMD patients treated with AAVs.
The third part aims to further characterize genes driving keloid formation. Here, we compare the dermal tissue of individuals from diverse racial backgrounds to identify conserved upregulated keloid gene markers. Through this comparison, specifically in Fibroblast cells, we identify shared and unique genes across our samples. These genes serve as potential candidates in keloid formation. Here, we provide novel genes we aim to validate and understand to target as a method of keloid formation prevention and treatment.
In summary, these studies apply single-cell RNA sequencing to expand our understanding in the immune effect of AAV treatment and keloid formation. These studies provide guidance to consideration of platform selection and novel cell type specific markers necessary for future studies.Geneticsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2v43c0p1https://escholarship.org/content/qt2v43c0p1/qt2v43c0p1.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1tt9q1k82026-06-13T05:01:37Zqt1tt9q1k8Effects of Ambient Temperature on Electric Vehicle (EV) Electricity Consumption Are Reduced in a Warming WorldWU, QINGYANGZHU, YIFANG2025-01-01Emerging evidence suggests that ambient temperature affects electric vehicles (EVs) electricity consumption through affecting the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries, yet this effect remains unclear in a warming world. We simulate the global EV stock and their response of electricity consumption patterns to ambient temperature changes from 2010 to 2100 on 0.5° grids. In 2022, the global EV electricity consumption was 61 TWh, projected to rise to 548 (528 - 576) TWh in the short term (2030), and 1936 (1738 - 2157) TWh in the medium term (2050). While overall electricity demand grows with EV adoption, the percentage impact of temperature on this demand decreases from 12.3% in 2030 to 11.4% by 2050. As global warming progresses, the impact of ambient temperature on EV power demand is expected to decline in most nations. Despite this reduced temperature sensitivity, equatorial areas and Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, however, may experience increased consumption. This apparent paradox occurs because massive EV growth outweighs efficiency gains from reduced temperature effects. These findings underscore the need for climate mitigation strategies and energy system planning.EnergyArtificial intelligenceComputer scienceenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tt9q1k8https://escholarship.org/content/qt1tt9q1k8/qt1tt9q1k8.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2sf9v8mw2026-06-12T06:39:43Zqt2sf9v8mwTwo Studies in Evolutionary Biology: Conservation Genomics of the California Red-Legged Frog and a Theory of Holobiont SpeciationYang, HanyuLohmueller, Kirk EdwardSong, Chuliang2026-06-10This thesis comprises two independent studies in evolutionary biology. Chapter 1 presents the first whole-genome resequencing analysis of the federally threatened California red-legged frog (_Rana draytonii_) in Southern California, alongside the sequencing foundation for the first de novo reference genome for the species. An ongoing reintroduction program in the Santa Monica Mountains has relied on a single source population to re-establish the species at extirpated sites. I found that all individuals sampled from the source were first-degree relatives and that the population is a marked genetic outlier relative to others in the region, which raises concern. Chapter 2 extends Bateson--Dobzhansky--Muller speciation theory to fluctuating microbiome and shows that, while microbiome variation traps lineages in simple genetic architectures, it asymptotically accelerates speciation in the complex multilocus systems.Evolution & developmentAnimal sciencesGeneticsConservation GenomicsFrogHologenomePopulation GeneticsReproductive IsolationSpeciationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sf9v8mwhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2sf9v8mw/qt2sf9v8mw.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt63t410fn2026-06-12T06:39:37Zqt63t410fnThree Essays on Political EconomyNguyen, Anh Thi NgocWacziarg, Romain2026-06-10This dissertation comprises three essays on political economy, the study of how political institutions the distribution of power, and beliefs interact with economic activity to shape long-term development. A long tradition treats political and economic outcomes as deeply interdependent: institutions are chosen under political constraints; those institutions in turn shape the distribution of resources and opportunities; and the resulting distribution feeds back into political power and into the beliefs through which individuals interpret their economic environment. Across three substantively distinct settings — colonial Vietnam, contemporary U.S. minimum-wage policy, and an Asian commercial bank’s internal labor market — the chapters that follow share a single substantive question — how do institutions and informational environments interact with beliefs and culture to determine short and long run economic outcomes?Chapter 1: Breaking the Old Order: Colonial Shocks, Cultural Change, and Economic Trajectories — The first chapter studies how a colonial political decision — the form of governance France imposed on Vietnam in the late nineteenth century — led to economic divergences that persist nearly a century after the end of colonialism. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design at the historical Cochinchina–Annam border, I show that areas placed under direct colonial rule today exhibit 20% higher household consumption and 30% higher individual wages than those administered indirectly, and they outperformed their indirectly-ruled counterparts during the Vietnam War period as well. An original in-person ii survey administered on both sides of the border identifies the mechanism: direct rule shifted the prevailing cultural norm from collectivism toward individualism, a shift concentrated among non-migrants and consistent with intergenerational cultural transmission. The chapter contributes to political economy along two dimensions. First, it provides causal evidence that the institutional choices of colonial powers — themselves the product of political bargaining within metropolitan France and between France and Vietnamese elites — have persistent effects on the regions they governed. Second, by documenting that culture rather than residual institutions carries the long-run effect, it sharpens the political-economy literature’s understanding of when institutions matter directly versus through the values and beliefs they leave behind (Nunn 2014; Bisin and Verdier 2024).Chapter 2: The Political Economy of Minimum Wages. The second chapter studies how individuals form preferences over the minimum wage—a question that has received comparatively little attention in a literature otherwise dominated by estimates of the policy’s labor-market consequences. I use two original survey waves fielded on national U.S. samples that combine descriptive evidence on attitudes and perceptions with three information treatments, each varying one piece of factual content: a respondent-specific correction to perceived rank in the state wage distribution; a correction to perceived share of workers earning at or near the state minimum wage; and a salience prompt about state unemployment that conveys no new information. The descriptive evidence reveals that misperceptions are substantial. Roughly half of respondents do not know their state’s prevailing minimum wage accurately; respondents systematically misjudge their own position in the wage distribution; and most overestimate the share of workers earning at or below the minimum wage by more than twenty percentage points. Support for raising the minimum wage is broad—only about five percent of respondents favor no minimum wage at all—but its intensity varies sharply along partisan lines, with Democrats favoring increases roughly twice as large as Republicans. The experimental results, by contrast, are largely inconclusive. Correcting these misperceptions produces statistically significant shifts in stated support for only a few specific party-by-wage subgroups; the policy-evaluation outcomes meant to identify mechanisms are noisy; and the chapter is unable to pin down through what channels—if any—information of this kind reiii liably moves minimum-wage preferences. The chapter contributes to the political economy of redistribution by extending the established public-choice literature on the winners and losers of wage floors (Cox and Oaxaca 1982; Sobel 1999; Saint-Paul 2002) from legislators and constituencies to individual citizens, and by joining a growing experimental literature on misperceptions and policy support (Stantcheva 2021; Alesina, Miano, and Stantcheva 2023) with a report of what informational interventions can and cannot do in this setting.Chapter 3: Gender Segregation in the Workplace - Evidence from Internal Labor Markets. The third chapter, joint with Bo Cowgill, Zo¨e Cullen, and Ricardo Perez-Truglia, asks how gender segregation is generated inside a firm: how much of it reflects worker preferences, how much reflects manager preferences, whether those preferences are rooted in inaccurate beliefs about productivity or in tastes for same-gender colleagues, and how alternative allocation mechanisms translate stated preferences into observed assignments. We exploit an unusual data environment: a centralized internal matching mechanism — iMatch — at a large Asian commercial bank, which elicits complete rank-ordered preferences from approximately three thousand workers and three hundred managers over the alternatives in their commuting zones and matches them through a deferred-acceptance algorithm that is approximately strategyproof on both sides. We combine these preference data with the bank’s personnel records on tenure, salary, position history, and performance ratings, and embed within the matching process an information-provision experiment that randomly shows half of the managers each candidate’s most recent productivity rating and offers them the opportunity to revise both their beliefs and their rankings. We document substantial gender segregation: although the bank is majority-female overall, women fall from roughly three-quarters of entry-level workers to about a quarter of senior executives, and employees work with same-gender managers and co-workers at rates well above what random assignment would predict. Decomposing these patterns by side of the market, we find that segregation is driven primarily by the preferences of female managers, who rank female employees substantially higher than comparably qualified male employees — a same-gender bias equivalent to roughly a 2.85-point increase on a productivity scale — while male managers display at most a slight preference for female employees and worker-side preferences are modest. Counterfactual simulations using random iv serial dictatorship confirm that assignment mechanisms which let female managers choose first generate substantially more same-gender pairings than random assignment, while other variations have much smaller effects. The information-provision experiment further suggests that the female-manager bias is largely belief-based rather than taste-based: female managers initially expect female candidates to outperform their most recent productivity rating by about 0.67 points more than male candidates, but among managers shown the actual past ratings, the gender gap in rankings shrinks toward zero. The chapter contributes to political economy by treating the firm as a micro-political system whose allocation rules carry distributional consequences, and by providing direct evidence that within-firm segregation — and the resulting gender skew of organizational authority — is sustained in part by correctable beliefs rather than by deep taste-based discrimination.EconomicsManagementPolitical scienceEconomic theoryapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/63t410fnhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt63t410fn/qt63t410fn.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt666912nq2026-06-12T06:39:32Zqt666912nqSign-Safe Advantage Composition for Multi-Objective RLSeth, AryanChang, Kai-Wei2026-06-10Multi-objective reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) combines binary outcome verifiers with continuous auxiliary signals via additive composition. We show that this has a failure mode: a non-trivial fraction of rollouts have advantages with sign opposite to the verifier’s judgment, causing the policy gradient to push the model toward verifier-rejected outputs. We find that 8-39% of advantages are sign-disagreeing across 3 tasks. We find unstable training in such regimes, including training collapse across multiple seeds on MATH with PRM guidance. We propose Sign-Safe Advantage Composition (SSAC), an advantage construction that bounds the auxiliary’s per-rollout contribution below the outcome anchor magnitude, guaranteeing sign agreement with the verifier on every rollout. SSAC eliminates sign-disagreement, mitigating training collapse and outperforming outcome-only GRPO on the MATH Level 5 subset of problems by +12.5 percentage points and all aggregation methods. On adversarial environments, SSAC suppresses hidden-objective hacking that GDPO and GRPO-sum learn to execute. SSAC is a drop-in replacement for the advantage construction in any GRPO-based RLVR algorithm.Artificial intelligenceComputer scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/666912nqhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt666912nq/qt666912nq.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7kv6v5042026-06-12T06:39:27Zqt7kv6v504On Collecting the Full Picture: Queer Archives and HateCaldwell, Camilla LCaswell, Michelle2026-06-10In theory, queer archives are representations of queer life, but in practice, they lack a large part of being queer–the hate. While some archives hold items such as electroshock therapy devices used in conversion therapy, where are the rest of the hate and hateful objects? In this thesis, I argue not only that queer archives should gather and describe objects and items of hate towards and within the queer community but also use the identifier “hate” in the metadata and description for bulk research, findability, and as a protective trigger warning measure. Hate, as defined by Sara Ahmed is, “negative attachment to another that one wishes to expel.” Through this definition, hate in this thesis is considered through community, both towards and within it. With this consideration in mind, I begin this thesis with a case study of the ONE Archives, with an extrapolation on what hate already is noted within the archive. Then, I look to where these records reside, and examine their non-inclusion in queer archives. I then explain where the records may be if they are not housed within a queer archive. Through this postulation, I outline the steps for the records inclusion. Following, I paint the picture of the era of erasure that is currently happening in the United States. This picture is painted with Executive Orders, memos, and governmental changes. I counter this erasure with the idea of visibility. Visibility in all aspects of queerness, including the hate. This visibility of the community does invite more hate, but it also ensures safety. I conclude this thesis with the idea of owning the narrative, and how with that ownership, queer archives empower the community to become affective owners of their own stories. The findings of this thesis are that while many of the records regarding hate are not housed within queer archives, and when they are included within the repositories, they may not be notated properly. Through this discovery, this thesis ends in a call for queer archives to look through the collections they already house and examine how the hate within the stacks should be notated, described, and handled.Information scienceLGBTQ studiesGender studiesSexualityaffect of archivesaffective ownershipcritical archival studieshatenegative solidarityqueer archivesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kv6v504https://escholarship.org/content/qt7kv6v504/qt7kv6v504.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1n44005z2026-06-12T06:39:21Zqt1n44005zHalodealkenylation Uses Ozonolysis Followed by Treatment with Iron(II) And Halogenating Reagent Convert Alkenes to Alkyl HalidesDehnert, Brady WilliamKwon, Ohyun2026-06-10This dissertation features an extensive background into dealkenylation chemistry and projects involving the installation of halogens on organic scaffolds using a dealkenylative functionalization strategy. Methods that introduce halides from the cleavage of alkenes are elusive, so this dissertation provides methodologies that bridge this gap in synthetic organic chemistry. The theme prevalent through the projects is using commercially available or easily synthesized alkenes as precursors for higher energy peroxide intermediates that subsequently produce alkyl radicals that will then abstract a halide atom from a variety of sources. With the prevalence of halides in various industries, chemical reactions that introduce them while being robust and low-cost are highly desired which these works seek to contribute to.Chapter One focuses on the history of functionalization from organic peroxides. The roots of this type of chemistry have been seldom discussed in the 21st century and the gap was addressed with literature reviews to provide context for the dealkenylation chemistry. Specifically, the early history of breaking the O–O bond of peroxides, early methods of peroxide synthesis, tandem ozonolysis and peroxide homolysis, and modern dealkenylation chemistry is discussed.Chapter Two discusses the development of halodealkenylation adding to investigations into C–C bond scission and functionalization. Halodealkenylation is described as a process in which the C(sp3)–C(sp2) bonds of alkenes are cleaved and C(sp3)–Cl, Br, and I bonds are formed, via a radical intermediate. These transformations occur through Criegee ozonolysis and FeII-catalyzed reductive coupling assisted by vitamin C as a stoichiometric reductant. The formal synthesis of (R,R,R)-γ-tocopherol was highlighted to show the utility of the transformation.Chapter Three focuses on leveraging the abundance of alkenes and reporting the cleavage of C(sp3)–C(sp2) bonds of alkenes as a route for radical fluorination. In this process, ozone leads to the creation of ⍺-methoxyhydroperoxide intermediates from alkenes, with subsequent treatment with FeII and Selectfluor providing a variety of alkyl fluorides. The products are obtained under mild, aerobic reaction conditions within short reaction times.Organic chemistryChemistryMaterials sciencePhysical chemistryAnalytical chemistryHalogenationOzonolysisPeroxideRadicalReductiveSingle Electron Transferapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1n44005zhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1n44005z/qt1n44005z.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2jd3t40t2026-06-12T06:39:16Zqt2jd3t40tWorldBench: Benchmarking Physical Understanding of World Models by Isolating Physics ConceptsAgrawal, AyushKadambi, Achuta2026-06-10Recent advances in generative foundational models, often termed “world models,” have propelled interest in applying them to critical tasks such as robotic planning and autonomous-system training. For reliable deployment, these models must exhibit high physical fidelity to accurately simulate real-world dynamics. Existing physics-based video benchmarks, however, suffer from entanglement: a single test simultaneously evaluates multiple physical laws and concepts, fundamentally limiting their diagnostic capability. I introduce WorldBench, a video-based benchmark specifically designed for concept-specific, disentangled evaluation, which rigorously isolates and assesses understanding of one physical concept or law at a time. To make WorldBench comprehensive, I design benchmarks at two complementary levels: (1) an evaluation of intuitive physical understanding through high-level concepts such as object permanence and scale/perspective, and (2) an evaluation of low-level physical constants and material properties such as friction coefficients and fluid viscosity. When state-of-the-art video-based world models are evaluated on WorldBench, I find specific patterns of failure on particular physics concepts, with all tested models lacking the physical consistency required to generate reliable real-world interactions. Through its concept-specific evaluation, WorldBench offers a more nuanced and scalable framework for rigorously evaluating the physical reasoning capabilities of video generation and world models, paving the way for more robust and generalizable world-model-driven learning.Computer scienceElectrical engineeringComputer engineeringRoboticsGenerative video modelsIntuitive physicsPhysical reasoningPhysics benchmarkVideo generationWorld foundation modelsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jd3t40thttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2jd3t40t/qt2jd3t40t.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3mk8x3r42026-06-12T06:39:10Zqt3mk8x3r4Terahertz-Field-Based Ultrafast Diagnostics for Relativistic Electron Beams and Terahertz Free-Electron LasersLenz, Maximilian PatrickMusumeci, Pietro2026-06-10Terahertz (THz) fields have emerged as a powerful intermediate regime between radio-frequency and optical accelerator technology. Their high frequencies provide strong temporal gradients and compact interaction structures, while their millimeter-scale wavelengths remain compatible with practical beam apertures and alignment tolerances. These properties make THz radiation attractive for beam manipulation, compression, synchronization, and ultrafast diagnostics. Relativistic electron beams can also generate THz-frequency fields and radiation, turning THz waveform measurements into diagnostics of beam and radiation dynamics. This dissertation explores these complementary roles: laser-synchronized THz pulses are used as active streaking fields for longitudinal diagnostics of relativistic electron beams, while electro-optic (EOS) sampling is developed for single-shot, field-resolved reconstruction of THz waveforms, with particular emphasis on the circularly polarized radiation emitted by the UCLA Pegasus THz free-electron laser (FEL).A high-field tabletop THz source based on tilted-pulse-front optical rectification in Mg doped lithium niobate is developed, producing single-cycle THz pulses with energies up to approximately 30 µJ and optical-to-THz conversion efficiencies approaching 0.5% at room temperature. These pulses drive waveguide-based THz streaking structures at the UCLA Pegasus photoinjector, producing estimated streaking fields exceeding 300 MV/m and measured streaking gradients above 30 µrad/fs. The resulting diagnostic demonstrates femtosecond-scale single-shot temporal resolution and resolves non-Gaussian current spikes on the few-femtosecond scale from RF-compressed electron beams.Diversity electro-optic sampling (DEOS) was implemented to capture broadband THz electric-field waveforms in a single shot, overcoming a central limitation of accelerator-generated THz diagnostics: shot-to-shot beam-charge and arrival-time fluctuations can make multishot waveform reconstruction unreliable. This work further shows that stretching the probe pulse in EOS opens an unexpected route to THz polarimetry, enabling simultaneous measurement of orthogonal THz field components that are not detected in conventional multishot EOS. The resulting vector-field diagnostic enables single-shot reconstruction of arbitrary THz polarization states and is validated through THz polarimetry and birefringent-index measurements. Finally, the technique is applied to the Pegasus THz free-electron laser, a single-pass, near-zero-slippage waveguide FEL driven by a helical undulator that emits circularly polarized THz radiation. The reconstructed vector waveform captures the circular polarization of the FEL pulse and reveals dispersive beam–radiation dynamics inside the undulator.PhysicsOpticsElectromagneticselectron beam diagnosticsfree-electron laserssingle shot diagnosticsterahertzterahertz streakingultrafast diagnosticsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mk8x3r4https://escholarship.org/content/qt3mk8x3r4/qt3mk8x3r4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4cp7v3f42026-06-12T06:39:05Zqt4cp7v3f4Neuronal Inhibition of JAK/STAT Delays Brain Aging and Extends Healthspan in DrosophilaNawrocki, ElleWalker, David W2026-06-10The JAK/STAT signaling pathway is a conserved regulator of immune and stress responses that has been implicated in several neuronal disorders. While neuroinflammation is a well-established driver of age-related decline, the specific contribution of JAK/STAT signaling within neurons to brain aging and organismal healthspan remains poorly defined. Here, we use an inducible gene expression system to achieve a tissue-specific knockdown of the JAK/STAT components in adult Drosophila melanogaster and assess the consequences for lifespan, locomotor function, and cellular homeostasis.Neuronal STAT inhibition produced significant and reproducible lifespan extension across two independent RNAi lines, an effect recapitulated by mid-life intervention. Moreover, inhibition of the upstream IL-6-like receptor Domeless in aging neurons also lead to extended lifespan, confirming pathway specificity. Aged flies with neuronal STAT knockdown also showed preserved spontaneous locomotor activity and climbing ability compared to uninduced controls, with no effect observed in young flies, indicating that the protective effects are specific to the aging context. At the cellular level, neuronal STAT inhibition reduced age-associated F-actin accumulation in the optic lobe, attenuated the age-dependent decline in autophagic flux, and decreased the accumulation of ubiquitinated protein aggregates, collectively suggesting improved cellular homeostasis in the aging brain.These findings demonstrate that neuron-intrinsic JAK/STAT activity is a key driver of brain aging in Drosophila and that its inhibition is sufficient to slow multiple hallmarks of neuronal aging at both the functional and cellular levels. This work highlights neuronal inflammatory signaling as a tractable target for promoting healthy aging and provides a foundation for future investigation into how neuron-specific immune pathways contribute to organismal longevity and healthspan.PhysiologyGerontologyMolecular biologyAgingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4cp7v3f4https://escholarship.org/content/qt4cp7v3f4/qt4cp7v3f4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7qt0b22w2026-06-12T06:38:58Zqt7qt0b22wCooperative Perception for Safer Smart Intersections: From Data Generation to Multi-Agent Multi-Modal FusionZheng, ZhaoliangYang, LinMa, Jiaqi2026-06-10Intersections concentrate vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, buses, and turning conflicts into small spaces where occlusion and limited reaction time make single-agent perception insufficient. This dissertation studies cooperative perception for smart intersections under the central thesis that deployable intersection intelligence requires an integrated pipeline spanning real-world multi-agent data, simulation-based long-tail scenario generation, latency-aware online fusion, heterogeneity-aware multi-modal aggregation, and rapid infrastructure sensor-placement evaluation.The first part establishes the data foundation. V2X-Real and V2XPnP provide realworld vehicle-to-everything data collected with connected vehicles and smart infrastructure, supporting vehicle-centric, infrastructure-centric, vehicle-to-vehicle, and infrastructureto-infrastructure perception and prediction. Because real-world data cannot safely cover rare safety-critical events, CDA-SimBoost builds digital twins from real data and generates controllable long-tail scenarios for infrastructure-centric cooperative driving automation research.The second part develops online cooperative perception systems and algorithms. OpenCDA-ROS provides a ROS-based bridge among simulation, digital twins, real vehicles, infrastructure units, mapping, localization, perception, communication, and planning services. CooperFuse studies real-time object-level late fusion, improving V2X AP@0.5 from 0.648 without fusion to 0.797 while reducing translation, scale, and orientation errors. V2XReaLO extends the pipeline to online intermediate fusion by transmitting compressed bird’seye-view features through ROS messages; at 32x compression, feature-message latency decreases from 511.2 ms to 41.7 ms.The third part addresses heterogeneous multi-agent multi-modal perception and infrastructure deployment. MMCooperFuse calibrates confidence scores across heterogeneous detectors and aggregates object-level detections using source-aware promote-suppress fusion, improving mAP across simulated multi-modal benchmarks. InSPE evaluates candidate infrastructure sensor placements before full detector training by combining ray-cast sensing models, occlusion analysis, information gain, and map-based traffic structure. Experiments on Infra-Set and V2X-Real show that these surrogate metrics correlate with learned 3D detection performance and help screen promising sensor layouts. Together, these contributions form a deployment-oriented research path from data collection and generation to online fusion, heterogeneous aggregation, and infrastructure sensor-placement analysis.Computer engineeringComputer scienceInformation technologycooperative perceptionV2X communicationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7qt0b22whttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7qt0b22w/qt7qt0b22w.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5vc5j95s2026-06-12T06:38:53Zqt5vc5j95sTemplate Driven Synthesis of Complex Polyheterocyclic PeptidomimeticsCooper, Gabriella I. D.Harran, Patrick G.2026-06-10Regulation of disease-relevant protein-protein interactions was historically considered an ‘undruggable’ therapeutic modality, as protein interfaces are shallow, poorly defined, and solvent exposed. However, advancements in the synthesis and screening technologies of cyclic peptides (i.e. mRNA display and DNA-encoded libraries) have revealed these macrocycles to have unparalleled potential in mediating protein-protein interactions. Backbone peptidyl-functionality mimics the native binding partners of proteins, and is embedded within conformationally preorganized, entropically stabilized, macrocyclic composite structures. Recognizing these aspects, our lab has developed synthetic methods for the amalgamation of small linear peptides with designed electrophilic scaffolding reagents to afford macrocyclic peptidomimetics with diverse ring connectivity, embedded heterocyclic motifs, and defined conformations. The focus of this dissertation has dissected embedded heterocyclic motifs within complex peptidomimetics in three manners.Chapter one describes the synthesis and reactivity of novel heteroaryl amino acids in large ring forming alkylations. Our studies reveal that p-basic heterocycles resist alkylation under acidolysis conditions, in contrast to the promiscuously reactive indole nucleus. This resulted in the identification of several inert isosteres of tryptophan, including the indolizinylalanine regiosiomers which display useful photophysical properties. Chapter two dissects the significant enhancement of passive permeability of bicyclic peptidomimetics with embedded bridging histidine residues. Crystallographic data, NMR studies and MD simulations indicate the imidazole bridged structures adopt conformations stabilized by internal H-bonding. Calculations reveal a quantity termed ‘desolvation cost efficiency’ is predictive of PAMPA performance and could be leveraged for the de novo design of passively permeable peptidomimetics. Chapter three studies the late-stage incorporation of heterocyclic functionality into composite macrocycles via Kürti aziridination of cinnamyl-templated peptides. Reacting the flat and hydrophobic embedded phenyl styrene with a Rh-nitrenoid introduces polarity and sp3 character to the template region and provides a reactive handle for further diversification. Preliminary calculations suggest this paradigm improves aqueous solubility of products while minimally perturbing the peptide-backbone’s conformation.Organic chemistryMaterials scienceAnalytical chemistryBiochemistryapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5vc5j95shttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5vc5j95s/qt5vc5j95s.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6tz790qf2026-06-12T06:38:48Zqt6tz790qfSpatial Regression Approaches for Predicting Cardiovascular Disease: A Comparative Analysis of Heart Attack Emergency Department Visits in Los Angeles CountyNguyen, AntoinettePaik Schoenberg, Frederic R2026-06-10Cardiovascular disease remains a leading cause of death in Los Angeles County. This study compares spatial regression techniques against classical regression for modeling Heart Attack Emergency Department Visit Rates across 1,997 census tracts, using environmental exposures, socioeconomic conditions, and healthcare access as predictors. Five models were evaluated: Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), three global spatial models (Spatial Lag, Spatial Error, Spatial Autoregressive Combined), and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). The Spatial Autoregressive Combined model achieved the best in-sample fit (Moran’s I = 0.0007, AIC = 7844.98), a substantial improvement over OLS (Moran’s I = 0.603, AIC = 9801.04). In holdout validation, the Spatial Error Model generalized most reliably to unseen data. GWR revealed that predictor relationships vary considerably across the county, showing that locally-varying coefficients offer a more granular view of cardiovascular risk than any single global model, one that can inform targeted public health intervention.StatisticsPublic healthInformation scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tz790qfhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6tz790qf/qt6tz790qf.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1r99h3mx2026-06-12T06:38:43Zqt1r99h3mxMusical DiscordWilder-Smith, JakeKomar, Kathleen L.Sellars, Peter M.2026-06-10Musical Discord presents a sustained interdisciplinary examination of the concept of musicality and its role in modernism. Bringing together approaches from literary studies and sound studies, it reveals how musicality—the quality of being like music, without being music—came to sit at the nexus of modernist debates about aesthetic experience, consciousness, abstraction, and identity. Musical Discord reveals how, in the wake of Walter Pater’s proclamation at the end of the nineteenth century that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music,” early twentieth-century writers, philosophers, and visual artists sought to define themselves against music while simultaneously aspiring toward music’s condition. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s assertion that “the main virtue of literature—that it is not music—is at the same time its main defect” captures the discordant relationship between music and literature that lies at the center of the dissertation, while pointing also to the promise held out by musicality, which is “not music” but feels like music.LiteratureMusicLatin American literaturePerforming artsComparative literatureBrazilian literatureMário de Andrademusic and literaturemusicalityphilosophy of musicsound studiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1r99h3mxetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5qn5789q2026-06-12T06:38:38Zqt5qn5789qPrecision Carrier-envelope Offset Control of Optical Frequency CombsSercel, GregoryCarbajo, Sergio2026-06-10Generation of a self-referenced frequency comb requires locking two degrees of freedom in a mode-locked laser: laser repetition rate, and the carrier-envelope offset (CEO) frequency. Most conventional means of CEO stabilization rely on oscillator pump modulation, which is largely limited by gain upper-state lifetime in the oscillator, coupled with cavity photon lifetime. Telecommunication-wavelength frequency combs operating on the erbium 4 I13/2 → 4 I15/2 transition at 1550 nm have a gain upper-state lifetime of about 8-10 ms, and experimental demonstrations of erbium fiber combs have shown control bandwidth roll-offs at 10-20 kHz. This CEO servo bandwidth limitation renders high-frequency phase noise difficult to correct, leading to excessive residual lock phase noise, often at the several-hundred milliradian level. To overcome this, we demonstrated a new frequency comb self-referencing architecture relying on feed-forward extra-cavity CEO correction carried out with acousto-optics. Our architecture does not rely on external radio-frequency references, enables CEO frequency (fceo) locks at tunable, non-zero values, and is compatible with feedback-based optical beat-locking of repetition rate, unlike prior demonstrations. We achieved a short-term residual integrated CEO phase noise of 53.1 mrad (integrated from 10 Hz to 1 MHz), a significant improvement over conventional pump current feedback locks. However, a comparison of long-term performance between this system and a second comb that was referenced with conventional feedback locks using Allan statistics revealed a tradeoff: the feed-forward system exhibited superior stability on short timescales but underperformed by nearly two orders of magnitude on timescales longer than 1 second despite having an order of magnitude lower short-term integrated phase noise. This previously unreported finding reveals a tradeoff inherent to feed-forward comb stabilization; while high-bandwidth locking enables superior short-term performance, an inherent lack of error memory results in an accumulation of slow phase slips, limiting long-term performance.These findings motivated the development of a new hybrid locking architecture in an effort to achieve the best of both worlds: the ultra-low short-term integrated phase noise of high-bandwidth feed-forward systems through extra-cavity modulation, enabling implementation on nearly any architecture of mode-locked laser, and the long-term accuracy holdover of a true phase-locked feedback loop (PLL) system. Our hybrid approach utilizes a frequency-modulated acousto-optic modulator, much like the feed-forward system, but is driven by a digital phase-locked loop instead of all-analog RF synthesis. Our hybrid system achieves an integrated residual CEO phase noise of 52.0 mrad from 1 Hz to 1 MHz, which we believe to be the lowest value reported with a feedback architecture to date. Additionally, the CEO modified Allan deviation reaches a value of 6.8 × 10−18 at τ = 1 second and averages down to less than 10−22 over 14 hours, outperforming both feed-forward and traditional feedback locks across all timescales. This simple, elegant architecture for high-bandwidth extra-cavity carrier-envelope offset stabilization provides unprecedented short-term phase noise, comparable to values achieved with feed-forward systems, while maintaining long-term holdover previously only accessible with feedback systems.Electrical engineeringOpticsElectromagneticsApplied physicspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5qn5789qetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5rm000bh2026-06-12T06:38:33Zqt5rm000bhDesigning for Justice: Toward an Emergent Theory of Restorative LeadershipRaphael, Leah AnnGuillén, Lorena I.Rogers, John S.2026-06-10While some think of restorative justice in education (RJE) as a singular practice to address problematic discipline patterns, others describe it as a transformational way of being in and understanding the world that can disrupt the inequitable norms and routines of schooling. For its potential to be realized, there is pressing need to better understand how RJE can be used for paradigm shifting amongst educators, rather than remaining focused on young people. In this study, I explore how the educational commonsense continues to reproduce historical injustice, while also arguing that schools have also long-served as potential sites for resistance and social imagination. Toward these transformational aims, I draw upon the epistemological, ontological, and axiological dimensions of RJE to envision new possibilities for educator learning that center a relational set of logics, including: flattening power; shared reflection; storytelling; vulnerability; spontaneity and joy; and leaning into discomfort. Through a set of RJE Design Principles, I explore how a three-person educator team (of which I am a part) designs, facilitates, and refines transformational learning for a cohort of 33 school leaders. Using participatory design-based research methodology, I investigate how our design team perceived the opportunities and challenges of RJE-informed learning design, as well as the outcomes and shifts that educational leaders experienced through participation in this project.
By analyzing extensive recordings of design team meetings, learning agendas, exit tickets, facilitator memos, and interviews with participating school leaders, I illustrate each RJE Design Principle, providing unique insight into how design processes configure learning possibilities and why RJE and RJE-informed activities can cultivate transformational educator growth. Further, I demonstrate the opportunities we experienced through integrating counterhegemonic racial literacy with restorative justice work, arguing that these two ways of being are most potent when intertwined. Finally, I lay out a set of interrelated ideas around how processes of change happened in this project and document a set of alternative pathways for leader growth built on new forms of relationality and new ways of seeing and moving. These insights move toward an emergent theory of restorative leadership, where reimagining educator learning through race-conscious RJE design is moved into the center of envisioning transformational possibilities for public schooling.EducationEducational leadershipCurriculum developmentParticipatory design researchProfessional developmentRacial literacyRestorative justice in educationRestorative leadershipUrban educationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5rm000bhhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5rm000bh/qt5rm000bh.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8vf5s58r2026-06-12T06:38:28Zqt8vf5s58rEssays on Housing Policy and Economic DisruptionsPan, YingruGarmaise, Mark J2026-06-10In Chapter 1, I examine how Los Angeles citywide discontinuous increases in real estate transfer taxes, aimed at preventing homelessness and funding affordable housing, actually affected housing supply. Using the city boundary as a natural experiment, I find that the tax reduced both home sales and new construction. I assemble a novel dataset of building permits, using AI-powered textual analysis of permit descriptions to extract granular information on construction activity. Sellers clustered transactions just below the tax threshold, while developers broadly reduced construction activity rather than pivoting to affordable or multi-family housing. Luxury homeowners increasingly chose remodeling over selling, further constraining supply. These findings suggest that taxing high-end properties may undermine rather than improve housing affordability. This paper offers novel insights into the effects of high-value property transaction taxes.In Chapter 2, I find that when COVID-19 containment policies were imposed sequentially across U.S. states, the cumulative layering of restrictions produced compounding effects on house prices. Comparing adjacent county-pairs that straddle state borders, I find a two-phase dynamic response. In the first two months following an additional workplace-closure policy, house price growth in the treated county declines relative to its cross-border counterpart. This initial decline reverses over subsequent quarters: by nine to eleven months out, the treated county exhibits significantly higher price growth, and cumulative gains turn positive within a year. The short-run contraction is consistent with demand suppression from uncertainty and reduced market activity. The medium-run appreciation is consistent with the view that workplace closures durably reshaped residential demand by accelerating the shift to remote work. The pattern is robust to one-to-one matching of county pairs.In Chapter 3, I show that disaster risk propagates through supply chain networks to downstream customers, producing an asymmetric timing pattern: affected customers increase capital expenditure immediately but experience significant sales declines only several quarters later. The investment spike is consistent with emergency procurement and the search for alternative supply sources. The delayed revenue loss is consistent with the gradual depletion of inventory buffers. Both effects survive the exclusion of customers ever located in a disaster zone, confirming that the channel runs through supply chain linkages rather than direct exposure. Customers with more diversified supplier bases are partially insulated from the upstream shock.FinancePublic healthEconomic theoryEconomicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vf5s58rhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8vf5s58r/qt8vf5s58r.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4dc961fp2026-06-12T06:38:23Zqt4dc961fpForaging behavior of harvester ants is impacted by exposure to smoke but not by past experience with wildfireWaymire, BearPinter-Wollman, Noa2026-06-10It is important to understand how animals respond to wildfires as climate change increases the frequency and severity of fire. Despite the global prevalence of fire and the smoke that comes with it, few studies have examined how smoke alters animal behavior. We explored how smoke affects the collective behavior of the harvester ant Veromessor andrei, additionally asking whether response to smoke differs depending on past experience with wildfire. To do so, we measured foraging and mound activity of 32 colonies in burned and unburned sites before and after experimentally exposing them to smoke. Exposure to smoke reduced outgoing foraging activity, but did not impact the rate of returning foragers nor change activity on the nest mound. Colonies from burned and unburned sites did not differ in their response to smoke. These findings show that exposure to smoke impacts some behaviors that can have important implications for the success of gathering resources.EcologyBehavioral sciencesEntomologyWildlife conservationforaging behaviormound activitysmokeVeromessor andreiwildfireapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4dc961fphttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4dc961fp/qt4dc961fp.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5v25n7fw2026-06-12T06:38:17Zqt5v25n7fwLiver Cancer Cells Escape Lenvatinib Inhibition via Phenotypic ShiftsChau, KevinSlamon, DennisNathanson, David2026-06-10Liver cancer incidence and mortality are projected to rise substantially worldwide, with some estimates predicting a near doubling by 2050. Lenvatinib (LEN) is a first‑line therapy for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), yet patients who are ineligible for immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI)–based regimens have few options once LEN fails. Defining mechanisms of LEN resistance and identifying strategies to prevent or overcome it therefore remains an urgent clinical priority.RNA‑sequencing and drug‑response analyses revealed that LEN induces MCL1 upregulation and a transient dependency on this anti‑apoptotic protein, which protects cells from LEN‑induced death. Sensitivity to MCL1 inhibition was restricted to the treatment phase and diminished in LEN‑resistant cells. Together with additional dichotomous responses—including low versus high pAKT/ERK and CHK2, and suppression versus re‑engagement of glycolysis—these data indicate that LEN elicits either an acute stress response or a distinct, stable resistance state. The acute response initially converges on a drug‑tolerant, cell‑stasis phenotype that allows survival under injury before diverging into multiple resistant trajectories. In parental Hep3B cells, combining LEN with the MCL1 inhibitor S63845 enhanced apoptosis and tumor suppression in vitro and in vivo, demonstrating that the acute anti‑apoptotic response can be therapeutically exploited. Insights into stable resistance were refined by leveraging molecular subtype annotations and resolving heterogeneity among liver cancer cell lines (LCCLs). These analyses showed that LCCLs encode intrinsic developmental programs that promote quiescence, broad drug refractoriness, evasion of apoptosis, immune escape, and ferroptosis resistance, all of which can be co‑opted by LEN‑exposed cells. Resistant populations adopted diverse gene‑expression programs spanning both forward and reverse developmental pathways, indicating substantial heterogeneity within the LEN‑resistant state. Integrative pharmacogenomic analyses identified vulnerabilities to inhibitors of SURVIVIN, CHK1/CHK2, DYRK kinases, EZH2, and HSP90, as well as to ferroptosis inducers and MCL1‑directed combinations, which may be differentially effective against acute drug‑tolerant cells versus stably resistant, quiescent‑like states. Collectively, this work defines LEN‑induced phenotypic plasticity as a central driver of resistance, maps developmental and apoptotic programs that sustain drug‑tolerant HCC cells, and proposes testable therapeutic strategies to extend LEN durability or overcome acquired LEN resistance. For future translation, the findings highlight the need for biomarker‑guided combinations that account for MCL1 dependency, differentiation state, and Wnt/immune signaling context in order to personalize therapy for LEN‑treated patients.MedicineCellular biologyOncologyMolecular biologyGeneticsacute stress and stable resistance responsedrug resistanceHCClenvatinibplasticitysubtypeapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5v25n7fwhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5v25n7fw/qt5v25n7fw.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3z32g8142026-06-12T06:38:12Zqt3z32g814Latent Patterns of Reliability in Mobile Health Nutrition DataBridgwater, Lauren MaressaVan den Broeck, Guy2026-06-10Mobile health (mHealth) applications offer a scalable, cost-effective solution for weight management, yet their clinical utility is compromised by underreporting and poor data reliability. Large-scale machine learning evaluations of this reporting quality remain scarce. To evaluate mHealth data integrity, this thesis utilizes a longitudinal dataset of 549,382 MyFitnessPal users to develop a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with Gaussian emissions. By modeling the physiological alignment between derived caloric surplus and weight change, we characterize latent behavioral states over time. Analyzing characteristics and transitions across weight loss, gain, and maintenance cohorts reveals distinct phenotypes of data trustworthiness that are linked to user goals. This work establishes that tracking fidelity is a dynamic behavioral state and demonstrates that HMMs can effectively detect these shifts in data integrity at scale. These insights enable mHealth platforms to implement interventions that disrupt reporting decay, reinforce positive self-monitoring behaviors, and reliably improve clinical weight management outcomes.Computer scienceBioinformaticsNutritionInformation technologyBehaviorsHidden Markov ModelsmHealthMy Fitness PalReliabilityTrustworthinessapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3z32g814https://escholarship.org/content/qt3z32g814/qt3z32g814.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0ft0x2rz2026-06-12T06:38:06Zqt0ft0x2rzEngineered Biomimetic Block Polymer AssembliesAlbreiki, FahedSrivastava, Samanvaya2026-06-10This dissertation establishes the biomimetic assembly of block polymers as a versatile tool for the development of water-based adhesives and hydrogels with superior mechanical performance. It introduces two complementary classes of block polymer systems: charge-driven block polyelectrolyte complexes and catechol-mediated adhesion in block polycatechols. Across both platforms, this work demonstrates the advantages of block polymer architectures over conventional homopolymers and heteropolymers by enabling precise control over the length, density, and spatial distribution of adhesive and cohesive functionalities. This level of control facilitates the development of hydrogels and adhesives with mechanical properties that surpass those of conventional designs.Marine organisms, such as mussels and sandcastle worms, secrete glue proteins that enable robust curing and adhesion in wet, marine environments. Their exceptional performance is largely ascribed to catechol-containing amino acids, such as 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA), which impart both cross-linking and adhesion through the controlled oxidation of catechol moieties. Concurrently, phase-separated coacervate states protect these adhesive proteins from dilution while providing a confined environment for curing in wet conditions. Although numerous synthetic homopolymers and heteropolymers have been developed to emulate these proteins, they often suffer from poor processability, slow curing, and weak adhesion.To overcome the adhesive limitations, we design biomimetic block polycatechols with high density and controlled placement of catechol groups to develop aqueous hydrogels that cure rapidly and adhere strongly across versatile surfaces. These adhesives rival the performance of both commercial and existing biomimetic adhesives, notably achieving adhesion strength of >13.5 MPa on metals such as aluminum, steel, and zinc, and >15 MPa on glass.To address the persistent challenge of adhesive deactivation in wet environments, we demonstrate the utility of block polyelectrolytes as protective scaffolds for precursor solutions, mitigating their dilution and loss of form in physiological and wet environments. These self-assembled scaffolds enable complete underwater curing of bioadhesives and serve as functional additives that enhance printability, injectability, and shape fidelity in hydrogel inks for additive manufacturing. Finally, we extend our block polymer assembly platform to explore previously unrecognized co-assembly between block polycations and anionic biosurfactants, yielding electrostatic interaction driven ordered structures in wet media with a variety of intriguing phase behaviors.Chemical engineeringPolymer chemistryPhysical chemistryAdhesionBiomimeticsHydrogelsPolymer ChemistryPolymer SciencepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0ft0x2rzetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6kc0876b2026-06-12T06:37:59Zqt6kc0876bDesign, Prediction, and Optimization of Ultrafast Waveforms for Extreme Brightness Light Sources and BeyondZhang, HaoCarbajo, Sergio SC2026-06-10The performance of extreme brightness light sources, ranging from free-electron lasers and laser-plasma accelerators to attosecond high-harmonic sources and ultrafast electron diffraction guns, is fundamentally tied to the precision of ultrafast optical waveforms. Beyond accelerator-based facilities, these waveforms also dictate the dynamics of phase-coherent operations, such as quantum frequency interconnects. This dissertation investigates the physical processes and engineering methodologies required to design, predict, and optimize such waveforms. The scope spans the entire generation and propagation chain, tracing the evolution of the drive laser through to the final charged-particle, photon, or quantum outputs. The research examines these interactions across multiple domains. From the aspect of nonlinear optics, the study explores the mechanisms of four-wave mixing in gas-filled hollow-core capillaries, specifically analyzing the balance between spectral phase transfer and energy conversion efficiency. To better anticipate the behavior of these interactions, a multi-modality deep learning framework is introduced, which models and predicts the output pulses of rare-earth-doped systems used for parametric conversion. Then we assess various gas-based nonlinear drivers applied to optical-field-driven photoemission. Shifting focus to accelerator technologies, the dissertation details the architecture and operational characteristics of the LCLS-II photoinjector laser system. By employing spatiotemporal shaping techniques on the ultraviolet photocathode laser, the work establishes deterministic control over the longitudinal phase space of relativistic photoelectrons. Building upon these electron control techniques, a new mechanism termed Coherent Emittance-Driven Gating of Emission is proposed to enable the generation of isolated sub-attosecond X-ray pulses. Expanding the utility of these optical techniques into the quantum domain, the study presents an experimental demonstration of phase-coherent infrared-to-ultraviolet frequency conversion within gas-filled hollow-core capillary fibers, providing a practical pathway for quantum interconnect applications. The concluding chapters outline future applications of computational methods, specifically inverse design, digital twins, and surrogate world models, to further advance the control of waveform-driven facilities.OpticsElectrical engineeringHigh temperature physicspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kc0876betdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5bg6n9cb2026-06-12T06:37:54Zqt5bg6n9cbLife in Exception: Racialization After Empire and the Zainichi Question in Postwar Japanese ActivismNamgung, ChulHirano, Katsuya2026-06-10This dissertation examines how Japan’s former colonial subjects were transformed into deportable aliens after empire, reshaping the politics of race, borders, and belonging in postwar Japan. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, Koreans and Taiwanese residing in Japan—collectively referred to as Zainichi—were stripped of imperial subjecthood and reclassified as “aliens” through the legal and administrative restructuring carried out during the Allied occupation (1945–1952). Excluded from Japanese citizenship yet incorporated into the administrative reach of the state, they occupied a condition of legal liminality in which residence remained contingent, rights largely inaccessible, and removal possible. Rather than treating this condition as a residual problem of incomplete decolonization or as a simple continuation of imperial-era racial formations, this dissertation argues that Zainichi alienage constituted a distinctive mode of post-imperial governance.The dissertation intervenes in scholarship on race in post-1945 Japan by shifting attention from a dominant focus on U.S.–Japan relations to the racial politics produced through Japan’s relationship with its former colonial subjects. It argues that postwar racialization was not simply inherited from the imperial past but produced through the legal and institutional organization of border control, nationality, residence, and political membership. To capture this process, the dissertation develops the concept of “life in exception” to describe a condition of inclusive exclusion in which former colonial subjects were simultaneously present within Japan and subject to state power, yet denied secure membership in the national community. Legal liminality, deportability, and administrative discretion were not merely effects of racial difference but mechanisms through which former colonial subjects came to be governed as racialized populations. In doing so, the dissertation advances a constructionist account of racialization as a historically contingent process shaped through law, governance, and regimes of belonging. The dissertation further traces how Japanese progressive movements grappled with this post-imperial condition from the 1950s through the 1970s. Through case studies of the Japan–Korea friendship movement, political asylum trials, New Left critiques of immigration control and discrimination, and proto-multicultural discussions of Zainichi belonging, it shows how activists, intellectuals, and citizens’ groups drew on some of the most expansive political languages available to them: alien rights, international law, structural discrimination, and multicultural inclusion. Activists exposed the violence embedded in Japan’s post-imperial order, yet the democratic and rights-based languages they mobilized to articulate their critiques remained tied to the very political frameworks that sustained that order, ultimately limiting their ability to transcend it. By placing Zainichi history at the intersection of decolonization, race and migration, sovereignty and rights, and border control, this dissertation rethinks postwar Japan as post-imperial Japan while also illuminating the difficulties of confronting sovereign violence from within the political imaginaries of the modern nation-state.HistoryAsian historyEast Asian studiesInternational lawEthnic studiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bg6n9cbetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1p59g5222026-06-12T06:37:49Zqt1p59g522From Historical Redlining to Neighborhood Revitalization: Examining Associations Between HUD's Choice Neighborhoods Program and Self-Harm Rates in Wayne County, MichiganHa, StephanieMimiaga, Matthew2026-06-10A prior suicide attempt is a key risk factor for suicide, and addressing self-harm at the structural level represents a critical path of intervention. Housing instability and neighborhood disinvestment are increasingly recognized as key determinants of suicide and self-harm risk. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Choice Neighborhoods program aims to provide significant federal investment to historically disinvested communities to improve neighborhood conditions. This study examined whether Choice Neighborhoods grants are effectively reaching historically redlined communities and whether grant receipt is associated with changes in self-harm rates.Aim 1 employed a retrospective cross-sectional design to assess whether Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grants were disproportionately awarded to formerly redlined census tracts. Using spatial analysis in QGIS and Fisher's exact test across 15,637 census tracts nationwide, findings demonstrated that 90.5% of grant-receiving tracts were located in formerly redlined areas, compared to 65.2% of non-grant-receiving tracts. Census tracts that received a grant had 36.6 times greater odds of being in a formerly redlined area compared to census tracts that did not receive a grant (OR = 36.6, 95% CI: 6.4–1452.8, p < 0.001). These findings suggest the Choice Neighborhoods program is effectively reaching historically disinvested communities.Aim 2 used a retrospective longitudinal quasi-experimental difference-in-differences design to evaluate whether receipt of a Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grant was associated with changes in population-level self-harm inpatient discharge rates in Wayne County, Michigan, using publicly available county-level HCUP data from 2016 to 2023 as a pilot analysis. Compared to 8 urban control counties, Wayne County had a reduction of 0.80 self-harm inpatient discharges per 100,000 following grant receipt (β = −0.80, 95% CI: −7.92 to 6.32, p = 0.802). Results were consistent in direction across all four models, though none were statistically significant. Null findings are likely attributable to a small analytic sample, limited post-treatment observation years, and county-level geographic aggregation diluting neighborhood-level effects.These findings provide preliminary evidence that Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grants are effectively targeting historically disinvested communities and suggest that neighborhood and housing investment may be associated with reductions in population-level self-harm rates.Public healthPublic policyEpidemiologyClinical psychologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p59g522https://escholarship.org/content/qt1p59g522/qt1p59g522.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7dx699pz2026-06-12T06:37:44Zqt7dx699pzProductive Nostalgia: Harnessing the Power of VHS Aesthetics For Magnetic Media PreservationRegan, MollyPosner, Miriam2026-06-10Loss is the core of nostalgia, and the undercurrent of nostalgia is fear. Fear of loss, and the wish to return to the places we can no longer enter, drives nostalgia culture. This is particularly true of media meant to replicate the look and feel of VHS. How do we reconcile the proliferation of VHS aesthetics, divorced from the materiality of tape, with ongoing efforts to preserve magnetic media in the midst of accelerating tape degradation and technological obsolescence? By examining four case studies that cover the spectrum from pure analog video creation to simulated VHS aesthetics, I explore the possibilities of harnessing a “productive nostalgia” for the purposes of magnetic media preservation. Building off of Marika Cifor’s concept of “vital nostalgia,” I envision productive nostalgia as a generative force that acts to pull us out of this tendency towards bittersweet yearning and, instead, catalyzes creative output through re-engagement with nostalgic objects. Utilizing the work of Vivian Sobchack, Edward S. Casey, and Marika Cifor, I employ a thematic analysis that examines nostalgia as a phenomenological, affective, and aesthetic experience. By doing this, I show how the VHS aesthetic has appeared throughout a variety of formats and platforms, and the ways in which nostalgia is activated through these works. I show that nostalgic engagement with the archive holds powerful potential for community activation which can bolster efforts toward magnetic media preservation.AestheticsInformation scienceFilm studiesLibrary scienceAnalogHome MoviesMedia ArchiveNostalgiaPhysical MediaVideoapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dx699pzhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7dx699pz/qt7dx699pz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4626d8fb2026-06-12T06:37:39Zqt4626d8fbMultimodal Metabolic Investigation of the Bacterium Xanthobacter autotrophicus as a Platform for Biomolecule ProductionSchuman, ZacharyLiu, Chong2026-06-10The bacterium Xanthobacter autotrophicus (X. autotrophicus) has emerged as a platform to produce value-added chemicals given its ability to grow utilizing gaseous N2 and CO2 as its respective nitrogen and carbon sources. The growth rate and associated biomolecule synthesis rate can be further improved through the addition of heterotrophic carbon and nitrogen sources that allow industrial-scale cultivation. My research investigates X. autotrophicus using a combination of metabolomics, proteomics, and metabolic flux analysis to advance our understanding of how culturing conditions designed for optimizing either sustainability or biomass yield affect its metabolism. This work has implications for improving upon existing growth setups and further developing the bacterium as a platform for bioproduct generation.ChemistryMicrobiologySustainabilitypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4626d8fbetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9460k0px2026-06-12T06:37:04Zqt9460k0pxQuantifying Multilevel Effects in the LOCUS Statistics Assessment: An AnalysisDivecha, AnirudhGould, RobertXu, Hongquan2026-06-09The Levels of Conceptual Understanding in Statistics (LOCUS) assessment is a standardized test designed to measure conceptual understanding in statistics education. Educational assessment data, such as LOCUS, usually exhibit hierarchical structure, with students nested within teachers, schools, and state. Ignoring this structure can often lead to misidentifying important sources of variation and can lead to misleading interpretations of student performance. This thesis applies hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) and other statistical analyses to the LOCUS dataset in order to examine and quantify teacher variation in exam performance.
The thesis begins with an exploratory analysis of the LOCUS dataset. Then, hierarchical linear models are fit separately across ten LOCUS exam forms to determine within-teacher and between-teacher variance components. Null models indicate substantial clustering at the teacher level across all forms. Full models incorporate fixed effects for school year, population of test takers, testing phase, and state in order to evaluate how much between-teacher variation can be explained by observable covariates. Results show that these covariates do account for a substantial portion of teacher-level variance, with state contributing the largest reductions in variance. However, estimated state effects are unstable across forms. After adjustment for observable covariates, residual teacher-level ICCs remain consistent across forms, generally ranging from approximately 0.15 to 0.20.
This thesis provides evidence that variation in LOCUS performance does exist at the teacher level, even after accounting for fixed effects. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the factors associated with students' conceptual understanding of statistics over the years of LOCUS administration.StatisticsEducational tests & measurementsEducationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9460k0pxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9460k0px/qt9460k0px.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6k68p6tc2026-06-12T06:36:59Zqt6k68p6tcSense, Replication, and Recreation of Human Grasp Shaping Using an Underactuated ExoskeletonZhou, MianzhiRosen, Jacob2026-06-09Stroke frequently results in persistent upper-extremity impairment, and loss of hand dexterity is especially limiting because functional hand use requires coordinated reaching, preshaping, grasping, and force modulation. Robotic hand exoskeletons can potentially support rehabilitation by sensing motion, assisting movement, and providing haptic feedback. However, three gaps remain: portable quantitative assessment is limited, adaptive assistance for grasp preshaping is underdeveloped, and virtual hand interaction is often simplified to fingertip-only contact. This dissertation addresses these gaps through three engineering contributions, validated with healthy participants to establish feasibility.First, SMOCs, a standalone wearable IMU-based motion capture system, was developed for rehabilitation-oriented assessment. The system captures upper-limb and hand kinematics during VR-based tasks and estimates quantitative movement metrics, including joint range of motion, reachable workspace, and trajectory-based motor-learning metrics.Second, a tunnel-guided assist-as-needed controller was developed for grasp preshaping with the OTHER Hand exoskeleton. The controller uses joint-angle sum as a synergy-based progression variable and modulates assistance using variance learned from healthy demonstrations. In healthy participants tested under simplified resistive constraints, the controller improved efficiency by 10.1%–22.5% compared with force-feedback and position control baselines.Third, a pilot multi-link virtual grasp-shaping framework was developed to render contact beyond the fingertip. The index finger was modeled as a planar three-link chain, and sliced virtual object geometry was used to detect link-level contact. These contact effects were mapped into fingertip-equivalent force commands compatible with the underactuated OTHER Hand interface. Single-finger pilot experiments showed that link-aware rendering can modulate finger workspace and joint trajectories, and a Unity hook-grasp demonstration illustrated the broader pipeline.These contributions provide engineering building blocks for future closed-loop rehabilitation systems that combine sensing, adaptive assistance, and contact-rich virtual interaction. The results should be interpreted as evidence of feasibility from healthy-participant studies rather than as clinical validation. Future work should evaluate these systems with post-stroke participants, integrate the modules into a unified closed-loop platform, and extend virtual grasp rendering to coordinated multi-finger interaction.RoboticsMechanical engineeringExoskeletonRehabilitationVirtual RealitypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6k68p6tcetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1q90n9b92026-06-12T06:36:53Zqt1q90n9b9Process Evaluation and Techno-Economic Analysis of Hydrogen production via Conventional and Electrified Methane Reforming pathwaysSridhar, ShruthiMorales-Guio, Carlos G2026-06-08This thesis describes a comprehensive process evaluation and techno-economic analysis (TEA) comparing three methane reforming technologies for the production of hydrogen at small scale: conventional (fired) steam methane reforming (SMR), electrified (Joule-heated) steam methane reforming (ESMR), and protonic membrane steam methane reforming (PMR). Three plants operating on each of the different technologies were simulated using AVEVA PRO/II with a production capacity of 230 kg/h. These process simulations were used for the TEA analysis. The economic evaluation employs a bottom-up costing approach, from which the levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) is determined as $2.32/kg for SMR, $2.96/kg for ESMR, and $2.80/kg for PMR, under the assumptions made across the study and detailed in this thesis. While SMR remains the most cost-effective due to its technological maturity and efficient heat integration, it is the most carbon-intensive, emitting 10.6 kg CO2/kg H2, where the stoichiometric minimum for hydrogen production via methane reforming process is 5.5 kg CO2/kg H2. ESMR eliminates direct combustion emissions through Joule-heating, however is highly sensitive to electricity prices and is CAPEX intensive. PMR emerges as a promising modular option, integrating reaction and separation into a single unit to achieve higher conversions, along with lower emissions, whose CAPEX and OPEX fall in the intermediate of SMR and ESMR. Thus, PMR economics are expected to improve with declining electricity prices and reduced CAPEX, which could be achieved as the technology moves down the experience curve. Sensitivity analyses indicate that CAPEX and electricity costs are the dominant parameters dictating economic viability for electrified pathways. The spatial footprint analysis of the full plant further demonstrates PMR's suitability for decentralized, point-of-use hydrogen production at refueling stations. This thesis work highlights the trade-offs between cost, emissions, and carbon footprint, providing a roadmap for transitioning from fossil-fuel-based infrastructure to decentralized and low-carbon hydrogen systems.Chemical engineeringEngineeringEnergyDecentralized Hydrogen ProductionElectrified Steam Methane ReformingProtonic Membrane ReformingSensitivity AnalysisSteam Methane ReformingTechno-economic analysispubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1q90n9b9etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4x10s5pt2026-06-12T06:36:48Zqt4x10s5ptPotential Bounds for Confidence Radii in Bandits and Reinforcement LearningHe, ZhenyuWu, Yian Nian2026-06-09Many regret analyses for bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms contain two steps. The first is to establish confidence bounds for unknown reward functions. The second is a deterministic accounting step that bounds the cumulative contribution of the resulting confidence radii. This thesis develops a unified framework for this second step. The framework treats both full sums over all rounds and selected-subsequence sums, as well as both unclipped and clipped sums. The results are stated in a general reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) setting and then specialized to finite-dimensional weighted linear designs.StatisticsApplied mathematicsArtificial intelligencebanditselliptical potentialinformation gainregret analysisreinforcement learningRKHSapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4x10s5pthttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4x10s5pt/qt4x10s5pt.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt92z9755q2026-06-12T06:36:27Zqt92z9755qOptimal stop inventories: Laryngeal settingsNarkar, JahnaviKeating, PatriciaSundara, Megha2026-06-08Although a large body of work has been dedicated to understanding the contents of vowel inventories, consonant inventories have received far less attention. In this dissertation, I investigate the contents of stop inventories, with special reference to their laryngeal features, to determine the factors that affect their composition.
Chapter 3 presents a probabilistic model of 3020 stop inventory attested in the world’s languages, showing that modeling functional pressures representing maximizing minimum distance, minimizing articulatory complexity and maximizing the number of contrasts accurately predicts the contents of stop inventories. This suggests that the interaction of these phonetically defined constraints can explain much of the structure found in stop inventories, without the need for explicit structural constraints that enforce the maximal use of distinctive features. I also present a case study demonstrating how such a model can be used to inform models testing hypotheses about the ancestral states shared by a set of inventories.
A major obstacle to the study of stop inventories is the lack of understanding of the basic phonetic space of stop contrasts. Even though aspects of stop articulation and acoustics are well understood, the primacy of different acoustic correlates across languages is poorly understood, as is their relationship to stop articulation. To enable the acoustic modeling of stop inventories, Chapter 5 develops a cross-linguistic acoustic space of stops. I show that thirteen acoustic parameters can be collapsed into a four-dimensional space whose individual dimensions are phonetically interpretable. Broadly speaking, two of these dimensions can be interpreted as indexing stop place contrasts, and the other two as indexing stop laryngeal contrasts.
The stop acoustic space thus constructed is used to examine the contents of stop inventories using two different approaches. Chapter 6 investigates the contents of the same 3020 stop inventories in terms of their acoustic properties. It evaluates two different aspects of inventory attestedness – what determines if a given inventory is attested at all, and if it is, how frequently it is attested among the world’s languages. Like the MaxEnt model, this model finds that stop inventories are shaped by the same phonetically-defined predictors – maximizing dispersion between the closest pair of stops, minimizing articulatory effort and maximizing the size of the inventory. This model also fnds that acoustic symmetry is not required as a predictor to capture the frequency distribution of inventories found in the world’s languages.
In Chapter 7, the problem of mapping the continuous acoustic space onto a discrete number of categories to form an inventory is conceptualized as a search problem, using a model inspired by the principles of biological evolution. This model shows that the goal of increasing perceptual distance between stop categories can be achieved by maximizing the size and annexing more of the acoustic space after articulatorily simpler options have been exhausted, in addition to the phonetically based factors found to influence the featural and acoustic makeup of stop inventories.
In sum, although there is evidence for many of the factors proposed in previous work, I find that some effects may be derivable from the others. Minimizing articulatory complexity, maximizing minimum dispersion and the number of stops are likely directly implicated, but the effects of feature economy and symmetry can be chalked up to the mechanisms by which inventories strike a balance between the phonetically-based factors.LinguisticsAcousticsLanguage artsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/92z9755qhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt92z9755q/qt92z9755q.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6wn1n89d2026-06-12T06:36:22Zqt6wn1n89dTrends & Predictors of Statistical Literacy: A Decadal Analysis of LOCUS Assessment PerformanceWong, KristenGould, RobertSchoenberg, Frederic2026-06-08This thesis examines patterns in statistical literacy using data from the Levels of Conceptual Understanding in Statistics (LOCUS) assessment collected between 2014 and 2025. The analysis explores trends in overall performance, differences across conceptual domains, and patterns by test-taker population, demographic characteristics, and geographic location. Regression models are used to identify key factors associated with LOCUS performance.
Results show that LOCUS performance has not improved consistently over time, with fluctuations largely attributable to changes in test-taker composition and the mix of assessment levels administered. Students perform strongest in formulating questions and weakest in analyzing data. Performance differs across populations, demographic groups, and states, though these differences are partly driven by variation in instructional context and educational opportunities. Test-taker population and assessment level are the strongest predictors of performance, while interaction effects indicate that performance differences across populations depend on assessment level. These findings provide a more nuanced understanding of statistical literacy and identify important areas for instructional improvement.StatisticsGeographyApplied mathematicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wn1n89dhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6wn1n89d/qt6wn1n89d.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6v63h4t92026-06-12T06:36:17Zqt6v63h4t9Reinforcement-Adaptive Visibility-Graph Planning for Robust Humanoid NavigationSingal, MehakPalsberg, Jens2026-06-08Achieving reliable humanoid navigation requires simultaneously reasoning over long planning horizons and satisfying short-horizon dynamic and safety constraints. Classical planners based on visibility graphs, when paired with model predictive control (MPC), can produce efficient collision-free trajectories, yet their effectiveness hinges on carefully hand-tuned parameters and accurate system models. On physical hardware, however, actuation delays, state-estimation errors, and imperfect low-level locomotion tracking routinely cause trajectories to deviate from their nominal paths, producing constraint violations even when the planned path is geometrically sound.This thesis introduces RAVEN (Reinforcement-Adaptive Visibility-Graph Planning with Collision-Free MPC), a hierarchical framework that addresses these limitations by coupling a learning-based global planner with a constrained local controller. Rather than tuning MPC cost weights or substituting the planner with a neural network, RAVEN trains a reinforcement learning meta-policy to adapt the geometric structure of the visibility graph by adjusting per-obstacle inflation radii online. Modifying these radii reshapes the navigable free space and thereby shifts the topology of the global path, allowing the system to proactively compensate for delay and tracking error before they propagate to the controller. A collision-free MPC layer then follows the adapted path while enforcing velocity and obstacle-avoidance constraints over a receding horizon. Training under injected control delays and observation noise encourages the meta-policy to discover inflation strategies that remain robust across varying system conditions, while the underlying geometric planner and constrained optimizer are left intact. Experiments compare RAVEN against a fixed-parameter visibility-graph MPC baseline and a pure end-to-end RL policy in both simulation and hardware deployment on a bipedal humanoid. RAVEN achieves substantially lower obstacle penetration depth under delay than the classical MPC baseline, along with shorter average path length and faster task completion than either baseline, and its simulation behavior transfers reliably to the physical platform. These results suggest that learning to adapt the planning geometry, rather than the controller parameters, is an effective and interpretable strategy for robust humanoid navigation.Computer scienceArtificial intelligenceInformation technologyRoboticsHumanoid navigationModel predictive controlObstacle avoidanceReinforcement learningSim-to-real transferVisibility-graph planningapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6v63h4t9https://escholarship.org/content/qt6v63h4t9/qt6v63h4t9.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8k98b59h2026-06-12T06:36:11Zqt8k98b59hOn the Role of Observations, Uncertainty, and Scale in Mountain Snow Water Equivalent EstimationSun, HaoruiMargulis, Steven A.2026-06-08Mountain snow water equivalent (SWE) is a key variable for hydrology, water supply, drought monitoring, and hazard assessment. However, accurate estimation of mountain SWE remains challenging because snow observations are limited, meteorological forcing datasets are uncertain, and model spatial representation affects simulated snow processes. This dissertation examines how observations, meteorological forcing, and model resolution influence mountain SWE estimation within a Bayesian snow reanalysis framework.First, this dissertation evaluates the use of the globally harmonized Snow CCI fractional snow-covered area product for estimating mountain SWE. Results show that assimilating Snow CCI snow cover observations can improve modeled SWE estimates, but performance depends on observation quality and availability, especially during the snowmelt period. Second, this dissertation assesses the role of meteorological forcing uncertainty by comparing SWE estimates simulated with multiple widely-used forcing datasets. Results show that no single forcing dataset performs best across all regions and time periods, motivating the use of a multi-forcing Bayesian framework. Assimilating near-peak lidar snow depth substantially corrects prior SWE errors and decreases the sensitivity of posterior SWE to forcing uncertainty. Third, this dissertation examines how model spatial resolution affects SWE simulation. Results show that coarsening model resolution smooths fine-scale SWE heterogeneity and introduces nonlinearity errors during both accumulation and ablation. These errors are model-dependent and related to precipitation phase partitioning, aggregation of melt energy, unresolved snow heterogeneity, and differences in melt timing. Overall, this dissertation shows that improved mountain SWE estimation requires accurate observational constraints, better characterization of meteorological forcing uncertainty, and model spatial representations that preserve important snow processes. The findings provide a basis for future harmonized mountain SWE reanalysis products that combine multiple satellite observations, multi-forcing uncertainty characterization, and adaptive spatial discretization.Civil engineeringMaterials scienceEnvironmental engineeringpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k98b59hetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6xz3g4392026-06-12T06:36:06Zqt6xz3g439Tackling Out of Distribution Scenarios for Autonomous DrivingZhao, AlbertSoatto, Stefano2026-06-08Learned models are attractive for autonomous driving as they can scale with data and do not rely on inflexible hand-coded rules, which may not handle the full complexity of driving scenarios. However, the performance of learning-based methods degrades for out of distribution driving scenarios due to their significant differences from the training data. This thesis proposes methods to improve driving performance on out of distribution scenarios. We first address distribution shift caused by driving-irrelevant nuisances by proposing a method to learn only driving-relevant information from driving-related side tasks while discarding nuisances relevant to only the side task. We then consider driving-relevant distribution shifts and tackle the case of adversarial agent behaviors by proposing a robust planning method that is robust to adversarial behaviors but not overly conservative when agents behave normally. Finally, we consider the general case of unanticipated out of distribution scenarios, dropping previous assumptions about the test time driving scenarios. To improve performance on arbitrary out of distribution scenes, we propose a test-time adaptation method that leverages the current driving scene to adapt a previously trained learned planner to the current scene itself. Together, these methods significantly improve the performance of autonomous driving under a variety of out of distribution conditions, ranging from unseen weather conditions to adversarial agent behaviors and novel cities.Computer scienceRoboticsArtificial intelligenceAutomotive engineeringAutonomous DrivingNuisance InvarianceOut of Distribution ScenariosRobust PlanningTest-time Adaptationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xz3g439https://escholarship.org/content/qt6xz3g439/qt6xz3g439.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0sr6z9752026-06-12T06:35:35Zqt0sr6z975The Descriptive-Prescriptive Paradox of Prioritizing Autonomy to Address InequalityBrody, Ilana BlairDai, HengchenWu, Sherry J2026-06-03This dissertation takes a micro-behavioral perspective on addressing economic inequality by studying two fundamental processes in resource allocation. The first is the process of giving, where people who maintain control over financial resources must decide whether and how to allocate them. The second process concerns receiving, where those who are eligible to receive the aid must decide whether and how to accept it. This research examines the psychology and decision making behind each process. Using field experiments, online laboratory experiments, prediction surveys, interviews, and archival data, this dissertation diagnoses current practices and juxtaposes them with effective behavior change interventions. Collectively, this research highlights a descriptive-prescriptive paradox in organizational attempts to address inequality. Descriptively, it is common in both theory and practice to promote individual autonomy in the processes of giving and receiving aid. To promote giving, this manifests as granting control over how the resources are used, and to promote receiving, it positions the aid as enabling pursuit of individual goals. While this is supported in the literature, common in practice, and believed to be effective by practitioners, it can undermine and overlook individuals’ motives to advance the welfare of others. The evidence of this dissertation instead prescribes behavior change interventions that harness an alternative driver behind the decisions to give and receive: the concern and regard for the wellbeing of others. This dissertation contributes new theoretical insight about the psychology and decision making of giving and receiving, with practical implications for improving individual-level interventions to address inequality.Behavioral sciencesManagementSocial psychologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sr6z975https://escholarship.org/content/qt0sr6z975/qt0sr6z975.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0pk1k5qm2026-06-12T06:35:10Zqt0pk1k5qmStudies Pertaining to Strained Cyclic Intermediates and Small-Molecule Inhibitors of IGF2BP3Scherer, GeorgiaGarg, Neil K2026-05-22This dissertation describes the development of methodologies to engage strained cyclic intermediates in complexity-generating reactions, along with the development of small molecule inhibitors of a key RNA-binding protein implicated in cancer. It opens with a method to generate and trap seven-membered strained heterocyclic allenes, providing insight into their fundamental properties. Next, a new method to engage strained cyclic allenes with palladium chemistry is discussed, accessing a high degree of complexity in a single step. Then, the generation and reactivity of an undisclosed seven-membered strained cyclic 1,2,3-triene is explored. The first three chapters expand the practical scope of strained intermediate chemistry. The latter half details advancements toward the development of small molecule inhibitors of IGF2BP3, an oncofetal RNA-binding protein of interest to the medical community for the treatment of leukemia and other cancer types. An overview of small-molecule inhibitors of RNA-binding proteins is presented first, followed by our disclosure of a small molecule that shows inhibition of IGF2BP3 and interesting downstream biological effects. Finally, an SAR study that elucidated key motifs needed for targeting IGF2BP3 with a small molecule, affording promising lead compounds, is presented. Overall, this dissertation underscores both the fundamental and applied power of chemical synthesis, and the chapters are more specifically outlined as follows.Chapter one explores the chemistry of seven-membered strained cyclic allenes, which have not previously been reported. It explores their fundamental structure and scope of reactivity to access functionalized azepanes. Importantly, the transfer of absolute stereochemical information in cycloaddition reactions of the strained intermediate is evaluated. It is found that seven-membered cyclic allenes transfer absolute stereochemical information more efficiently than their six-membered counterparts, a trend that had not previously been identified in cyclic allene chemistry.Chapter two describes the development of catalyst-controlled annulations of strained cyclic allenes engaging with palladium π-allyl species. This methodology employs vinyl benzoxazinones and cyclic allene precursors to generate a palladium n-allyl intermediate and cyclic allene intermediate that react in situ to ultimately form two isomeric products. Notably, either constitutional isomer can be formed with high selectivity based on the ligand employed. The development of this palladium-catalyzed reaction demonstrates that despite their high reactivity and short lifetimes, strained cyclic allenes can efficiently engage in catalytic processes to access complex products in a single step.Chapter three explores the chemistry of a related class of strained intermediates, strained cyclic 1,2,3-trienes. An efficient synthetic route to a seven-membered azacyclic variant is developed. Computations provide insight into its distorted structure and generation from a Kobayashi-type precursor. Experimentally, the previously unreported 1,2,3-triene reacts with high efficiency and regioselectivity in cycloadditions and nucleophilic additions. The origins of regioselectivity are investigated computationally, and a model for predicting regioselectivity is proposed.Chapters four, five, and six cover the development of small molecule inhibitors of RNA-binding proteins, specifically IGF2BP3. Chapter four provides an overview of small molecules that are reported to inhibit RNA-binding proteins implicated in cancer, with an emphasis on their mechanisms of action. Chapter five discloses a key hit compound that was found to not only inhibit and bind IGF2BP3, but also cause downstream anti-leukemic effects in vitro and in vivo. Finally, SAR efforts towards a potent and selective small molecule inhibitor of IGF2BP3 with favorable pharmacokinetic properties are reported in chapter six. We report the most potent and selective inhibitors of IGF2BP3 disclosed to date, with promising candidates for in vivo studies and lead development. Collectively, these studies demonstrate the potential for the development of small molecule inhibitors of RNA-binding proteins, a class of proteins with rampant dysregulation in human cancers.Organic chemistryBiochemistryCellular biologyMolecular biologyGeneticsOrganic ChemistryOrganic SynthesisRNA-Binding ProteinsStrained IntermediatespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pk1k5qmetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3k84z6bc2026-06-12T05:02:08Zqt3k84z6bcNeonatal exposure to Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, maternal exposure to residential proximity to oil and gas development during pregnancy, parental occupational exposures to organic solvents and childhood cancer riskChen, YixinRitz, Beate RHeck, Julia E2024-01-01 Childhood cancer, defined as cancer diagnoses in children aged 0 to 19 years, is the second leading cause of death in children in the Unites States and Europe. The etiology of childhood cancer remains unclear. Established risk factors include genetic predispositions, high dose ionizing radiation, and prior chemotherapy. This dissertation examines three types of environmental exposures in relation to childhood cancer: 1) neonatal exposure to PFAS and the risk of retinoblastoma; 2) maternal residential proximity to oil and gas development during pregnancy and the risk of childhood cancer; and 3) parental occupational exposures to organic solvents and the risk of childhood cancer. The first study utilized 501 retinoblastoma cases and 899 controls born 1983-2011 from a population-based case-control study. We identified PFOS, PFOA, and PFNA feature intensities in neonatal DBS from California GDSP. Among all children, above-mean PFOS levels increased the risk of retinoblastoma overall (aOR: 1.29; 95% CI: 1.00, 1.67) and unilateral retinoblastoma (aOR: 1.42; 95% CI: 1.03,1.97). In children of Mexico-born mothers, above-mean PFOS levels increased the risk of retinoblastoma overall (aOR: 1.67; 95% CI: 1.06, 2.66) and bilateral retinoblastoma (aOR: 2.06; 95% CI: 1.12, 3.92). In children of US-born mothers, the risk of unilateral retinoblastoma increased by 15% for each IQR increase in PFOS (95% CI: 0.99, 1.35) and by 71% (95% CI: 1.04, 2.90) for above-mean PFOS levels. PFOA increased the risk of retinoblastoma overall (aOR: 1.41; 95% CI: 1.00, 2.02 for above-mean levels, aOR: 1.06; 95% CI: 0.98, 1.16 per IQR increase) for children of US-born mothers.
The second study utilized the same population-based case-control study in California with children born 1998-2016. We estimated exposure during pregnancy to any well (i.e., active or inactive) and inactive wells located within 1km and 3km of residences and assessed low and high exposures (categorized by median) within this proximity. The risk of medulloblastoma increased among children of mothers exposed to any well within 3km (≥1 well: adjusted Odds Ratio (aOR): 1.40; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.08, 1.82; low, aOR = 1.27; 95% CI = 0.93, 1.74; high, aOR = 1.55; 95% CI = 1.14, 2.11). The risk of rhabdomyosarcoma consistently increased across the exposure levels of any well within 3km (≥1 well: aOR = 1.64; 95% CI = 1.28, 2.09; low, aOR = 1.69; 95% CI = 1.28, 2.23; high, aOR = 1.57; 95% CI = 1.16, 2.12). Similar associations were observed for teratoma with any well within 3km (≥1 well: aOR = 1.42; 95% CI = 0.99, 2.05; low, aOR = 1.35; 95% CI = 0.88, 2.07; high, aOR = 1.51; 95% CI = 0.98, 2.33). Overall, the results were consistent across the buffer sizes and no differences were found between any well and inactive wells.
The third study utilized a linkage of four Danish data registries, including 10442 cases and 261050 controls born 1968-2013. Using JEMs, we identified and examined the role of parental occupational exposure to 3 hydrocarbon groups (i.e., aromatic, aliphatic/alicyclic, chlorinated hydrocarbons) and 4 individual hydrocarbons (i.e., toluene, DCM, TCE, 1,1,1-TCA) in two biologically relevant time periods: 1) 3 months preconception to birth for fathers; and 2) during pregnancy for mothers and the risk of childhood cancer in offspring. Paternal exposure to aromatic (high: aOR: 1.31; 95% CI: 0.95, 1.81) and chlorinated hydrocarbons (high: aOR: 1.82; 95% CI: 1.18, 2.82) increased the risk of glioma. The risk of AML was higher among fathers highly exposed to aliphatic/alicyclic hydrocarbons (high: aOR: 1.87; 95% CI: 1.24, 2.82). Paternal exposure to1,1,1-trichloroethane increased the risk of osteosarcoma (high: aOR: 2.29; 95% CI: 1.25, 4.18). The risk of medulloblastoma increased in offspring of mothers ever exposed to DCM (aOR: 1.69; 95% CI: 1.01, 2.84), TCE (aOR; 1.86; 95% CI: 1.12, 3.10), and toluene (aOR; 1.92; 95% CI: 1.07, 3.46). The risk of ALL increased in children of mothers ever exposed to aromatic hydrocarbons (aOR; 1.29; 95% CI: 1.01, 1.64), and 1,1,1-TCA (aOR; 1.30; 95% CI: 1.01, 1.69), while risk of NHL was associated with maternal exposure to chlorinated hydrocarbons (aOR; 1.94; 95% CI: 1.05, 3.57).
Epidemiologyenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3k84z6bchttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3k84z6bc/qt3k84z6bc.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2q9562nf2026-06-12T05:01:54Zqt2q9562nfTuning the Optical Properties of Stearyl Acrylate-Hydroxy Ethyl Methacrylate based Copolymer for Smart Window ApplicationsWakuta, ThomasPei, Qibing2024-01-01Thermally responsive smart window devices are gaining popular attention due to its ability to be dynamically tuned in response to changes in external temperature, serving to reduce energy consumption for cooling and heating systems. The optical state of the smart window device is adjusted that controls the extent at which the incident solar radiation is transmitted. A thermochromic phase-changing copolymer is introduced that consists of clear poly stearyl acrylate (CPSA) and poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) poly(HEMA). The synthesis process consists of a thermal-activated ultraviolet curing treatment with the use of ethoxylated trimethylolpropane triacrylate (ETPTA) crosslinker and 2,2-dimethoxy-2-phenylacetophenone (DMPA) photoinitiator. The crystallinity change of CPSA as it is heated to its phase transition temperature (Tc) of 42°C causes its refractive index to differ from that of poly(HEMA), resulting in the copolymer to switch from a transparent to an opaque state. At room temperature (20°C) and 80°C, the copolymer film has a visible transmittance of 91.9% and 3.6%, respectively, with a solar modulation (∆Tsolar) of 88.3%. The data measurements are gathered with the use of a UV-VIS spectrophotometer.EngineeringMaterials Scienceluminous transmittancerefractive indexsmart windowsolar modulationthermochromicenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2q9562nfhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2q9562nf/qt2q9562nf.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2k24j8jz2026-06-12T05:01:51Zqt2k24j8jzMachine Learning Applications in Day-Ahead Electricity Price ForecastingBell, VincentWu, Ying Nian2024-01-01This study reviews machine learning based time series forecasting approaches and applies them to the day-ahead electricity price forecasting problem. We review the literature on transformer models for time series forecasting, in addition to two MLP-based methods, NBEATSx and NHiTS, and XGBoost. Four models are chosen and implemented: NBEATSx, NHiTS, Temporal Fusion Transformer, XGBoost. They are tested on electricity price data from the PJM market. We product prediction intervals using adaptive conformal inference. We find that NBEATSx and NHiTS perform best on this dataset. We find that by averaging as few as two models, we are able to significantly improve prediction accuracy.Statisticsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2k24j8jzhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2k24j8jz/qt2k24j8jz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4rt209962026-06-11T06:38:13Zqt4rt20996Femicide on Trial: The Logics of Gendered Justice in Colonial Kenya, c. 1920-1965Neumann, Lauren PowellLydon, Ghislaine E2026-06-09Femicide, as a subject, has been largely situated within contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship, with many studies relying on statistical and news media data sources only available from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This thesis historicizes femicide within colonial Kenya’s common law courts through an analysis of forty-nine murder cases, tried between 1920 to 1965, collected from the Kenya National Archives. By utilizing this “femicide archive,” this study argues that the administration of justice for women’s murders was conditional upon how motives of the accused were interpreted by the court. Courts administered murder convictions or mitigation based on how these motives for violence were translated into legally intelligible language and whether they aligned with the colonial state’s interests. Through the analytical lens of the “logics of gendered justice,” this study examines how gendered assumptions surrounding masculinity, women’s morality, and social order shaped the adjudication of femicide within colonial courts. This study also argues that legal hybridity, or the interactions of Indigenous, Islamic, and British common law, created a legal environment in which motive became the main category through which violence against women was interpreted. The six main cases analyzed in this study are categorized into the three motives of witchcraft accusations, bridewealth disputes, and women’s marital abandonment. They reveal that colonial courts interpreted women’s death through competing sociocultural and legal understandings of gender, power, and acceptable violence. Through the analysis of various legal and social institutions, this study demonstrates how colonial courts defined what forms of femicide were legally condemnable through upholding murder convictions or excusable through commutating convictions and reducing sentences. This study contributes to African women’s and legal histories by elucidating how colonial courts produced gendered legal logics that shaped the legal treatment of femicide, and how women’s voices persisted despite the patriarchal constraints of such legal documentation.HistoryAfrican studiesCriminologyfemicidegender-based violenceKenyalegal hybriditymotivesmurderapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rt20996https://escholarship.org/content/qt4rt20996/qt4rt20996.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt35v7q2wx2026-06-11T06:38:07Zqt35v7q2wxDevelopment of a Preoperative EHR and Waveform model for Postoperative Major ComplicationsBharucha, Janvi AanandiPellegrini, Matteo2026-06-09Importance:Postoperative complications represent the third leading cause of death in the United States. Mortality following their development varies considerably between institutions, suggesting that differences in early recognition and clinical response may be the primary driver of preventable deaths.Objective:To determine whether machine learning approaches utilizing both waveform and EHR data can better identify patients at risk of developing major complications compared to the current standard of care.Participants:A surgery was included if there was both waveform and preoperative EHR data available. This led to a cohort of 9,211 patient encounters for PPG cohorts, and 3,560 patient encounters for ABP cohorts.Design:A postoperative major complication (POMC) was defined as any occurrence of pneumonia, acute renal failure, cardiac arrest, cardiac arrhythmia, hemorrhage, myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolism, sepsis, or ICU reintubation within 96 hours of surgery. Three class-weighted LightGBM classifiers were developed per cohort (ABP, PPG, ABP+PPG): preoperative EHR only, waveform only, and EHR + waveform combined. ASA score was used as a clinical benchmark. Models were evaluated on a held-out test set using bootstrapped AUROC and average precision (n=1,000 iterations), with pairwise comparisons via the DeLong test.Results:The best-performing model was the EHR + ABP model (AUC 0.914, SD: 0.016; AP 0.841, SD: 0.029). The EHR + PPG model demonstrated statistically significant improvement with the addition of waveform data over EHR alone (AUC 0.898, SD: 0.014; AP 0.684, SD: 0.042). Waveform augmentation of ASA score significantly improved POMC prediction across all cohorts.Conclusions:Machine learning models incorporating routinely collected intraoperative waveform data can predict postoperative major complications with strong discrimination, outperforming current clinical risk scores and supporting their potential use in individualized risk stratification and early warning systems.BioinformaticsHealth sciencesMolecular biologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/35v7q2wxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt35v7q2wx/qt35v7q2wx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt491915vg2026-06-11T06:38:02Zqt491915vgToward Efficient and Domain-Specific Retrieval-Augmented Language ModelsZhang, JunyiYang, LinPeng, Nanyun2026-06-09Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for grounding large language models in external knowledge and supporting knowledge-intensive applications. Its practical deployment, however, faces two fundamental challenges: scaling efficiently to long retrieved contexts, and providing meaningful support for specialized real-world domains.
This thesis advances retrieval-augmented language models along these two complementary axes. To improve efficiency, we introduce BRIEF-PRO, a lightweight context compressor trained on synthetic data that expands short-context seed data into long-context examples and supports user-controllable compression. Experiments on four multi-hop question answering datasets show that BRIEF-PRO achieves a 32× compression rate while improving downstream accuracy and reducing inference cost across small (8B), large (70B), and proprietary reader models. To study domain-specific RAG, we introduce TEMMED-BENCH, the first multi-task benchmark evaluating temporal reasoning over medical images, accompanied by a knowledge corpus of more than 17,000 instances to support retrieval augmentation. Evaluation results on our benchmark show that augmenting LVLMs with both retrieved visual and textual evidence substantially outperforms text-only augmentation, highlighting the promise of multi-modal RAG for clinical applications.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringComputer scienceRetrieval-Augmented Language Modelsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/491915vghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt491915vg/qt491915vg.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9d60c34n2026-06-11T06:37:57Zqt9d60c34nComputational Studies on the Mechanism of Pericyclic and Pericyclase ReactionsZhou, QingyangHouk, Kendall N.2026-06-09Pericyclic reactions, defined as reactions in which bond formation and bond breaking occur through a single concerted cyclic transition state, have become a major class in modern organic chemistry. The mechanism of pericyclic reactions has been intensively studied by Woodward and Hoffmann, who then developed the well-known rules for predicting the stereochemical outcome. Given the rapid development of computational hardware (CPU, GPU, etc.) and quantum mechanical theory, quantitative calculations for pericyclic reactions have become feasible in recent decades. This dissertation describes a series of computational and experimental mechanistic investigations on various pericyclic reactions and on enzymes that have evolved to catalyze such reactions, using modern computational chemistry methods combined with experimental work by our collaborators.The first part of this dissertation, chapters 1-4, focuses on the mechanistic studies of non-enzymatic pericyclic reactions. Chapter 1 is a perspective on the history of electrocyclic reactions and our DFT and CASSCF investigations. Chapter 2 describes DFT studies and quasi-classical simulations of the electrocyclic ring opening of bicyclo[2.2.0]hex-2-ene and its 1-amino-4-cyano derivative, providing an in-depth analysis of the ring-opening mechanism in highly strained and polarized bicyclic systems. Chapter 3 details the mechanism of a solar energy storage system based on substituted anthracene, highlighting the effect of the lattice environment on the reaction pathway and energy barrier. Chapter 4 reports the DFT and CASSCF study for a photochemical skeletal editing reaction, which involves a series of photoinduced isomerization, electrocyclization, and cycloaddition processes.The second part, chapters 5-7, explores the so-called pericyclases, which are enzymes that catalyze pericyclic reactions. Chapter 5 reports combined DFT and MD computations on a glycosylated enzyme-catalyzed tandem [4 + 2] cycloaddition. Chapter 6 focuses on the mechanism of PfB, an enzyme that is proposed to catalyze a sequence of pericyclic reactions to give natural product PF-1018 from a linear polyene substrate. Chapter 7 is a minireview covering enzymes known to catalyze [4 + 2]/[6 + 4] ambimodal cycloadditions and recent computational advances in studying these bifurcation reactions.ChemistryOrganic chemistryPhysical chemistryBiochemistryComputational chemistryComputational ChemistryDensity functional theoryEnzymeMolecular dynamicsPericyclic reactionapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d60c34nhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9d60c34n/qt9d60c34n.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9d5986kq2026-06-11T06:37:52Zqt9d5986kqTowards Foundation Models for Scientific SimulationNguyen, Duc TungGrover, Aditya2026-06-09Scientific simulation is a foundational capability that drives progress across the natural sciences and engineering, from modeling weather and climate to designing novel molecules and materials. Traditional physics-based approaches, while enormously useful, face fundamental bottlenecks in computational cost, representational fidelity, and data efficiency. Deep learning has emerged as a powerful alternative, yet most data-driven methods remain task-specific, generalizing poorly beyond their training distribution. This thesis develops general-purpose deep learning models for scientific simulation along three directions: (1) building data-driven models for weather simulation that surpass physics-based methods while being orders of magnitude faster; (2) developing foundation models for scientific simulation, including weather and climate as well as physical systems governed by partial differential equations, that are pretrained once and adapted to diverse downstream tasks involving unseen variables, dynamics, and spatiotemporal scales; and (3) extending data-driven simulation to scientific domains where labeled data is scarce or expensive to collect, using in-context learning and synthetic pretraining to build models that simulate unknown systems from only a handful of observations without any task-specific finetuning. Collectively, this thesis demonstrates that pretraining on diverse data with general-purpose objectives and adapting with minimal supervision can produce models that are broadly generalizable across tasks and data regimes.Atmospheric sciencesArtificial intelligenceComputer scienceInformation scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d5986kqhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9d5986kq/qt9d5986kq.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt07b745gt2026-06-11T06:37:47Zqt07b745gtNatural Language for Asset PricingBettencourt, NicholasMichailidis, George2026-06-09Financial forecasting has often incorporated text only after reducing it to compact variables such as sentiment scores, event labels, topic weights, or other hand-engineered features. Recent long-context language models relax this constraint by making it possible to condition directly on news articles, press releases, and other unstructured financial documents. This thesis studies direct text-conditioned forecasting for small-cap equities using SC454k, a dataset of financial news articles and press releases paired with market data, and introduces ADAPT-0.7B, a 693M-parameter sparse Mixture-of-Experts transformer trained to predict stock prices 30 days after publication.The central empirical finding is that long-context financial forecasting is not solved by simply adding more text. In the evaluated checkpoint, recent price information explains much of the observed forecasting signal, and removing article bodies improves price-space error relative to full-news prompts. This does not show that financial news is uninformative; rather, it shows that ADAPT-0.7B does not yet reliably separate predictive article content from routine or weakly informative context under the available training budget and data quality. The task therefore becomes not only a forecasting problem, but also a context-selection problem: among many potentially relevant articles, the model must identify which information is likely to matter for the 30-day target.This thesis evaluates test-time strategies that sample multiple candidate article contexts, generate a forecast from each, and then select among candidates using hidden representations near the forecast marker. On 114 usable held-out examples with full 131k-token context, the best ADAPT-0.7B full-news result is a no-reasoning hidden-state selector, which reduces mean absolute error by 14.6% relative to using the first sampled context and raises direction accuracy to 59.65%. A reasoning-prefix ablation finds that a 128-token prefix is the best observed decoded-reasoning budget, but all explicit reasoning settings underperform no-reasoning hidden selection. Additional Qwen3.5-4B experiments on a fixed 250-problem open-source forecasting benchmark show a similar pattern: hidden-state selection outperforms simple majority aggregation, suggesting that latent representations can carry useful signal about candidate answer quality. The results favor latent candidate ranking over unconstrained generated reasoning, while showing that useful long-context asset-price forecasting likely requires stronger pretrained foundations, cleaner financial corpora, and objectives better aligned with returns or economic utility.StatisticsFinanceInformation scienceEconomicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/07b745gthttps://escholarship.org/content/qt07b745gt/qt07b745gt.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9v85b39d2026-06-11T06:37:43Zqt9v85b39dEarthly Flavor vs. Unrefined Taste: Douyin and Kuaishou’s Rural, Platform, and Speculative Career EnvironmentsLi, JiaxuMann, Denise2026-06-09This dissertation examines Tuwei content creation on Chinese short-video platforms as a speculative cultural industry produced through the interaction of platform infrastructures and rural representation. Focusing on Douyin and Kuaishou, it argues that Tuwei is not merely a vulgar aesthetic, a rural subculture, or a symptom of platform exploitation. Rather, it is a mediated labor formation in which platforms, interfaces, algorithms, creator dashboards, livestreaming economies, MCNs, educational infrastructures, successful wanghong figures, aspiring imitators, rural spaces, bodily labor, and viewers collectively organize the possibility of a creator career.
The dissertation develops a three-part environmental framework: the platform environment, the rural representation environment, and the speculative industrial environment that emerges from the encounter of the platform and the rural. The first two chapters analyze Douyin’s platform environment through its “hard” logistical infrastructures and “soft” pedagogical systems, showing how users are cultivated as self-managing creative laborers and potential entrepreneurs. The third chapter turns to Giao, a paradigmatic successful Tuwei creator, to examine how rural stigma, self-caricature, and humiliation are retrospectively narrated as the prehistory of entrepreneurial success. The fourth chapter shifts to unsuccessful and emerging rural creators whose repetitive, grotesque, affective, domestic, and bodily performances expose the precarious underside of this same speculative promise.
Drawing on actor-network theory, elemental media theory, critical media industry studies, platform studies, and scholarship on Chinese wanghong and Tuwei culture, the dissertation shows that rural creators are not simply passive victims of platform power. They actively mobilize rural spaces, local speech, food practices, bodily endurance, social injury, and comic self-exposure as aesthetic and economic resources. Yet the conversion of these resources into income, visibility, or mobility remains uncertain. Tuwei content creation is therefore best understood as a speculative industry: a partially real, partially ideological environment in which platforms and creators collectively manufacture the belief that ordinary rural life can become a viable digital career.Film studiesWeb studiesChinaPlatformRuralShort VideoSpeculative IndustryTuweiapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9v85b39dhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9v85b39d/qt9v85b39d.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5vc0n1q92026-06-11T06:37:38Zqt5vc0n1q9Differentiable Energy LearningChaiyakul, RyanVandenberghe, Lieven2026-06-09The growth of physical AI has heightened the need to accurately model real-world object dynamics. While we can easily observe an object’s trajectory, its movement is fundamentally governed by underlying energy and forces, which we aim to learn as an inverse modeling problem. Traditional explicit models often fail to capture the nuances of complex real-world systems, leading to a ”sim-to-real” gap. While data-driven models can reduce this gap, existing methods typically rely on structured experiments, making them impractical for robotics operating in unstructured, real-world environments. Closing this gap allows simulation-trained policies to generalize gracefully to real-world environments without a sudden drop in performance.In this work, we introduce differentiable simulation and a homotopy-inspired energy learning framework. Our approach solves the inverse modeling problem directly from static, quasi-static snapshots, eliminating the need for full temporal trajectories. By embedding this learned energy into a simulator, we can accurately predict object dynamics under new conditions. We demonstrate superior computational efficiency and resilience to initial conditions compared to baseline methods across a series of stiff elastic systems.Electrical engineeringMechanical engineeringArtificial intelligenceComputer engineeringEnergyDifferentiable SimulationInverse ModelingOptimizationPhysics-Informed MLQuasi-Static System IdentificationpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5vc0n1q9etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt82q8z8xp2026-06-11T06:37:33Zqt82q8z8xpEssential yet Expendable: Domestic Servitude and Cultural Politics of Labor in Industrializing KoreaChoi, Da InChun, JenniferHan, Judy2026-06-08Domestic servitude is seen as an abject condition without agency. My dissertation, “Essential yet Expendable: Domestic Servitude and Cultural Politics of Labor in Korea” analyzes the narratives of singmo sari (maid’s life) and how they express aspirations under extreme social, economic, and political duress during the period of compressed industrialization in South Korea. This dissertation examines the historical construction of the category of singmo: many were adopted daughters, working sisters, or wives-in-training. The porous labeling of singmo and ambiguities in singmo’s experience as a kin and non-kin who provided essential labor while excluded from the category of a worker produced exploitative conditions that singmo contested.
I build on feminist scholarship that examines servitude as a social institution shaped by unequal histories and day-to-day relationships. Through interdisciplinary analysis of narratives in life history collections, state archive of oral histories, memoirs in women’s magazine, Ministry of Labor’s and religious organizations’ publications, this dissertation demonstrates how servitude is institutionalized. In postwar Korea, the afterlives of Japanese and US military occupation, gendered family expectations of sacrifice, and rural underdevelopment coerced young girls to enter the position of servitude. Families of birth, adoption, and employment represented continuous experiences of alienation characterized by deprivation of opportunities, labor value, and reciprocity. Due to widespread poverty in postwar Korea, narratives further show how even poor women created a labor regime of control within the patriarchal family order even when they themselves struggled against it, navigating complex dynamics of disenfranchisement and privilege.
While illuminating relationships of domination and coercion, the narratives also demonstrate how women aspired for social mobility and fought against injustice. Whether by advocating for more horizontal relationships of care, sharing their experiences with legal counseling centers, or running away from abusive homes, the narratives I examine illuminate creative strategies practiced by women who countered systemic deprivation of their life opportunities in postwar Korean society. By assembling together an archive of diverse sources constituting women’s experience as singmo, this dissertation reveals how poor women documented injustice they faced while they struggled to reclaim the control over their lives and labor.Gender studiesHistoryKorean literaturedomestic servitudegenderlaborSouth KoreapubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/82q8z8xpetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2wr965nn2026-06-11T06:37:28Zqt2wr965nnApplications of Next Generation Sequencing in Respiratory Viral Pathogen DetectionQian, KeninArboleda, Valerie2026-06-09The development of targeted molecular diagnostics, such as multiplexed Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), has revolutionized clinical microbiology by offering highly sensitive and rapid detection of common respiratory pathogens. However, as highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, these targeted assays are intrinsically limited by their reliance on a priori knowledge, making them blind to novel, rare, or highly mutated pathogens. To address this fundamental diagnostic gap, pathogen-agnostic metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) offers a theoretically ideal solution, capable of detecting any nucleic acid present in a sample. Yet, the routine clinical adoption of respiratory mNGS has been hindered by the biological complexity of non-sterile samples, with high host-background and degraded RNA, and operational constraints related to cost, turnaround time, and scalability.This dissertation addresses these barriers through the development, optimization, and validation of a scalable respiratory RNA-mNGS assay. Chapter 2 addresses the biological complexity of respiratory samples by evaluating 24 distinct assay combinations for nucleic acid extraction and RNA-sequencing library preparation from saliva. We found that the choice of RNA-seq library preparation chemistry had a greater impact on viral read recovery than the extraction method, with the Tecan Revelo High Sensitivity RNA-Seq kit yielding the highest analytical sensitivity. Crucially, traditional sample quality metrics like total RNA concentration and RNA Integrity equivalent (RINe) scores did not reliably correlate with successful viral RNA read recovery in these matrices. Chapter 3 addresses the operational challenges of throughput and cost by directly comparing early-barcoding (BRB-seq) and late-barcoding (NEB) mNGS methodologies. Incorporating sample-specific barcodes during the initial reverse transcription step enabled extensive sample pooling, which drastically simplified the workflow, reduced per-sample costs. The standard late barcoding mNGS approach performed identically to PCR and late barcoding only missed a single positive sample. The agnostic mNGS approaches also successfully identified incidental viral infections missed by initial targeted PCR screens. Chapter 4 evaluates the real-world clinical performance of the mNGS pipeline against multiplexed PCR assays, confirming mNGS's ability to detect a wider array of viruses. The comparison showed that while targeted PCR achieved marginally higher analytical sensitivity for its predefined targets, mNGS simultaneously exposed the limitations of targeted testing by successfully identifying multiple additional, off-panel pathogenic targets that were missed by PCR. Additionally we demonstrate that the use of total RNA sequencing is able to lessen the diagnostic sensitivity gap between early and late barcoding that is seen with mRNA sequencing. These systematic improvements collectively help adapt mNGS for the respiratory pathogen space where it can eventually serve as an invaluable, scalable, pathogen agnostic, diagnostic platform.MicrobiologyVirologyCellular biologyGeneticsMetagenomic SequencingPathogen AgnosticVirus DetectionpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2wr965nnetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt870394vj2026-06-11T06:37:23Zqt870394vjInvestigating oncogene-driven phenotypic plasticity and therapeutic vulnerabilities in glioblastomaCadet, DimitriNathanson, David A2026-06-09Phenotypic plasticity is an increasingly recognized driver of therapeutic failure in cancer, enabling tumor cells to evade oncogene-directed therapies through reversible state transitions rather than genetic escape. Glioblastoma (GBM) provides a stringent system to interrogate this problem: it exhibits pronounced intratumoral transcriptional heterogeneity, and despite EGFR being its most frequently amplified oncogene, every EGFR-directed therapy evaluated in the clinic has failed to improve patient outcomes. This dissertation argues that these failures reflect three interacting constraints and addresses each in turn. First, we describe the discovery and development of KTM-101, a brain-penetrant reversible EGFR inhibitor engineered for the GBM-specific variant landscape of amplified wild-type and extracellular-domain mutant EGFR. KTM-101 achieves brain-to-plasma ratios of approximately 10 across species, produces dose-dependent survival benefit substantially exceeding osimertinib in orthotopic patient-derived xenograft models, and achieves pharmacologically active intratumoral exposures in patients with recurrent EGFR-altered GBM. Second, using KTM-101 as a pharmacologically validated tool, we demonstrate that effective EGFR inhibition depletes glial progenitor-like malignant states but rapidly restores RAS-ERK signaling through active RAS-GTP, rerouting tumors into cycling glioneuronal progenitor programs. Wild-type RAS functions as a truncal regulator of this plastic, high-entropy progenitor architecture, and baseline malignant state composition predicts therapeutic response more accurately than EGFR genotype alone. Direct RAS-GTP inhibition collapses the progenitor hierarchy, enforces astrocyte-biased differentiation, and exposes a conditional survival dependency on EGFR signaling, such that subsequent EGFR blockade triggers apoptotic collapse in vitro and in orthotopic tumor models. Third, we describe the discovery of X-288, a covalent CNS-penetrant EGFR inhibitor achieving brain-to-plasma ratios exceeding 300% and tumor-selective target coverage that spares normal EGFR-dependent tissues at efficacious doses, with preclinical efficacy across the major GBM EGFR variant architectures including models of acquired resistance to reversible inhibition. Together, these studies establish the rationale for combining RAS-GTP inhibition with covalent EGFR blockade to restrict adaptive lineage trajectories and convert plasticity into therapeutic vulnerability in GBM.BiochemistryPharmacologyOncologyMolecular biologypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/870394vjetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8kv9b3kb2026-06-11T06:37:17Zqt8kv9b3kbThe tt-geometry of permutation filtered modulesNi, ColinBalmer, Paul2026-06-09We study the derived category of permutation filtered modules. We focus on the case Db(pfmod(E)) of an elementary abelian group E. Our key insight is to consider for each subgroup N ⩽ E a relative subcategory pfmod(E, N) ⊂ pfmod(E) of permutation filtered modules and a relative category pgmod(E, N) of permutation graded modules. The case N = 1 recovers the original categories. We show that the spectrum Spc Db(pfmod(E, N)) as a set consists of a copy of the spectrum Spc Db(pgmod(E, N)) and a colimit colimL>N UL of open subsets UL ⊂ Spc Db(pfmod(E, L)) coming from smaller relative subcategories. This allows an inductive analysis of Spc Db(pfmod(E)).MathematicsTheoretical mathematicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8kv9b3kbhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8kv9b3kb/qt8kv9b3kb.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1j98s0x62026-06-11T06:37:12Zqt1j98s0x6Backdoor Poisoning in Road-Scene Perception: Occlusion, Natural-Object Transfer, and Weight-Space ActivationLim, HanaWu, Yingnian2026-06-09Vision models used in traffic perception can preserve strong clean performance while carrying hidden behaviors that activate under attacker-chosen visual conditions. This thesis studies dirty-label backdoors in cropped-sign classification and scene-level traffic-sign detection using the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K dataset, with emphasis on what the models actually learn from poisoned data rather than attack success under an ideal trigger alone. At classifier scale, the backdoor remained effective under severe occlusion, but this persistence depended on a compact trigger remnant appearing at a learned spatial location, revealing a narrow geometry-specific shortcut rather than general robustness to trigger degradation. Neural Cleanse remained comparatively stable as the trigger was occluded, showing that diagnostic visibility and direct attack activation capture different properties of the poisoned model. At scene level, attacks transferred strongly to synthetic bicycle composites but weakly to naturally occurring bicycle scenes, suggesting that effectiveness was constrained by the trigger appearances and scene geometries represented during poisoning. Weight-space interpolation further showed that poisoned behavior activated nonlinearly after sufficient poisoned parameter structure was restored, while clean utility recovered in the same region, limiting both clean performance checks and whole-checkpoint averaging as indicators of model integrity. These results show that a backdoor is defined not simply by the nominal presence of a trigger, but by a learned acceptance region over its visual evidence, spatial geometry, and parameter configuration; evaluating whether deployment conditions enter that region provides a more meaningful account of risk than headline attack success alone.StatisticsComputer scienceTransportationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1j98s0x6https://escholarship.org/content/qt1j98s0x6/qt1j98s0x6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0m04c3k42026-06-11T06:35:15Zqt0m04c3k4Estimating Price Elasticities in Retail Markets: A Causal Machine Learning ApproachNarasayya, RohanWu, Guani2026-06-05This thesis estimates price elasticities of demand across four retail product categories using the Dominick’s Finer Foods scanner dataset, a panel of weekly store-level transactions
from the Chicago metropolitan area from 1989 to 1997. Prices in observational retail
data are endogenous, confounders are high-dimensional, and price sensitivity varies across
demographics and products. Three estimation approaches are compared: two-way fixed
effects regression, Double Machine Learning, and causal forests, all estimated on a common
training sample and evaluated on a held-out period of 52 weeks. Fixed effects and DML yield
broadly consistent average elasticities, with DML producing larger magnitudes attributable
to flexible nonlinear control of promotions and demographics. Causal forests reveal store-level
heterogeneity in price sensitivity driven by category-specific demographic factors, and attain
the lowest out-of-sample prediction error in all four categories. Across all methods, paper
towels emerge as the only inelastic category while cereals and laundry detergent exhibit the
highest price sensitivity.StatisticsMarketingArtificial intelligenceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0m04c3k4https://escholarship.org/content/qt0m04c3k4/qt0m04c3k4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0394m3nz2026-06-11T06:35:10Zqt0394m3nzFour Fairies for Four HarpsChiracharasporn, NichagarnLefkowitz, David S2026-06-05Four Fairies for Four Harps is a chamber work for Harp Quartet that I created as an exploration of the instrument’s mechanics and possibilities. Since the harp is commonly pigeonholed into the same characters and sounds in the classical repertoire, I sought to make a piece that finds entirely new uses for the instrument, particularly by utilizing the instrument’s percussive side and expanding its sonic palette through various extended techniques. The harp is well known as an instrument that plays angelic music exceptionally well, but I believe that it can be capable of so much more expression, especially in a chamber music setting. This work is the culmination of six months of research, and it would not have been possible without the help of my harp-playing colleague Jillian Risigari-Gai, professor of harp at the University of Redlands, as well as harpists Brian Molina, Alaina Stark, and Nina Zipnick. I would like to thank Professors Kay Rhie and David S. Lefkowitz for their guidance. I hope that this work will not only add to the harp’s repertoire, but serve as a tool for other musicians and composers who want to explore the capabilities of this wonderful instrument.Musical compositionMusicMusic theoryExtended techniqueHarpQuartet Ensemblesonic expansionapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0394m3nzhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0394m3nz/qt0394m3nz.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt309984bg2026-06-11T06:35:04Zqt309984bgHarnessing the Power of User InteractionsYang, XiaoyingZhang, Yang2026-06-05The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) and ubiquitous computing imagines a future where everyday objects and environments are intelligently connected and responsive to human needs. Despite decades of progress in sensing, processing, and connectivity, this vision remains largely unrealized. One central barrier is power: deploying and maintaining batteries for billions of small embedded devices at scale remains costly and impractical.
This dissertation identifies an overlooked power source embedded in everyday life — the energy generated when people interact with objects. Every time a person opens a door, adjusts a window, or handles a tool, physical energy is produced and typically wasted. This dissertation argues that this interaction energy can serve as a source of electrical power and a carrier of contextual information. Generated as a natural byproduct of human interactions and inherently tied to the context in which they occur, this energy represents a largely untapped resource for enabling future computing systems.
To investigate this opportunity, this dissertation explores interaction energy along two complementary dimensions: (1) harvesting human kinetic energy during interactions to power devices, and (2) encoding interactions into expressive signals that reduce power demands for computation. By combining mechanical mechanisms, electrical circuits, and signal design, this research demonstrates a series of innovative system designs that harness the power of user interactions to enable a wide range of computing tasks, including object actuation (MiniKers), human activity sensing (CubeSense++), object identification (LuxAct), and wearable powering and haptic feedback (Interaction Power Stations and Hapt-Aids).
Together, these systems establish interaction energy as a practical and versatile foundation for augmenting everyday objects with computing capabilities, enabling sustainable, low-maintenance, and context-aware ubiquitous computing.Computer engineeringComputer scienceArtificial intelligenceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/309984bghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt309984bg/qt309984bg.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6290r2rn2026-06-11T06:34:58Zqt6290r2rnIntegrated Physical and Computational Platforms to Monitor 3D Cyst and Organoid GrowthSusanto, AnnaLin, Neil2026-06-05The morphological progression and dysfunction of tissue governs mechanisms in oncogenesis and organ development. To control and track this process, various physical and digital platforms like fabricated microwell arrays and segmentation algorithms were made. Developing them requires resources with limited accessibility, and both platform types struggle with more complex morphologies and environments. More specifically, irregular microwell topologies reduce image clarity and magnification, while many algorithms are not generalized enough to perform well for challenging image datasets. I integrated various fabrication and imaging strategies to improve on current microarray cell trapping and culture platforms by reducing resource requirements and enhancing confocal image quality. I then identified epithelial disorganization induced by microwell-imposed geometric cues. I also evaluated cutting-edge segmentation algorithms and combined the best performers to tackle less-attempted segmentation problems without high-compute environments. Overall, this thesis describes work that incrementally improves on efficiency and performance of organoid and cyst characterization platforms.BioengineeringCellular biologyBiomedical engineeringapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6290r2rnhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6290r2rn/qt6290r2rn.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2b19q7gt2026-06-11T05:07:07Zqt2b19q7gtTime and the Politics of Literary Comparison: Reading Korean Literature beyond the NationLee, HeeJinHanscom, Christopher P2022-01-01This dissertation re-examines select works of sinsosŏl by Yi In-jik (1862-1916) to proffer a new approach to transnational literary studies that questions the very premise of the nation itself. Yi’s oeuvre has been considered foundational to the modern Korean literary canon ever since Im Hwa (1908-1953), one of the foremost critics and anti-colonial activists in Korea under Japanese rule, first presented it as such in his influential history of Korean literature. I argue that extant approaches to literary transnationalism are intimately tied to national literary studies by showing how the logic upholding Im’s literary history—and by extension, Korean literary studies—is also found in world literature and postcolonialism. I thereby reveal how this logic—which construes the modern nation as a fully autonomous Self at the expense of objectifying its others as less developed Others—has resulted in transnational literary comparisons that remain centered on the nation. I contest this logic in world literature, postcolonialism, and national literary studies with a new mode of reading in what I call postnational time, which I derive from showing how Ŭnsegye (“Silvery World”), Ch’iaksan (Mt. Ch’iak), and the “Hyŏl ŭi nu” (“Tears of Blood”) series undermine the nation in literary form. I claim that reading in postnational time gives rise to a new politics of resistance that enables the formation of diverse communities against colonialism in toto, across national divides. I demonstrate one such possibility by comparing Yi’s sinsosŏl works to Mirages de Paris (Mirages of Paris) by Ousmane Socé Diop and Un Nègre à Paris (An African in Paris) by Bernard Dadié, francophone African novels by writers from colonial Africa. Asian literatureComparative literatureenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2b19q7gthttps://escholarship.org/content/qt2b19q7gt/qt2b19q7gt.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6db3m8md2026-06-11T05:03:07Zqt6db3m8mdDissecting and combating cancer predisposition syndromes: from animal models to novel therapeutic strategiesNa, BrianGiovannini, MarcoKornblum, Harley I2024-01-01There is an increasing recognition of the important role cancer predisposition syndromes play in the development of oncological diseases. Consequently, there's an urgent need to identify and understand these syndromes to uncover underlying disease mechanisms. Among these syndromes are Rhabdoid Tumor Predisposition Syndrome Type 1 (RTPS-1) and Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1). RTPS-1 is marked by mutations in the SMARCB1 gene, whereas NF1 is linked to mutations in the NF1 gene. Given their rarity, there's a critical need for novel therapeutic approaches and preclinical models to accelerate the translational research pipeline. Previously, our team developed genetically engineered animal models (GEMM) for both RTPS-1 and NF1. This dissertation aimed to explore the mechanisms of rhabdoid tumorigenesis by pinpointing specific biomarkers and drug targets within the RTPS-1 GEMM. Additionally, we endeavored to establish a large animal porcine model for RTPS-1 as a proof-of- concept. We then investigated Cold Atmospheric Plasma (CAP) as a novel therapeutic strategy to target NF1-associated peripheral nerve sheath tumors. Our results showcased the ability of CAP to impact cellular oxidative stress, paving the way for its potential application in treating tumors associated with cancer predisposition syndromes.Translation studiesMolecular biologyenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6db3m8mdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6db3m8md/qt6db3m8md.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9xb6w0r02026-06-10T06:36:05Zqt9xb6w0r0Evaluating Domain-Adapted Embeddings for Automotive Technical LanguageLi, RebeccaHandcock, Mark S2026-06-08Embedding models play an important role in modern semantic retrieval systems, but their performance often degrades when applied to highly specialized technical domains. In the automotive repair business, technical manuals contain complex terminology, repetitive procedures, and vehicle-specific variations that are difficult for general-purpose embedding models to represent accurately. This study investigates whether lightweight domain adaptation can improve embedding quality for automotive technical language without requiring large labeled datasets or expensive full-model fine-tuning. To address this problem, we adapt a pretrained sentence embedding model using unsupervised training on automotive repair manuals and technical service documents. The study evaluates how domain adaptation changes the embedding space, improves discrimination between highly similar repair procedures, and affects downstream retrieval performance under realistic technician search scenarios. Experimental results show that the adapted embedding model produces more domain-aware semantic representations and improves retrieval performance on real technician queries compared with the original pretrained model. Additional analyses further demonstrate that domain adaptation reshapes semantic structure within the embedding space and improves the model’s ability to distinguish operationally different technical procedures despite strong lexical similarity.StatisticsComputer scienceArtificial intelligenceAutomotive Repair ManualsDomain AdaptationParameter-Efficient Fine-TuningSemantic RetrievalSentence EmbeddingsTSDAEapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xb6w0r0https://escholarship.org/content/qt9xb6w0r0/qt9xb6w0r0.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9qm9g7v52026-06-10T06:36:00Zqt9qm9g7v5Behind the Screens: News Selectivity in Algorithmic Digital EnvironmentsNoh, SeonhyeSoroka, Stuart2026-06-08This dissertation argues that dominant narratives of digital media fragmentation— echo chambers and filter bubbles—present a picture that is considerably more complicated than commonly assumed. The discrepant findings in the selective exposure literature reflect three recurring analytical tendencies: (a) measuring expressed preferences in place of actual behavior; (b) treating news engagement as a single undifferentiated act rather than a layered sequence of distinct behavioral stages; and (c) insufficient attention to disentangling what algorithmic systems make available from what users themselves choose to engage with. The three studies in this dissertation address each of these tendencies in turn, drawing on con-trolled experiments and large-scale digital trace data to examine political news engagement. What emerges is not a refutation of selective exposure, but a more precise and nuanced account of when, how, and why it occurs—and what it means for democratic politics in the algorithmic age.CommunicationPolitical scienceFilm studiesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9qm9g7v5https://escholarship.org/content/qt9qm9g7v5/qt9qm9g7v5.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5zf854qv2026-06-10T06:35:55Zqt5zf854qvA Statistical Analysis of Wildfire Occurrences in Los Angeles CountyXia, JingfanSchoenberg, Frederic2026-06-05As global warming and urban development continue, areas with warm and dry climates have become more prone to wildfires in recent years. Not only do wildfires cause instant public health issues and financial losses, but they also result in long-term damage in the local biosphere. To predict and mitigate wildfires, it is important to apply statistical methods to perform a comprehensive analysis on the occurrences of wildfires to understand the trends and correlations.
Los Angeles County is an important and typical area to analyze, as it has a dry, warm Mediterranean climate, and is surrounded by hills and mountains. Those mountains are usually covered by deciduous trees and shrubs, which contributed to dry, fallen leaves that are prone to get ignited by winds in winter. Moreover, Los Angeles County is densely populated and has limited land for urban developments. As a result, many regions near foothills have been urbanized, including cities or communities of Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, West Hollywood, Los Feliz, La Canada Flintridge, Altadena, Sierra Madre, and Arcadia. As these parts of the county sit just south of either the Santa Monica Mountains or the San Gabriel Mountains, wildfires that occur in these mountain forests are a nonnegligible threat in winter. The Eaton Fire, for instance, caused severe loss in Altadena, Sierra Madre, and Arcadia, while the Palisades Fire had very negative socioeconomical influences on Pacific Palisades and Brentwood. Both wildfires occurred in January 2025, when precipitation was less than normal and a major Santa Ana wind event occurred, which had synergistic effects that dramatically elevated the risk of wildfires.
To further understand the occurrences of individual wildfires in Los Angeles County as well as their relationships, I use statistical approaches including Stoyan Grabarnik (SG) estimation, Moran’s I method, Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA), and Social Network Analysis to form a clear and multidimensional reflection. The Stoyan Grabarnik method is an efficient and predictive way that can help analyze the likelihood of wildfires, which is indispensable for fire prediction and prevention. Moran’s I and LISA are more focused on determination of occurrence distribution, which facilitates the identification of high-risk areas in a period. Social Network representations provide us with information about relationships among wildfires based on different parameters and are thus helpful for understanding the mechanism and interaction of wildfires.StatisticsGeographyEnvironmental scienceLocal Indicators of Spatial AssociationLos Angeles CountyPoint ProcessSocial Network AnalysisSpatial StatisticsWildfiresapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5zf854qvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5zf854qv/qt5zf854qv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9w1595jh2026-06-10T06:35:50Zqt9w1595jhOn Presence: Intersubjectivity and Legibility in Clinical Pastoral Education ProgramsGrabill, Megan CatherineThroop, C. Jason2026-06-08Hospital chaplains work as translators between spiritual and medical worlds, supporting people in multilayered ways within the constraints of a biomedical institution. Spiritual care is ambiguous and difficult to adjudicate as “effective,” a marked contrast to the technocratic focus on efficacy and metrics present in mainstream clinical medicine. This thesis focuses on the primary formal mode of chaplain training, CPE, in order to understand how chaplains situate themselves within the broader hospital ecosystem. I draw from chaplain’s characterizations of their work as the work of “presence,” using phenomenological understandings of attunement, morality, and empathy to highlight the intersubjective and experiential elements of spiritual care. I argue that chaplains contend with the “problem of presence” in two distinct ways: first, as a problem of visibility and legibility within the hospital, and second as a problem of intersubjective attunement at the bedside. This speaks to broader questions around legitimacy, ambiguity, and value in care work.Cultural anthropologySpiritualityMedical personnelchaplainsintersubjectivitylegitimationpastoral carephenomenologyspiritual careapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9w1595jhhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9w1595jh/qt9w1595jh.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9jz9r75h2026-06-10T06:35:46Zqt9jz9r75hDoped Tin Oxide as Electron Transfer Layer for Stable p-i-n Perovskite Solar CellsTSAI, CHU-YENYang, Yang2026-06-08P-i-n perovskite solar cells are important for next-generation photovoltaics because their low-temperature processability, reduced hysteresis, and compatibility with scalable, flexible, and tandem-device fabrication make them attractive device architectures. However, traditional fullerene-based electron transport layers, such as C60 and PCBM, can suffer from limited stability under illumination and thermal stress and may require additional buffer layers or interfacial modification, which can restrict device performance and long-term stability.To solve these issues, Nb5+-modified SnO2 electron transport layers were developed for p-i-n perovskite solar cells. The optimized 3 mol% Nb5+-modified SnO2 film showed improved electrical conductivity while maintaining good morphology and optical transparency. XPS analysis confirmed Nb incorporation and indicated a reduced contribution of oxygen-related defect species. KPFM and UPS results further suggested that Nb5+ modification changed the surface electronic properties and provided suitable energy-level alignment for electron extraction.Devices using the optimized Nb5+-modified SnO2 layer showed improved photovoltaic performance compared with pristine SnO2 devices. The modified devices also exhibited improved operational stability, retaining approximately 90% of their initial PCE after 24 h of open-circuit storage. Overall, this work demonstrates that Nb5+ incorporation is an effective strategy for improving in the stability of SnO2-based p-i-n perovskite solar cells.Chemical engineeringChemistryCellular biologyOrganic chemistrydevice stabilityelectron transport layerinterfacial energeticsniobium dopingp-i-n perovskite solar cellstin oxidepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9jz9r75hetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5f82h55q2026-06-10T06:35:41Zqt5f82h55qHigh-Efficiency and Broadband mm-Wave/THz Signal Generation for Communication and Sensing SystemsSun, WeiBabakhani, Aydin2026-06-05Terahertz and millimeter-wave integrated systems have strong potential in future wireless communication, high-resolution sensing, imaging, and spectroscopy because they offer large available bandwidth together with fine spatial resolution. Realizing these systems in silicon, however, remains challenging because high-frequency signal generation must simultaneously provide adequate tuning range, low phase noise, strong output power, and high efficiency in the presence of severe device and passive losses. This dissertation addresses these challenges through a sequence of circuit and architecture techniques spanning W-band to sub-THz frequencies.
The dissertation first introduces an octave-band local-oscillator generator based on an OATL, enabling continuous 47–100 GHz frequency coverage from a scalable low-power architecture. As a side project within the same chapter, a stand-alone broadband W-band voltage-controlled oscillator is presented, which validates the underlying inductive-tuning and bias-reconfiguration techniques and demonstrates that the same gm-boosted cascode Colpitts core can deliver wide tuning range and low phase noise in a single-band, single-core form factor. The dissertation next demonstrates a fully integrated 360-GHz multi-mode transmitter that combines harmonic generation with a cavity-based on-chip antenna to radiate multiple OAM modes from a common phase center. Finally, it presents a 280-GHz SSIL radar for micron-level vibration sensing and reflection-based phase imaging. Together, these works establish a unified approach to high-efficiency and broadband mm-wave/THz signal generation for future communication and sensing systems.Electrical engineeringElectromagneticsComputer engineeringAnalog CircuitsAntennaIntegrated CircuitsRadio FrequencypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f82h55qetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0cd4909p2026-06-10T06:35:36Zqt0cd4909pInvestigating Phosphorylation-Driven Crosstalk between Nuclear and Membrane ERa Signaling Using a Novel Fluorescent Estrogen Signaling ReporterMishra, Aaryavan Veen, John Edward2026-06-08Estrogens are a class of steroid hormones in the body involved in various physiological processes, including regulation of the menstrual cycle, protection against heart disease, and maintenance of neural health. The first identified estrogen receptor (ER) is ERɑ, which has two different signaling pathways: nuclear and membrane. The activation of kinase cascades by the binding of estrogens to membrane ERɑ helps facilitate phosphorylation of cytosolic ERɑ, which promotes its import into the nucleus and recruitment of co-activators. Once in the nucleus, estrogen response element (ERE) dependent transcription may occur. This key phosphorylation step is believed to confer resistance to tamoxifen, an antiestrogen therapy, in breast cancer treatment. As an antiestrogen, tamoxifen competitively binds to ERɑ, thus halting its ability to bind to EREs and induce transcription. However, membrane ERɑ is believed to remain intact, thus continuing to promote aberrant ERɑ activity in breast cancer cells. A knowledge gap exists in understanding the role membrane localization and phosphorylation of ERɑ has in the crosstalk between both nuclear and membrane ERɑ. of ERɑ’s membrane localization is unclear in relation to the phosphorylation that drives this crosstalk. Our lab’s novel fluorescent estrogen signaling reporter, Cell SeeER (“See Estrogen Response”), captures both spatial and temporal resolution of ERE-induced transcription, which addresses this critical knowledge gap by capturing fluorescent signaling of transcription under different experimental conditions. This work investigates how mutating the membrane component of ERɑ signaling affects its sensitivity to estrogens, and how different mutations at serine 118 and serine 167 affect estrogen-dependent (ethanol added to cells) and estrogen-independent (estrogen added to cells) transcription in both wild-type ERɑ and NOER (nuclear-only ERɑ, created by mutating palmitoylation site C447A). We used timelapse microscopy using an Incucyte where we imaged 293T cells (transfected with Cell SeeER and different hormone receptors), which lack endogenous steroid hormone receptors, after adding estradiol. After validating that Cell SeeER was specific to capturing interactions between estrogens and ERs, we found that NOER had diminished early sensitivity to estradiol but matched the level of ERE-transcription present in WT ERɑ after 6 hours. Following this, a phospho-mimetic mutation of serine 118 in WT ERɑ (S118D) showed increases in both estrogen-dependent and estrogen-independent ERE-induced transcription. ERɑ S167A, a phosphor-deficient mutation, showed a similar effect. Neither NOER S118D nor NOER S167D brought transcriptional activity back up to levels found in WT ERɑ, suggesting that membrane localization plays a critical role in the effects phosphorylation has on the crosstalk between nuclear and membrane ERɑ signaling.Molecular biologyEndocrinologyCellular biologyCellular biologyEstrogensHormone biologyMolecular biologypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cd4909petdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9m8243k32026-06-10T06:35:31Zqt9m8243k3Nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations with quasi-periodic initial dataPapenburg, HagenKillip, RowanVisan, Monica2026-06-08This work is concerned with nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations with quasiperiodic initial data. First, we prove unconditional local well-posedness for a wide family of dispersive equations with derivative nonlinearity and a class of analytic quasi-periodic data. In particular, the result applies to the Korteweg-de Vries equation, the derivative nonlinear Schrödinger equation, and the Benjamin-Ono equation. We also discuss local well-posedness of some dispersive models without a problematic derivative in the nonlinearity, including the standard nonlinear Schrödinger equation and the generalized Benjamin-Bona-Mahony equation. Next, we focus on the Benjamin-Ono equation and construct local solutions for a much larger space of quasi-periodic initial data. Our argument goes beyond what can be accomplished by traditional energy methods; our approach relies on an a-priori estimate, whose proof utilizes Strichartz estimates for quasi-periodic functions obtained recently via decoupling, and a quasi-periodic extension of Tao’s gauge transform. As a byproduct of our method, we also establish local well-posedness in certain anisotropic Sobolev spaces.MathematicsApplied mathematicsAnalysisdispersiveharmonic analysisPartial differential equationsquasi-periodicwell-posednesspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9m8243k3etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt621854mk2026-06-10T06:35:26Zqt621854mkImplementation of a Culturally Tailored Outpatient Case Management Program for Filipino Americans with Type 2 Diabetes MellitusFontejon, Ralph Vincent AguinaldoTolentino, Dante AnthonySong, Yeonsu2026-06-08Background: Filipino Americans experience a disproportionate burden of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), yet culturally responsive outpatient interventions remain limited. Despite established benefits of diabetes self-management education and support (DSMES), standard programs often fail to address cultural values, language needs, and family-centered practices that influence self-management behaviors in this population, contributing to persistent disparities in glycemic outcomes.
Purpose: The purpose of this scholarly project was to evaluate the effectiveness of a six-week culturally tailored outpatient diabetes case management program for Filipino American adults with T2DM in improving patient activation, medication adherence, and glycemic control in a primary care setting.
Methods: A prospective single-group pre-post quality improvement design was implemented at Serra Medical Group in Sun Valley, California. Twenty-four Filipino American adults with T2DM enrolled in a six-week hybrid (in-person and telehealth) culturally tailored DSMES and nurse practitioner-led case management program. Twelve participants completed the full intervention. Primary behavioral outcomes included patient activation measured using the 13-item Patient Activation Measure (PAM-13) and medication adherence measured using the 8-item Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS-8). Glycemic control, Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) served as the secondary clinical outcome and was extracted from the electronic health record at baseline and 8-12 weeks post DNP project completion. Pre-post differences were analyzed using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, with effect sizes and descriptive statistics reported.
Results: Of 24 enrolled participants, 12 (50%) completed the intervention and were included in the analysis. All 12 participants showed an improvement in patient activation after (Mdn = 48, Z = -2.94, p = .003) with a very large effect size (r = .85), and median activation shifted from Levels 2-3 to Level 4 post-intervention. Medication adherence also improved significantly (Mdn = 8, Z = -2.39, p = .017) with a large effect size (r = .69); all participants achieved a high medication adherence score of 8. Ten of the 12 participants (83%) demonstrated a reduction in HbA1c, achieved a clinically meaningful reduction of ≥0.5%. The Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test indicated a large effect size (Z = -1.83, p = .068; r = .53). Attrition was primarily related to logistical and social determinants rather than dissatisfaction. Participant satisfaction and program acceptability were high.
Conclusion: The culturally tailored outpatient diabetes case management intervention demonstrated statistically significant improvements in patient activation and medication adherence, along with clinically meaningful reductions in HbA1c among Filipino American adults with T2DM. Findings support the feasibility, acceptability, and clinical value of culturally responsive, nurse practitioner-led diabetes management within primary care and provide translational evidence for broader implementation.NursingNutritionHealth care managementapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/621854mkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt621854mk/qt621854mk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1sj345b82026-06-10T06:35:21Zqt1sj345b8Timbral Fluidity, Emotional Resonance: James M. Stephenson’s Liquid Melancholy with an Adaptation for Alto SaxophoneHarget, Mathew JamesBaker, Jan Berry2026-05-29This dissertation examines James Stephenson’s clarinet concerto Liquid Melancholy and my adaptation for alto saxophone soloist, focusing on its thematic engagement with melancholy and the challenges of adapting the solo part for alto saxophone. The title, Liquid Melancholy, is taken from an excerpt of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. After exploring how melancholy is portrayed in the novel, the study examines how Fahrenheit 451’s melancholy is embodied in Stephenson’s work. This present research examines the timbral and technical differences between the clarinet and the saxophone, including range, articulation, and vibrato. This study incorporates interviews with James Stephenson and clarinetist John Bruce Yeh to contextualize Liquid Melancholy as a new concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra.Musical performancesMusicMusical compositionArrangementBradburyClarinetMelancholySaxophoneapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1sj345b8https://escholarship.org/content/qt1sj345b8/qt1sj345b8.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt35k133zv2026-06-10T06:35:16Zqt35k133zvA Lively Jurisprudence: Dynamic & Dimensional International Law for a Vibrant WorldPooudomsak, VanessaPagden, Anthony R2026-06-08In this dissertation I construct an alternative theory of international law, what I call a “lively jurisprudence.” This lively jurisprudence is an answer to deep skepticism about international law’s place in today’s global environment, a result of its occasional failures to command or control global actors or help them achieve consensus or cooperation. I show that these aims are predicated on assumptions that serve as foundational premises in dominant approaches to international law, leading them to narrowly construe international law’s purpose and limit it to four primary goals: command, control, consensus, and cooperation. This has blinded scholarly studies to other important purposes of international law: creation, contestation, and the construction and development of healthy and resilient communities. This lively jurisprudence brings dimension to and breathes life into the concept of international law by changing perceptions of what it is and what it is meant to do. I confront the same problems that dominant approaches tried to solve through the force of assumptions — the inevitability of conflict, the ubiquity of uncertainty, and the reality of selfish actors. Instead of demanding that international law fix these irresolvable problems, I claim that international law’s purpose is to help global actors understand their world and their places in it in spite of them. The fundamental question is shifted from how international law can solve global actors’ problems to how international law can help global actors understand the world they live in. I reconceive international law as a lively activity of contestation in which global actors participate together in a perpetual ordering of the world as opposed to a static conception of international law as a world order. Understanding international law as a dynamic activity of ordering makes it possible to consider its creative potential on multiple levels: proliferation of laws and institutions, (re)construction of global agents’ identities and interests, formation and development of communities, and conceptual creation and evolution. I turn to existing fields of law, the laws of war and human rights law, to show that this lively jurisprudence’s conception of law makes it possible to see previously overlooked ways international law has been helping global actors understand and shape their world.Political scienceInternational lawInternational relationsLawHuman RightsInternational LawInternational RelationsJurisprudenceLaws of Armed Conflictapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/35k133zvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt35k133zv/qt35k133zv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7jj6767n2026-06-10T06:35:10Zqt7jj6767nInterface Engineering for Aqueous Zinc Ion Battery Electrodes and Machine Learning Applications to Predict Lithium PlatingCho, VanessaLi, Yuzhang2026-06-08Aqueous zinc ion batteries suffer from poor calendar aging performance and lose substantial amounts of active material during storage. Performing interface engineering by introducing seed layers on the electrode can bind the zinc to the substrate surface more effectively and reduce CE losses during calendar aging. Here, tin, titanium, and silver are tested as seed layer materials with copper foil as the substrate. At a thickness of 50 µm, the seed layers are shown to reduce the second cycle CE loss by 2%, 12%, and 7% respectively after aging for 24 hours.Machine learning models are also explored in this thesis. Specifically, models to predict anode voltage and pressure are created for the purpose of predicting lithium metal plating, which is a critical degradation mechanism that can lead to cell failure. While directly measuring these features is possible, it requires specific equipment, such as extra electrodes or physical pressure sensors that can take up extra space and resources. By creating a model, these metrics can be predicted without the use of extra equipment and can be implemented in battery management systems to prevent lithium plating. Cells start plating lithium once the anode voltage reaches 0 V against Li/Li+. Because of this, anode voltage can be used to predict lithium plating. The anode voltage model predicts the anode voltage of the cell, using a collection of 55 three-electrode cells in its dataset and a feedforward neural network for the model framework. Using this model, anode voltage prediction achieves R2 values of 0.924 and 0.891 for the training and test sets respectively. As cells cycle, the cell pressure increases and decreases with lithium intercalation, while lithium plating causes a much greater pressure spike. dP/dQ is the derivative of cell pressure with respect to the charge capacity and has been shown to be a good predictor for lithium plating. The pressure model directly predicts cell pressure, and dP/dQ is obtained by performing calculations on the predicted pressure values. Using an XGBoost model framework and a collection of 38 cells, the pressure model is able to achieve R2 values of 0.896 for both training and test sets, enabling accurate dP/dQ predictions as a result.EnergyEngineeringElectrical engineeringanode voltageaqueous zincbatterylithium platingmachine learningpressureapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7jj6767nhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7jj6767n/qt7jj6767n.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6pr0n5v42026-06-10T06:34:35Zqt6pr0n5v4“Ooo…where are you from?”: Foreign-Born Faculty’s Understandings of Racialization and Academic Practice Across ContextsBillot-Vasquez, Kiana MicheleAllen, WalterOdinga, Sobukwe2026-06-05This research seeks to understand foreign-born faculty members’ experiences, stories, and reflections regarding race across contexts and their own racialization. It also examines how these experiences may shape their teaching, mentorship, and research practices. This study draws on interviews with 12 foreign-born faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Narrative analysis is used to analyze faculty interviews. The study is guided by Borderlands Theory and Racial Formation Theory, which center themes of in-betweenness, negotiation, and practice shaped by positionality. The findings are organized around two research questions: (1) How do foreign-born faculty members discuss race and their own racialization in the U.S. and how are these understandings shaped by experiences in their country of origin? (2) How do foreign-born faculty members’ experiences and understandings of racialization across contexts inform their teaching, mentoring, and research practices within U.S. academic institutions? Findings show that some faculty describe confusion and contradiction in understanding race and/or their own racialization in the U.S. while other faculty discussed their distance from conversations about race and racialization in the U.S. As for the second research question, multiple faculty described how their experiences informed their roles as professors and academics. Overall, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of how racialization processes are transformed and renegotiated across borders. It also offers insight into how foreign-born faculty’s experiences within racial and geographical borderlands informs their pedagogy and experiences in academia.Higher educationMulticultural educationHigher education administrationEthnic studiesBorderlands TheoryForeign-born FacultyRaceTeachingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6pr0n5v4https://escholarship.org/content/qt6pr0n5v4/qt6pr0n5v4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5693c3742026-06-10T05:36:20Zqt5693c374True Time Delay Array Beamforming for Link Establishment, Data Communication, and Spectrum Sharing in Cellular NetworksWadaskar, Aditya YogendraCabric, Danijela2025-01-01The future generations of wireless cellular networks are expected to support dense user deployments with high data rates, requiring communication over large bandwidths. The spectral scarcity in the overcrowded sub-6 GHz bands has prompted the consideration of higher frequency bands, such as the millimeter wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) bands, for expanding cellular networks. While these bands offer abundant spectrum to meet the growing data-rate requirements, they are plagued by high propagation losses that make the channels spatially sparse. The small wavelengths facilitate the deployment of large antenna arrays, which offer spatial degrees of freedom for directional beamforming to overcome the propagation losses. The large antenna arrays and spatial sparsity of mmWave channels inspire approaching the key physical layer procedures, such as link establishment, multiple access, and interference management for spectrum sharing, from the perspective of beamforming design. Link establishment in sparse mmWave channels would involve estimating the best steering direction or angle of arrival (AoA) of the dominant channel path between the base station and the user. Low-latency and high-accuracy link establishment is key to achieving the desired throughput and requires the ability to probe multiple codebook beams at once. In the data communication mode, cellular base stations need to serve multiple users simultaneously. The surplus bandwidth at mmWave and THz bands can facilitate new multiple access modes where users are multiplexed across non-overlapping sub-bands. With an appropriate beamformer that exhibits sub-band specific spatial responses, multiple users can be served simultaneously using a single data stream.In recent years, new spectrum sharing opportunities have been identified in the upper-mid band spectrum form 7--24 GHz, owing to more favorable propagation and coverage characteristics than mmWave bands. However, existing incumbents in these bands, such as satellites and radio astronomy, pose a challenge for expanding wideband cellular operations. Seamless coexistence with incumbents requires the cellular base stations to deploy cost-effective beamforming techniques that adequately protect the incumbents via null-steering, without hurting the cellular communication.Realizing frequency-dependent beamforming solutions for the above use cases requires antenna array codebooks that offer adequate degrees of freedom. However, maintaining large digital arrays with a dedicated radio frequency (RF) chain per antenna becomes costly and impractical at mmWave frequencies. On the other hand, conventional analog phased antenna arrays (PAA), though energy efficient, are unsuitable for frequency-dependent beamforming. This necessitates the deployment of novel, energy-efficient array architectures and beamforming techniques that can support frequency-dependent beamforming for the aforementioned applications with as few RF chains as possible. True Time Delay (TTD) arrays present a low-complexity method of generating frequency-dependent beams using a single RF chain. Additionally, hybrid TTD arrays with a few RF chains can offer enhanced beamforming capabilities for performance-sensitive applications at a small hardware cost, representing the trade-off between performance and energy efficiency. This work presents the design of energy-efficient beamforming solutions using analog and hybrid TTD arrays for fast link establishment, multi-user data communication via sub-band multiplexing, and spectrum sharing for cellular networks at upper-mid band and mmWave frequencies. The proposed methods include analytical closed-form solutions that exploit array processing principles, as well as optimization-based methods for analog and hybrid TTD arrays. The proposed solutions offer low-cost beamforming alternatives to fully digital and PAA-based arrays without compromising on the desired performance metrics.Electrical engineeringbeam trainingbeamformingMillimeter waverainbow beamsspectrum sharingtrue time delay arrayenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5693c374https://escholarship.org/content/qt5693c374/qt5693c374.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt14c683792026-06-10T05:01:29Zqt14c68379Broadband Smart Window Materials Based on Thermal Responsive Phase-Changing PolymersFan, JiachengPei, Qibing2024-01-01Smart windows with tunable optical transmittance to electrical-, thermal-, mechanical stimuli offer promising solutions for energy saving application in the field of novel building, vehicles, agriculture, etc. Among which, the thermal responsive smart window arouses great interest due to its passive response, without introducing external energy. Numerous studies have been conducted, yet several critical challenges remain unresolved, including undesired transition temperature, slow transition in temperature span, low transparency at clear state, and limited optical modulation capability.The phase changing polymer shows extraordinary thermal responsive optical switching capability base on melting and crystallization. By introducing another distinguishable phase into the established phase changing polymer network to create refractive index matching and mismatching, the optical modulation is achieved at different temperature stage.I developed a series of thermal responsive smart window materials based on side chain crystallizable phase changing polymer, to accomplish smart windows with tunable transition temperature ranging from 32 °C to 45 °C, ultra-high low-temperature visible transmittance above 91%, and excellent optical modulation capability higher than 80%.Chapter 1 outlined the background of the imperative for smart window of modulating solar radiation, for energy conservation purposes.In Chapter 2, I introduced a thermal responsive phase changing polymer (TPCC), which was synthesized from hydrophilic and hydrophobic monomer blends. The phase transition of the semicrystalline polymer led to a refractive index drop, effectuating light scattering and facilitating optical modulation across the solar spectrum. The transition temperature for this smart window was designed to be 32 °C.In Chapter 3, I presented a semicrystalline polymer with exceptional transparency between 20 °C to 60 °C. By employing such polymer as the functional thermal responsive material, a high transmitted state of the smart window was achieved, with transmittance varying from 91.4% at 20 °C to 2.7% at 50 °C. The transition temperature for this smart window design was around 42 °C.In Chapter 4, based on the previous transparent semicrystalline polymer, I enhanced the smart window performance by introducing glass beads to realize a controllable light scattering. A high contrast in optical transmittance between 96.8% and 3.2% was achieved, signifying its capability of optical tuning.These materials demonstrated the viability of using such semicrystalline polymers for smart window applications to address a high capability of optical modulation >80% with a more desirable transition temperature between 32 °C and 45 °C. A total low-temperature transparency and wavelength selected modulation could be further achieved by material selection and refractive index tuning cooperate with the established materials.Materials Scienceenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/14c68379https://escholarship.org/content/qt14c68379/qt14c68379.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6hx7q0fc2026-06-09T06:35:00Zqt6hx7q0fcThe Politics of Trade Protection: Evidence, Coalitions, and Rhetoric in International TradeLam, Shing HonPeters, Margaret E2026-06-05This dissertation examines how trade protection is justified and contested across three levels of contemporary politics: international institutions, domestic interest-group coalitions, and the mass public. Each chapter studies a different currency of justification––scientific evidence, organized coalitions, and political rhetoric––and asks how protectionist measures are sustained or disciplined once that justification is scrutinized. The first chapter asks how the World Trade Organization constrains regulatory protectionism despite the erosion of its adjudicatory enforcement. Analyzing 50,599 Technical Barriers to Trade and Sanitary and Phytosanitary notifications (2010–2024), I show that the WTO operates as an epistemic regime in which governments signal regulatory legitimacy through the volume of justificatory evidence they disclose. Regulatory credibility follows a non-linear pattern: both minimal and excessive evidence invite peer scrutiny and revision, while intermediate disclosure attracts the least. Peer comments, not litigation, drive modification. The second chapter turns to the domestic politics that produce trade-restrictive regulation. Linking 1,788 U.S. regulations notified to the WTO to 1.25 million public comments, I use large-language-model classification to map actor coalitions across rulemaking rounds and estimate their effects on three outcome margins: whether a rule is finalized, how its stringency moves, and how extensively the agency engages comments. Opposition from locally concentrated producers is the most robust veto force; the modal supportive coalition pairs advocacy groups with industry associations; and mass-mobilization campaigns systematically depress finalization. The third chapter examines reactions at the mass level. Across two survey experiments on tariff retaliation, I find that voters reward the rhetoric of toughness but punish the material costs of tariffs once those costs become salient: conservative-styled rhetoric raises support primarily among anti-trade and Republican respondents, yet escalating to costly tariffs mobilizes only a narrow base while alienating moderates, and trade preferences prove elastic, shifting with co-partisan leadership rather than fixed material interest. Together, the chapters trace one argument: contemporary trade protection succeeds or fails not through enforcement or material interest alone, but through the contested evidentiary, coalitional, and rhetorical justifications that surround it.International relationsLawPolitical scienceEconomicsNon-tariff barriersRegulatory politicsTrade protectionWorld Trade OrganizationpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hx7q0fcetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1qr6n9812026-06-09T06:34:55Zqt1qr6n981Characterizing molecular targets in cell division, cell cycle, and cell state transitionsRich, Kayla JoanTorres, Jorge2026-06-05Cell state transitions are useful concepts to approach investigating cellular processes and their dysregulation in disease. With this approach cellular processes can be further investigated based on their differences across molecular expression markers, epigenetic patterns, and phenotypic features. This opens the opportunity to identify novel targets important in the transitions and shifts between states to address progression and initiation of disease. The first process that is investigated the mechanism of microtubule severing by katanin in mitosis within non-neuronal cell types. The role of the individual katanin subunits on microtubule severing within human cell cycle function has yet to be fully elucidated. This study developed tools that investigate individual katanin subunits protein level perturbation on mitotic spindle morphology. This included cell lines that perturb protein level by knockdown or overexpression with A549 and RPE-1. Constitutively expressed all-in-one single guide RNA katanin subunit CRISPR-Cas9 RPE-1 cell lines were generated and assessed katanin protein level perturbation, which resulted in perturbed mitotic spindle shape and size. An additional approach to investigating cell state transitions, is within disease context. Retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) undergoes a process known as the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) which occurs in age-related macular degeneration (AMD). There is an increased need to identify and develop novel therapeutics to target the onset and progression of AMD by inhibiting RPE EMT. This research addresses the need by identifying novel target proteins and pathways for the onset and progression of AMD by inhibiting RPE EMT. This was achieved by developing a high-content cell painting imaging assay of the epithelial and mesenchymal cell states coupled with small molecule chemical modulator screens. Targets were identified by AI image analysis to extract features and reconfirmed by secondary dose-response screens. Targets were further classified by phenotypes that perturb EMT. This work has identified potential target proteins and pathways critical for inhibiting EMT in RPE for the treatment of AMD. Overall, this research details the design, implementation, and identification of a high-content cell-based imaging approach that identifies target molecular pathways and proteins of interest of RPE dysfunction during EMT, which impacts the development of AMD therapeutics.BiochemistryCellular biologyMolecular biologyage-related macular degenerationcell paintingcell stateEMThigh-throughputRPE-1publiceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1qr6n981etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt70k1764q2026-06-09T06:34:50Zqt70k1764qTrans on Transit: The mobility and public transit experiences of transgender and nonbinary peopleGuy, Tam J.Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia2026-06-05Successful public transit requires understanding the full breadth of rider experiences to inform policies and procedures. Prior research shows that gender affects security and mobility, yet binary gender metrics erase whether and to what extent people with marginalized gender identities experience transit differently. This national mixed methods study addressed the US public transit experiences of transgender and nonbinary adults.I designed the survey and semi-structured interview instruments to answer the following questions. What are the public transit experiences of transgender and gender nonconforming people? How do these experiences influence/affect their use of public transit, as well as their mobility and travel more broadly? In what ways are these experiences influenced by other individual characteristics (e.g. age, race, appearance)? Which gender conformity aspects influence harassment on public transit? How do these experiences inform our understanding of social hierarchy enforcement in the public spaces of transit? And, what policies/strategies can help improve the transit experiences of transgender people?Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data from 353 online surveys and interviews of 22 survey participants, this study showed that gender identity, particularly at the intersection of race and gender, results in different experiences for riders—notably a likely increased risk of harassment for trans and/or nonbinary riders, more so for trans and nonbinary riders of color. The surveys and interviews both demonstrated that infrastructure failures and social hostility limit mobility. The interviews revealed how trans and nonbinary riders conceptualize social norms of who deserves what treatment. The data was not clear on which gender conformity aspects influence harassment.Interventions to improve the transit experiences of transgender and nonbinary people include better transit service, attention to physical infrastructure, shifting social norms towards respect for all people, and research centering the knowledge of trans and nonbinary riders. Though these interventions would benefit all transit riders, improving the experiences of transgender and nonbinary people holds its own value.Urban planningTransportationGender studiesSocial psychologyGenderMobilityPublic spacePublic transportationTransgenderTransitapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/70k1764qhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt70k1764q/qt70k1764q.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9x7333gx2026-06-09T05:35:26Zqt9x7333gxDeep Learning Methodology and Theoretical Analysis for Change Points, Spatiotemporal and Contaminated DataGENG, JIALIANGMichailidis, George GM2025-01-01Many modern statistical problems are inherently nonparametric, including a variety of problems in change point detection, graph models, and robust statistics. Previously, the literature is abundant and well studied in parametric and even linear cases in these problems. And for nonlinear cases, many problems remain open and unresolved. In my dissertation, I would like to bridge this gap by leveraging deep learning techniques to solve these nonparametric statistical problems. Moreover, with the rapid development of deep learning techniques and machine learning theory, we can now conduct asymptotic analysis in a variety of different neural network spaces. And this allows us to thoroughly analyze the convergence rate of the algorithm using these networks. My first project proposes an offline methodology in change point detection capable of both regression-type problems and multivariate time-evolving data, and provides rigorous theoretical analysis with guarantees for detecting change points and bounding the distance between true and estimated points, covering both independent and dependent sub-Gaussian data sets.My second project focuses on the graph model and proposes a novel methodology for modeling the time-evolving data, having the capability to predict both existing points with previous data known and new points with previous data unknown. The proposed model also included an asymptotic analysis of the model convergence rate. Two datasets are used to demonstrate the model performance.My third project proposes a novel two-step neural network-based model structure combining nuclear norm penalization and output truncation, which is robust to various data contamination mechanisms. The asymptotic analysis on the convergence rate of proposed algorithms is given as well, and the numerical experiments in both synthetic and real datasets are included to demonstrate the model capabilitiesIn my dissertation, I also include an additional project that I collaborate on with Scientists at the Mayo Clinic. We propose a novel redundancy removal methodology that works on the indexing, archiving, and searching of high-resolution medical images and saves storage and search costs significantly.StatisticsData ContaminationDeep learningGraph Neural NetworkMachine LearningMedical ImagingNonparametric Statisticsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9x7333gxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9x7333gx/qt9x7333gx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5n1563r82026-06-09T05:35:26Zqt5n1563r8A Modified Expectation-Maximization Algorithm for Accelerating Item Response Theory Model Estimation with Large DatasetsFeng, TianyingWu, Yingnian2025-01-01The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is widely used for parameter estimation in item response theory (IRT) modeling. Despite its utility, when applied to datasets with large numbers of individuals and items, the standard EM algorithm can be slow to converge, with computationally expensive E-steps. This study proposes a modified EM algorithm with a two-stage structure that capitalizes on data subsets to accelerate estimation for unidimensional two-parameter logistic (2PL) IRT models. Two simulation studies evaluated the reduction in convergence time, bias and root mean squared error (RMSE) of parameter recovery, and bias and RMSE of standard error (SE) estimation under the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm was also compared to standard EM across varying subset sizes and item set lengths. Results showed that (a) parameter recovery differed between types of IRT parameters and between moderate and extreme parameter values; (b) recovery improved with larger subset sizes; (c) reduction in time was more pronounced with a larger item set; and (d) a small upward bias and RMSE in SE estimates were observed compared to standard EM, though both metrics remained modest in all conditions. Overall, the proposed algorithm improved computational efficiency while maintaining comparable estimation accuracy and precision under larger item sets and moderate-to-large subset sizes. The study concludes with future applications in large-scale operational contexts with large volumes of examinees and moderate to large item pools, and potential extensions to multidimensional IRT settings.StatisticsEducational tests & measurementsEM AlgorithmEstimationItem Response Theoryenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5n1563r8https://escholarship.org/content/qt5n1563r8/qt5n1563r8.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5920q6gm2026-06-09T05:02:24Zqt5920q6gmCorrective Gendered Spaces: Testimonios from Young Women of Color in Group HomesChavez, JoanaCarpio, Genevieve2025-01-01Corrective Gendered Spaces examines the institutional gendered violence experienced by young women of color in the juvenile legal system, with a particular focus on group homes in Southern California’s Inland Empire and Los Angeles. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this study draws on testimonios—shared lived experiences from 20 young women placed in group homes, foster care, and juvenile detention—and archival records that trace the historical development of correctional institutions. I argue that while group homes claim to replicate familial environments, they in fact reproduce carceral logics and structures that fail to support young women’s mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being. I conceptualize the framework of corrective gendered spaces: institutions that operate as alternatives to incarceration but function to discipline and regulate gendered behavior under the guise of care. These sites replicate punitive practices through geographic isolation, behavioral surveillance, and coercive “rehabilitation,” targeting the gender expression and autonomy of young women of color. Through an interdisciplinary feminist and abolitionist framework, this research theorizes group homes and other gendered carceral spaces as part of a prison continuum, where gendered incarceration is central to shaping how the state manages and punishes girlhood.This dissertation is guided by several key questions: How do group homes function as carceral spaces? What are the lived experiences of young women within these systems? What roles do surveillance, isolation, and resistance play in their experiences? And how do young women navigate and challenge the gendered expectations imposed on them by institutional care? Structured across four chapters—including a review of literature, theoretical framing, methodology, case studies, and analysis—this work centers the voices and resistance strategies of young women who have experienced these systems firsthand. In its conclusion, the dissertation reflects on the transformative wisdom these young women offer. It advocates for a shift from punitive responses to violence and trauma toward healing-centered, intersectional approaches rooted in collective care and love. Ultimately, Corrective Gendered Spaces contributes to broader conversations around institutional reform, abolitionist visions of justice, and the politics of care for criminalized girls and women.Ethnic studiesGender studiesHistoryabolitioncarceralitycorrective gendered spacesgendergroup homesjuvenile legal systemenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5920q6gmhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt5920q6gm/qt5920q6gm.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7zr7p2b62026-06-08T06:35:35Zqt7zr7p2b6Probing the Interior Structure of Europa and Ganymede with Magnetic Induction: From Molecular-Scale Ocean Conductivity to Spacecraft ObservationsPsarakis, Catherine AnneKavner, Abby2026-06-04The Jovian moons Europa and Ganymede host subsurface oceans beneath their water-ice shells, and are therefore prime targets in the search for habitability beyond Earth. These oceans were discovered by meticulous analysis of the magnetometer data returned from the Galileo spacecraft. The interpretation of the magnetometer observations require a near-surface electrically conductive layer to react to Jupiter’s time varying magnetic field and produce the moons' induced secondary magnetic field. The recently launched European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUICE and NASA’s Europa Clipper missions will reach the Jovian system in the early 2030s with upgraded magnetometers. The aim of this dissertation is to prepare for the arrival of this finer-scale geophysical data, so it is ready to be interpreted in terms of the properties of the moons' interior, especially their ice-ocean hydrospheres. Here we present a series of studies addressing the properties of the moons’ interiors, in preparation for the magnetometer data return.Chapter 1 presents a molecular dynamics-based determination of the electrical conductivity of aqueous-salt solutions as a function of pressure, temperature, and NaCl concentrations that are relevant to the Jovian moons. Chapter 2 outlines a 1D planetary geophysical model, the “Icy Moons Interior Explorer”, that can predict the moons' induction response to Jupiter's magnetic field. This model use observed mass and moment of inertia to constrain possible density versus depth profiles. Thermal models are also included, which permit the creation of a radial electrical conductivity profile-- anchored in the oceans with our data from chapter 1, as well as with literature values of electrical conductivity of mantle and core materials. The generated families of conductivity models are then fed into a multi-shell magnetic induction model. This gives us a full pipeline in which we can trace how individual interior properties manifest in the induced field signal a spacecraft would measure. The goal is to determine which properties are magnetically distinguishable with current data, and whether future missions can resolve degeneracies in which multiple interior structures produce the same induced field.Using this framework, I derive lower bounds on ocean conductivity at both Ganymede and Europa from recent re-analyses of Galileo and Juno data and demonstrate that indeed a global conductive ocean near the surface is the only plausible interior model consistent with the observed amplitudes. I then show under what conditions the deep interior becomes visible, and what is needed to better constrain layer thicknesses. Finally, a global sensitivity analysis tests how variations in each modeled parameter propagates to changes in an observed induced field. With this tool, we show that the field is generally insensitive to properties of the mantle and core, but can be especially sensitive to hydrosphere variations for oceans with low conductivity. This analysis was also used to examine variations in thermal models, showing a lack of sensitivity to variations in thermal boundary layers, including stratified ocean models. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate both the utility and the limitations of magnetic induction in probing the properties of icy moon interiors, thus preparing for accurate interpretation of future spacecraft data.GeochemistryGeophysicsPlanetologyAerospace engineeringEuropaGanymedeMagnetic InductionPlanetary Interiorsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zr7p2b6https://escholarship.org/content/qt7zr7p2b6/qt7zr7p2b6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7x2930hj2026-06-08T06:35:31Zqt7x2930hjBlueprints: 11918Webster-Zuber, Kaitlin RoseKrouse, Ian2026-06-02Blueprints: 11918 is a collection of miniatures inspired by family and home – a sincere labor of love. As my parents designed and built our home, I had the opportunity to experience this ambitious undertaking firsthand! The title originates from the architectural concept of a blueprint: a technical drawing, illustrating DNA of a designed space. Having an architect as a father means space is always a relevant conversation. It's about how we occupy space – those who live, breathe, and create in the space – and continually questioning what turns a house into home.
Each movement offers glimpses into the unique personalities within my home, and each person’s motif was composed by applying his/her name to an “alphabet-to-musical-pitch” cypher I created. Further, there are seven letters in KAITLIN, and seven total possible combinations of the ensemble of this work: two violins and two pianos, solo violin, violin and piano, etc. This piece uses all combinations of this ensemble and, excluding the Prelude, the tonal center of each successive movement is based on the letters in KAITLIN. For example, using the pitch cypher: starting with movement 2, "K" = D, oscillating between variations of D (i.e. D Major and d minor); for movement 3, "A" = A and this movement flirts with a minor; so on and so forth. In the culminating movement, Blueprints: 11918, everyone’s themes are interwoven in conversation with one another.Musical compositionMusicMusic educationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7x2930hjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7x2930hj/qt7x2930hj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4cf662mg2026-06-08T06:35:25Zqt4cf662mgAn underappreciated role of stratospheric ozone depletion in recent Southwestern North America dryingWang, ZelinDong, Yue2026-06-03Southwestern North America (SWNA) has experienced pronounced drying since 1980s, yet the causes remain elusive. Using large-ensemble single-forcing simulations from the Community Earth System Model (CESM), we revisit the forced response of precipitation trends and their anthropogenic drivers. While previous studies have suggested a substantial contribution from anthropogenic aerosol forcing, we here demonstrate that stratospheric ozone depletion, part of the “Everything Else” (EE) forcing group, has also played an important role in driving the long-term drying trend. Although ozone depletion has occurred primarily over Antarctica, it exerts remote impacts on SWNA precipitation by driving a La Niña-like tropical sea-surface temperature (SST) trend pattern through teleconnections. This finding is robust across an EE ensemble and stratospheric ozone-only ensembles in two global climate models. Our results suggest that stratospheric ozone depletion represents an underappreciated anthropogenic driver of recent SWNA drying, with important implications for future hydroclimate projections as ozone is projected to recover in the coming decades.Climate changeGeophysicsAtmospheric sciencesMeteorologypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4cf662mgetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3fs372gg2026-06-08T06:35:20Zqt3fs372ggMechanism-Based Alternating-Pressure Support Surfaces for Pressure Ulcer PreventionLanger Weida, James EdwardHopkins, Jonathan B2026-06-04Pressure injuries remain a major clinical, financial, and caregiving burden, particularly for patients with limited mobility, impaired sensation, advanced age, or extended exposure to bedrest. Although repositioning protocols and some pressure-redistributing support surfaces are widely used, pressure injuries remain prevalent, suggesting that current prevention strategies are insufficient for many high-risk populations. Alternating-pressure support surfaces are compelling because they address the time-dependent nature of tissue damage by periodically unloading different body regions without requiring dense pressure sensing or closed-loop control. However, existing pneumatic alternating-pressure systems have shown mixed clinical results and are often limited by slow actuation, noise, vibration, leakage, and dependence on pumps and air-cell architectures. This dissertation investigates mechanism-based alternating-pressure support surfaces as an alternative approach for pressure-ulcer prevention. Rather than using inflatable air cells, the developed prototypes impose alternating pressure profiles through mechanical motion of structured support surfaces. The research began with prior actuator-bed studies that identified pressure-pattern parameters capable of reducing persistent tissue loading. These findings informed a series of full-scale prototype mattresses designed to cyclically shift support between two complementary states while minimizing areas exposed to continuous pressure above the commonly cited 32 mmHg occlusion threshold.Five prototype concepts were developed and evaluated through iterative mechanical design, fabrication, and pressure-mapping experiments. Early prototypes demonstrated the feasibility of producing alternating-pressure patterns using compliant and linkage-based mechanisms, but also revealed limitations related to durability, safety, stability, and incomplete elimination of persistently loaded regions. Subsequent designs transitioned toward more robust mechanism architectures, including shuttle- and roller-based systems compatible with bedframe articulation and human testing. Prototype performance was evaluated against commercial alternating-pressure products using pressure-sensing mats.The results show that mechanism-based support surfaces can create clinically relevant alternating-pressure patterns without relying on conventional pneumatic architectures. This work also provides mechanical insight into the underperformance of current products by showing how pressure profiles, switching behavior, and support geometries can fail to fully interrupt sustained loading in high-risk tissue regions.Mechanical engineeringBiomedical engineeringBiomechanicsalternatingBedsoremattressocclusionpressurePressure UlcerpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3fs372ggetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8sc4388b2026-06-08T06:35:15Zqt8sc4388bComputational Imaging Inspired by Photonics Time-StretchGunawan, WesleyJalali, Bahram BJ2026-06-04The evolution of computing has transitioned from specialized analog mechanisms to general-purpose digital systems, culminating in the current dominance of data-driven deep learning. While effective, these models often suffer from prohibitive computational costs, lack of interpretability, and heavy reliance on massive training datasets. This dissertation presents a paradigm shift toward physics-inspired computing, where established physical laws serve as structural priors for algorithmic design. Rooted in the principles of Photonic Time Stretch (PTS), this research develops PhyCV (Physics-inspired Computer Vision), a library of algorithms that translate optical phenomena into digital image processing tasks. The core contribution of this work is the development and optimization of VEViD (Vision Enhancement via Virtual Diffraction and Coherent Detection), a physics-inspired algorithm for low-light enhancement. VEViD reimagines digital images as spatially varying light fields subject to virtual diffraction and coherent detection, offering a high-performance alternative to empirical methods. To enable practical deployment, the thesis details the mathematical simplification of VEViD into a single-parameter model and its subsequent optimization via Look-Up Table (LUT) implementation. This approach eliminates computationally expensive trigonometric operations, achieving real-time processing speeds on resource-constrained edge devices. Benchmarks demonstrate 1080p video processing at 45 FPS on Raspberry Pi 4 and 4K video at 67 FPS on iPhone 14 Pro Max, significantly outperforming standard neural network approaches in latency and energy efficiency. Furthermore, this research quantifies the energy efficiency of computational enhancement versus physical illumination. It establishes that while physical lighting power requirements scale quadratically with distance, the computational cost of VEViD remains constant for a fixed pixel count, positioning it as a superior solution for energy-constrained environments. To enhance accessibility and usability, the dissertation proposes an integration framework using Large Language Models (LLMs) via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling natural language control over vision pipelines. By combining theoretical rigor with practical optimization, this work demonstrates that physics-inspired algorithms can deliver robust, interpretable, and efficient solutions for modern computer vision challenges.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringComputer scienceArtificial intelligenceEdge computingEnergy efficiencyInterpretable AILow-light enhancementPhysics-inspired computer visionapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sc4388bhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8sc4388b/qt8sc4388b.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7cm1d4n22026-06-08T06:35:09Zqt7cm1d4n2Frequency-Programmable Liquid Acoustic Sensing Networks for Self-Powered Underwater SurveillanceZhang, JingyuanChen, JunYang, Lin2026-06-04Underwater acoustic environments span a wide and dynamic frequency spectrum, posing a fundamental challenge for conventional acoustic sensors with fixed and limited bandwidths. Here, we introduce spectrally programmable permanent fluidic magnets to develop a self-powered, frequency-programmable liquid acoustic sensory network that achieves broadband underwater sound sensing through physically encoded spectral programmability. Each liquid acoustic sensor is designed with a tunable frequency response, enabling selective sensitivity to a targeted acoustic band while operating without an external power supply. By integrating sensors with distinct programmed frequency responses to a non-symmetric network configuration, the network collectively covers a wide frequency range of up to 10 kHz with a minimum current response of 3.5 μA, overcoming the intrinsic bandwidth limitations of individual sensing elements and spatial array ambiguities. Combined with a multi-task convolutional neural network, the system achieves 98.5% accuracy in identifying five distinct underwater sound sources and a mean squared error below 2% in estimating source direction and distance. This self-powered, frequency-programmable sensing architecture provides a scalable and energy-efficient solution for underwater surveillance in complex marine environments.Electrical engineeringElectromagneticsAcousticspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7cm1d4n2etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3829x9122026-06-08T06:35:04Zqt3829x912“Unity, Struggle, Victory!” The PAIGC, Amílcar Cabral, and the Organization of a Pan-African Revolution, 1945-1974Fonseca, DesmondKelley, Robin DG2026-06-04This dissertation reframes the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) as a pan-African revolutionary party in the Leninist tradition whose praxis was centered around unity on two dialectically connected fronts. The first was based on the core of its political program, Guinean-Caboverdean unity, which bound two distinct but related nations in a single struggle against Portuguese colonialism and NATO imperialism. The second was its organizational unity predicated on the Leninist conception of the vanguard party operationalized through a shifting balance of centralized and democratic leadership towards the fulfillment of a revolutionary program. The PAIGC expressed these principles through four constantly reiterated concepts: revolutionary democracy, democratic centralism, collective leadership, and criticism and self-criticism. I argue that these two forms of unity were not merely parallel but mutually constituting: programmatic unity required and reproduced organizational unity, and each referred back to the party’s revolutionary purpose. The party’s motto, “unity and struggle,” names this relationship: they saw unity as the means to struggle, and the struggle as a means towards unity. Cabo Verde was pivotal on both fronts. The liminal position of Cabo Verde and Caboverdeans within the Portuguese colonial order shaped the program of Guinean-Caboverdean unity and gave the party’s leadership its distinctive formation, making Marxism, Leninism, and pan-Africanism especially resonant. Yet the same Caboverdean centrality that anchored the PAIGC’s cohesion was also the fault line exploited by colonial and reactionary nationalist psychological warfare, culminating in the 1973 assassination of Amílcar Cabral which ruptured the very unity the party had been built to sustain. The majority of the scholarly literature on the PAIGC mimics — often implicitly — the position of the Portuguese and opposing nationalists, missing what made the party a uniquely successful organization on the African continent. Drawing on multilingual archival research supplemented by oral histories with surviving militants, the dissertation traces this dual unity from the PAIGC’s clandestine origins through the armed struggle, the plans to extend the revolution to Cabo Verde, and the decolonization of both territories. It concludes that the party’s organizational and programmatic unity secured its historically distinct unilateral victory over a colonial power, and that Cabo Verde was central to both that triumph and the party’s deepest tensions.HistoryAfrican studiesBlack historyAmilcar Cabralanti-imperialismdecolonizationLeninismpan-AfricanismrevolutionspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3829x912etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3kb070ct2026-06-08T06:34:59Zqt3kb070ctExploring Previously left-behind Central American Immigrant and Refugee Students’ Perceptions of Parent-Child Relationships and Academic Experiences during the Separation and Upon Reunification in CaliforniaMagana Montoya, Karen BeatrizOmwami, Edith S2026-06-04Migration-related family separation has become a common yet understudied feature of transnational family life among Central American immigrant families. Although previous scholarship has documented the emotional consequences of family separation and reunification, less attention has examined how these experiences continue shaping youths’ educational experiences after reunification in the United States, particularly from youths’ own perspectives. This qualitative phenomenological study explores how previously left-behind Central American immigrant and refugee youth understand and make meaning of migration-related family separation, parent-child relationships, reunification, and academic experiences in Los Angeles County, California. Guided primarily by Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit), racist nativism, and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this study conceptualizes family separation as an ongoing structural condition rather than a singular event. Data were collected through pláticas with ten previously left-behind Central American immigrant and refugee youth between the ages of 12 and 19 who experienced prolonged separation from one or both parents before reunification in the United States. Findings revealed that migration-related family separation continued shaping participants’ emotional well-being, parent-child relationships, and educational experiences long after reunification occurred. Participants described unresolved grief, loneliness, emotional distance, and tension within family relationships while simultaneously recognizing migration as a sacrifice motivated by love and economic necessity. Findings also demonstrated that educational experiences were shaped by broader structural conditions, including immigration systems, language barriers, economic precarity, and institutional support. This study contributes to scholarship on migration and immigrant education by centering youths’ voices and highlighting the need for educational systems responsive to immigrant youths’ lived realities.Multicultural educationEducational sociologyIndividual & family studiesCentral American Immigrant YouthEducational ExperiencesFamily ReunificationFamily SeparationImmigration and EducationParent-Child RelationshipspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kb070ctetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9ms6q2gf2026-06-08T06:34:54Zqt9ms6q2gfThe Making and Unmaking of The Tale of GenjiLi, YueyingEmmerich, Michael2026-06-04This dissertation rereads The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century Japanese classic, as a metafictional monogatari. I use monogatari not only as a generic term for the work, but also as a process through which persons and events become narratable within the court society depicted in Genji. This dissertation argues that Genji is fundamentally concerned with the processes of narrativization and the social dynamics through which stories are produced, transmitted, and contested.The dissertation follows this politics of storytelling from the making of the tale to the limits of its own narrative forms. The first two chapters examine Genji as a world structured by the circulation of information in varied media. Chapter 1 takes gossip as its focal point that reveals and sustains the communicative networks of the court. It also examines attempts to manipulate or contain these networks, showing how such efforts are repeatedly undone by the very circulation they seek to control. Chapter 2 extends this framework beyond speech to material and sensory media, including handwriting, gifts, scent, music, dreams, and spirits, through which characters shape or resist the narratives forming around them. Chapter 3 defines authorship in the context of the tale as the shifting relation between characters and the words or texts attributed to them, through which characters navigate their narrative agency and participate in the formation of the tale, even as their words become vulnerable to appropriation and reinterpretation. Chapter 4 follows the failure of Genji’s ambition to master the tale as a tale of his own. In the Uji chapters, this failure moves toward a more radical limit, as Ukifune’s withdrawal gestures toward what the narrative order of this tale may no longer be able to absorb.The dissertation concludes by considering the ending of the tale as the point at which the forms that have long sustained monogatari reveal their own limits. By reading Genji as a meta-monogatari, this dissertation shows that its psychological depth, courtly realism, and poetic refinement are inseparable from its inquiry into the power and limits of storytelling.Japanese literatureLiteratureEast Asian studiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ms6q2gfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5nz5r4xh2026-06-08T06:34:49Zqt5nz5r4xhReading History, Reading Race: Historical Narrative, Racial Epistemology, and the Multiplicity of Interpretation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. TextsDriben, BrettLópez, Marissa K2026-06-04Reading History, Reading Race argues that, for nineteenth-century U.S. readers, the technologies of historical narrative and of race co-constitute each other: making sense of historical narrative is to simultaneously make sense of race and vice versa. In the dissertation’s first half, I argue that, for these readers, the coherency of U.S. historical narrative is the coherency of race (Chapter 1 on Walker’s Appeal), so that to dissolve the coherency of historical narrative is to dissolve the coherency of race (Chapter 2 on Life Among the Piutes). In the dissertation’s second half, I argue that the varying verisimilitude of historical narrative, which I call genre, is likewise inseparable from race. I explore how nineteenth-century readers’ divergent, racial convictions about whether or not a historical narrative is naturalistic are sometimes distributed across many readers (Chapter 3 on The Conjure Woman) and other times contained in conflicted, individual readers (Chapter 4 on “The Yellow Wall-paper”).These claims all take off from the historical reality that, even though nineteenth-century U.S. readers read relatively identical printed texts, they crafted multiple, radically different interpretations of those texts. Engaging this history of reading requires, I argue, conceptualizing textual meaning not as pre-set, but as coming into being through a performance, namely the duration of time during which people read, listen to, or otherwise engage a printed text. Studying historical acts of reading benefits from engaging not only the texts real readers read, but also evidence of their readings preserved in newspapers, magazines, and other printed materials. In this dissertation, I craft and mobilize an epistemological framework to engage both kinds of evidence.As a whole, this dissertation argues that nineteenth-century U.S. readers understood interpretative authority as an open question rather than a singular, perhaps shifting, answer, and, furthermore, that these readers’ understandings of and engagement with the diverse field of possible readings were critical to their interpretations and their attempts to cultivate interpretative authority. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on readers’ struggles for interpretative authority and dominance, while Chapters 3 and 4 focus on how readers’ conflicting interpretations necessarily made meaning in context of one another.American literatureAmerican historyPerforming artsEpistemologyGenderHistorical NarrativeHistory of ReadingNineteenth-Century LiteraturePerformanceRacepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5nz5r4xhetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8h86d36w2026-06-07T05:03:14Zqt8h86d36wMagnetic Field Based Quasistatic Indoor Position Sensing and Navigation: Enhancing Precision Tracking and Location Accuracy for First Responders in Emergency SituationsWilson, Tristan AlexanderWang, Yuanxun E2024-01-01First responders navigating compromised environments, such as burning buildings, often face obstructed fields of view, making navigation challenging. Alleviating these difficulties is crucial for providing essential aid to individuals at risk. Quasistatic electromagnetics serve as an effective tool for real-time position sensing and tracking within non-line-of-sight, steel-reinforced structures. The quasistatic regime is characterized by electromagnetic waves that vary slowly over time, allowing for deep penetration into structures with minimal signal loss. We propose a multiaxial system architecture that couples magnetoquasistatic and electroquasistatic waves radiating from collocated loop antennas and piezoelectric field emitters. Our research into the radiation characteristics of these devices revealed that piezoelectric emitters cannot produce fields strong enough for effective coverage in single-story buildings. Consequently, we adjusted to a magnetoquasistatic sensor fusion system which predicts positioning with meter-level accuracy. The efficacy and accuracy of our system operating within a single-story structure were verified and presented in a live demonstration.Electromagneticsenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8h86d36whttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8h86d36w/qt8h86d36w.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3902m0tv2026-06-07T05:01:51Zqt3902m0tvTowards the Physical Origin of Flexible-to-Rigid Transition in GexSe1-x GlassZhao, ZhangjiTaciroglu, Ertugrul ET2024-01-01Based on their connectivity, network glasses can be classified as flexible, stressed–rigid, or isostatic, if the number of topological constraints is lower, larger, or equal to the number of atomic degrees of freedom, respectively. Thanks to the absence of any stoichiometric requirement, the rigidity of glasses can be continuously tuned (e.g., from flexible to stressed–rigid) by changing their chemical composition. Interestingly, optimally-constrained isostatic glasses have been noted to exhibit unusual properties (e.g., nearly-reversible glass transition, low relaxation, desirable mechanical properties, etc.). Especially, the non-aging intermediate state features an almost vanished endotherm between the first and second heat scan across glass transition, providing a pathway for phase change material optimization in the application of non-volatile rewriteable media. However, the physical origin of the unusual behaviors and properties of isostatic glasses remain unclear.This thesis begins with investigating how the flexible-to-rigid transition in network glasses is encoded in their energy landscape based on molecular dynamics simulations. To this end, we introduce a simplified, yet realistic model of network glasses with varying connectivity. We characterize the topography of these glasses by adopting the activation-relaxation technique (ART), which enables a systematic search of saddle points and transition pathways in the energy landscape surface. We then demonstrate that the flexible-to-rigid transition arises from an interplay between low-energy saddle points (in flexible glasses) and topological frustration (in stressed–rigid glasses). Also, by utilizing the ring structure, we expand the transition correlation with ring size distribution. Meanwhile, we highlight the local heterogeneity with all the energy landscape features by dicing the model into small cubes. Comparing within a single glass helps exclude the effect of different configurations, further consolidating our conclusion on the physical origin of rigidity transition.
Finally, to explore the role of chemistry effect in rigidity transition, we compare the behavior of the simple connectivity model with a realistic GexSe1-x model. With the similar shape of enthalpic differences, the realistic model could reveal the effect of glass-forming ability with experimental results where the simple model fails. Overall, we have a clear pathway towards understanding the physical origin of rigidity transition of GexSe1-x glass.
EngineeringGlassMD simulationRigidity transitionenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3902m0tvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3902m0tv/qt3902m0tv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt96x024x12026-06-06T05:32:46Zqt96x024x1Interactive Tuning on Batch Content Generation TasksYang, ChunxuChen, Xiang2024-01-01Batch Content Generation (BCoG) tasks necessitate the simultaneous generation of a substantial volume of similarly formatted content, such as batches of scientific articles, storybooks, or font sets. Currently, this process is typically accomplished through user-initiated multi-session interactions with generative models. This approach requires users to re-prompt the generative AI multiple times and manually apply changes to each item, thereby increasing the cognitive load associated with fine-tuning across multiple targets. To address these limitations, we propose StubCog, a novel solution mechanism for BCoG tasks, which leverages pipeline management and a task scheduler. An evaluation study conducted with 18 users possessing varying levels of domain expertise demonstrated that (i) in comparison to multi-session operations with dialog-based chatbots, StubCog reduces the time required for batch content generation and fine-tuning by 50%; (ii) StubCog significantly reduces the cognitive load associated with the fine-tuning process. Our findings suggest that StubCog isa promising solution for BCoG tasks that require the generation of large volumes of content.Computer engineeringComputer scienceElectrical engineeringenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/96x024x1https://escholarship.org/content/qt96x024x1/qt96x024x1.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt62s662jw2026-06-06T05:02:37Zqt62s662jwTailoring and Characterizing Pore Size Distribution of Phase Inverted Porous Polymeric Membranes: What, Why, and How?Xiao, MinhaoHoek, Eric2024-01-01In this thesis, the methodology of tailoring and characterizing pore size distribution (PSD) of phase-inverted porous polymeric membranes is conducted with theoretical model simulations and experimental verification. The investigative journey begins with the revealing of the significance of pore size and pore size distribution for membrane performance with the CFD and other classical model analysis and culminates in the systematic fabrication matrix for membrane pore manipulation, which is strongly supported by precise characterizations and distinguished by the illustration of classical hydrodynamic models.Chapter 2 initiates the effects of PSD mean, shape, and scale on water permeance and solute rejection of membranes by using classical analytical models and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which elaborates on the importance of precisely manipulating membrane pore size and pore size distribution from a theoretical perspective, emphasizing the need to avoid excessively large or small pores.
Chapter 3 systematically examines the influence of polymeric membrane sample preparation techniques on their morphologies and structures as revealed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to develop a sample characterization method that not only serves as a guide for accurate SEM characterization of polymeric membranes but also as a stepping stone towards standardizing protocols.
Chapter 4 involves the fabrication of porous membranes and integrates the surface porosity characterization via SEM and the data derived from contact angle measurements (with dry-wet adjustment ratio applied in wet conditions), establishing a novel method for quantifying the surface porosity of porous membranes through contact angle measurements.
Chapter 5 investigates the water permeability and solute rejection of microfiltration (MF) and ultrafiltration (UF) membranes in pressure-driven filtration by integrating the surface porosity, mean pore size, pore size distribution, and skin layer thickness of dry membrane samples into three classic hydrodynamic pore-flow models (Hagen-Poiseuille (HP), Kozeny-Carman (KC), and Happel’s cell (HC)). The dry-wet ratio, developed in Chapter 4, is conducted to correct and simulate the fully-wetted condition.
The culmination of these insights is found in Chapter 6, which presents a series of experimental methods for manipulating membrane pore size and pore size distribution. Here, the superiority of nano-bubble water as a pore former is highlighted, characterized by enhanced water permeance without trading off solute rejection, indicating an innovative approach for fabricating polymeric porous membranes.
In summary, this thesis offers accurate and standardized methods for membrane characterizations from a novel and comprehensive perspective. Additionally, it elucidates the significance and provides techniques for precisely tailoring membrane pore size and pore size distribution through simulation models and experimental validation, paving the way for the advancement of mesoporous membrane design for a wide range of academic and industrial applications.
Environmental engineeringenapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/62s662jwhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt62s662jw/qt62s662jw.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5bd0h3n52026-06-05T06:35:29Zqt5bd0h3n5Mechanical Metamaterials for Unique Deformations, Shape Morphing and Energy AbsorptionAgarwal, ShivamJin, Lihua2026-06-03Mechanical metamaterials are designed for engineered properties unavailable in regular materials. Moreover, metamaterials based on soft materials exhibit high stretchability, reusability, and ease of fabrication. We develop several metamaterial architectures and material modifications to achieve unique mechanical responses, diverse deformation modes, enhanced energy absorption, and superior shape-morphing capabilities. To investigate unique in-plane deformations, we create topological metamaterials for a multi-directional, two-step deformation response. Additionally, we create template-driven woven 3D meta-shells for compression-induced twisting and friction-enabled multistability. We also develop 3D-printed woven shells to realize disruptive geometries, such as wavy, asymmetric, combined, and closed designs. Moving from passive to active structures, we create shape-morphing polygonal frames with targeted actuation at internal angle sites, and discuss strategies for complex arrangements, such as tessellations, nesting, stacking, and 3D configurations. We then create techniques to enhance energy absorption by utilizing instability and viscoelastic dissipation. First, we investigate the effect of strain-softening and strain-stiffening in the buckling and post-buckling of columns, where we explain snap-through in slender columns via a continuum approach. Second, we exploit the viscoelastic properties of thermoplastic polyurethane to increase the energy absorption capacity of truss-based, bending- and stretching-dominant lattices. Overall, our work advances metamaterial development for potential applications in the aerospace, packaging, sports, personal protective equipment, furniture, marine, and automotive industries.Mechanical engineeringEnergyMaterials scienceArchitected LatticesBucklingEnergy absorptionMetamaterialsShape morphingWoven structurespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bd0h3n5etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1vk4130r2026-06-05T06:35:24Zqt1vk4130rHybrid Spatiotemporal Modeling of Electric Vehicle Diffusion in the United States Using Sequential Gaussian SimulationXia, NingzeWu, Yingnian2026-06-03This thesis proposes a hybrid spatiotemporal modeling framework to address the limitations of traditional machine learning methods in capturing localized "neighbor effects" during the process of Electric Vehicle (EV) diffusion. Although the rate of EV adoption in the United States has accelerated significantly, passing 10% in 2023, growth remains highly heterogeneous across states. Utilizing a national dataset spanning all 50 U.S. states from 2018 to 2023, this study comparatively evaluates the predictive performance of the XGBoost model against a hybrid model incorporating Sequential Gaussian Simulation (SGS) techniques. The standalone XGBoost model achieved an R2 value of 0.70 on the 2023 test set and identified infrastructure density, socioeconomic fundamentals, policy and political environments, and environmental psychological characteristics as the primary drivers of EV adoption. Furthermore, a Global Moran’s I analysis revealed that, beginning in 2021, spatial autocorrelation within the model residuals became statistically significant, indicating that there exist non-random regional factors resulting in the adoption variance that typical covariates cannot capture. To address this issue, the study introduces an SGS-based correction layer designed to model the spatial structures within the residuals that were not explicitly captured by the standalone XGBoost model. The resulting hybrid ML-SGS model significantly enhanced predictive accuracy, boosting the R^2 score to 0.80. Beyond predictive metrics, this study produces a spatial mean surface alongside a probabilistic mapping of adoption uncertainty, identifying stable leading markets and unstable adoption frontiers. As the 2026 Middle East conflict and subsequent fuel price volatility expose the systemic risks of gasoline dependency, this thesis provides the guidance of infrastructure planning and confirms electric vehicles as a strategic necessity for national energy resilience.StatisticsEnergyElectrical engineeringapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1vk4130rhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1vk4130r/qt1vk4130r.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4c61q3cx2026-06-05T06:35:19Zqt4c61q3cxFood Security and Blood Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury Among U.S. Children and Adolescents 1-19: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2017 to 2023Campa, Isabellavon Ehrenstein, Ondine S.2026-06-03Exposure to toxic metals during childhood can adversely affect neurodevelopment and long-term health. Food insecurity may serve as an indicator of broader structural and environmental inequities that influence patterns of metal exposure. This study examined associations between household food security and blood concentrations of lead (Pb), cadmium(Cd), total mercury (THg), and methyl mercury (MeHg) among U.S. children and adolescents ages 1 to 19 using National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2017 to 2023 data. Survey weighted regression models estimated adjusted associations, and dietary factors were explored as potential co-factors or exposure pathways. Blood lead concentrations were modestly higher among children from households with lower food security, although
associations were not statistically significant. Cadmium concentrations were similar across food security categories. In contrast, THg and MeHg concentrations were 10-15% lower among children experiencing lower food security. Differences in fish consumption partially explained this pattern. These findings may suggest different environmental and dietary pathways linking food insecurity to metal exposures.Public healthEnvironmental healthHealth sciencesNutritionAdolescent HealthChild HealthFood SecurityNHANESToxic Metalsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4c61q3cxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4c61q3cx/qt4c61q3cx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt74k2b86h2026-06-05T06:35:13Zqt74k2b86hToward aTrustworthy MetaverseCai, KunlinTian, Yuan2026-06-03The Metaverse is widely understood as a persistent, shared, immersive virtual space that integrates physical and digital realities. As the Internet evolves toward this paradigm, the convergence of spatial computing and machine learning is reshaping human-computer interaction. The resulting ecosystem rests on two complementary capabilities: a spatial interaction layer that captures continuous, embodied user kinematics, and a cognitive intelligence layer that synthesizes this data through predictive and generative models. Together they enable immersive experiences but also introduce system-level risks. Without careful design, the Metaverse may evolve into a pervasive sensing and inference infrastructure with expanded attack surfaces, opaque data practices, and entrenched centralization across both the spatial and cognitive layers.
This dissertation reexamines the security and privacy foundations of Metaverse applications around this dual-pillar architecture. Rather than relying on reactive, point-wise defenses, it advocates for a proactive approach that prioritizes trustworthiness at the architectural level.
For the spatial interaction layer, we bridge vulnerability discovery with structural reform. We empirically uncover a novel class of side-channel threats showing that seemingly benign VR kinematics expose sensitive user intentions. To understand why such vulnerabilities persist, we conduct an in-depth interview study with 23 professional XR developers and surface ecosystem-level root causes. Finally, instead of treating decentralization as a binary switch between keeping the central server and removing it entirely, we redistribute each role the central operator plays—identity, shared state, behavior auditing—to system participants one role at a time. We ground this design in a 22-participant interview study of user-stated needs, and a 20-participant within-subjects double-blind comparison against a centralized baseline returns no evidence of a perceptual gap on the constructs participants themselves consider load-bearing for a usable collaborative experience.
For the cognitive intelligence layer, we establish rigorous privacy boundaries using model-centric attacks. We show that predictive spatial-temporal models leak precise user trajectories, and that fine-tuned zero-shot Text-to-Speech models expose biometric voice features at both speaker-level identity and record-level verbatim granularities, with attack performance grounded in an information-theoretic characterization of the optimal query.
Together, these contributions move the Metaverse toward an architecture that is secure, accountable, and user-sovereign by design.Computer engineeringArtificial intelligenceElectrical engineeringMetaversePrivacySecurityUser studyXRapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/74k2b86hhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt74k2b86h/qt74k2b86h.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8176j13r2026-06-05T06:35:08Zqt8176j13rAmour de soi – the Stanchion of Sixties Soul Sovereigns Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, and Tina TurnerKilman, SandraFink, Robert W2026-06-01“Amour de soi – the Stanchion of Sixties Soul Sovereigns Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, and Tina Turner” argues that the career accomplishments of these musical artists exemplified Rousseau’s concept, amour de soi as they took a leap of faith and led the soul music genre. The mid-twentieth century music business was fraught with pitfalls, risks, as well as powerful, unscrupulous, and even some very dangerous participants. Attributes of courage, discipline, and faith were indispensable qualities for those artists who struggled to survive the exigencies of an industry with historical affiliations with sex work and organized crime. Female artists faced sexism, misogyny, and the danger of sexual assault in this field dominated by men. African American artists encountered additional obstacles presented by racist music moguls. This project examines the history of the music industry and the racism present in locations relevant to the lives and careers of Cooke, Franklin, and Turner. In relating their stories, this study argues that, in addition to the above referenced positive attributes, they exhibited an unquenchable amour de soi that powered their extraordinary achievements in the popular music genre, appropriately called, soul.Music historyAfrican American studiesMusicAretha FranklinMusic - African AmericanPopular musicSam CookeSoul musicTina Turnerapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8176j13rhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8176j13r/qt8176j13r.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3qq1117g2026-06-05T06:33:30Zqt3qq1117gThe Oversedation Zero Tool: A Quality Improvement Project Evaluating Nurses’ Sedation Knowledge, Attitudes, and Documentation in Mechanically Ventilated ICU PatientsOrosco, CinthiaPavlish, Carol2026-06-01Background: Oversedation in mechanically ventilated patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is associated with adverse outcomes, including delirium, prolonged mechanical ventilation, and longer length of stay. Despite guidelines recommending light, goal-directed sedation, typically defined as a Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS) target of −2 to 0, sedation practices and documentation remain variable at the bedside. Objectives: To evaluate the impact of the Oversedation Zero tool, a structured, consensus-based bundle, on nurses’ sedation knowledge, attitudes, and documentation practices in a mixed medical-surgical ICU. Methods: A pre–post quality improvement (QI) project was conducted over an eight-week period in a mixed medical-surgical ICU. The intervention included brief huddle-based education, visual reinforcement tools, and ongoing support from the project lead. Outcomes were measured using a sedation knowledge questionnaire, the Nurse Sedation Practices Scale (NSPS), and chart audits assessing documentation of adherence to the Oversedation Zero tool elements, including documentation of RASS goals and scoring. Results: A total of 29 nurses completed the pre-intervention survey, and 11 completed the post-intervention survey. Mean knowledge scores increased from 4.24 (SD = 0.64) to 4.64 (SD = 0.50) (p = .05). No statistically significant differences were observed across NSPS subscales, indicating minimal change in nurses’ attitudes, perceived norms, and behavioral influences related to sedation practices (p > .05). Chart audit findings were associated with improvements in several clinical practice measures, including increased documentation of the Critical Care Pain Observation Tool (CPOT) (81% to 100%, p = .02), improved pain control (CPOT <3) (35% to 67%, p = .01), and a reduction in inappropriate sedation escalation before pain management (35% to 8%, p = .02). Documentation of sedation goals and maintenance within target RASS ranges remained consistently high across both time points. Conclusion: Implementation of the Oversedation Zero tool appeared to be associated with improvements in selected clinical practice behaviors, particularly analgesia-first sedation practices and pain assessment. Changes in knowledge and self-reported perceptions were minimal, likely reflecting high baseline knowledge among participating nurses. Interpretation of the findings should be cautious, given the small post-intervention survey sample size and concurrent organizational QI efforts during implementation. Brief, workflow-integrated interventions may support bedside clinical decision-making and reinforcement of evidence-based sedation practices in ICU settings.NursingHealth educationHealth care managementMechanical ventilationNursing educationOversedationQuality improvementSedationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3qq1117ghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3qq1117g/qt3qq1117g.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8ks0f30z2026-06-05T06:33:24Zqt8ks0f30zThe Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Colonial Settlement, Splintered Sovereignty, and the Making of an Injurious AllianceWeinger, Joseph Rafael KaplanLuft, Aliza R.2026-06-01This dissertation develops a sociological account of colonial settlement by examining the historical formation and contemporary operation of the Israeli settler–state compact in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It asks how political projects that instrumentalize violence are carried out when the actors who advance them occupy disparate social and institutional locations, and how variable coordination shapes outcomes. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Occupied West Bank among Israeli settlers, soldiers, state and military officials, and Palestinians living in the rural frontiers of Areas B and C, alongside semi-structured interviews and extensive archival research, the study reconstructs the processes through which territorial expansion and coercive governance are produced through interaction. The dissertation advances a theory of colonial embeddedness to capture the historically produced entanglement of state institutions and settler networks in the joint exercise of rule. Rather than treating settler–state alignment as given, it shows how this relationship is assembled through contingent yet patterned processes, including path-dependent institutional repertoires, learning through diffusion and adaptation, institutional transformation, and the empowerment of extra-state actors. These processes redistribute coercive capacity across formal and informal actors, producing what the study terms splintered sovereignty: a governing arrangement in which domination is delegated and unevenly coordinated. Empirically, the dissertation traces the evolution of Zionist settlement from its late-Ottoman and Mandate-era foundations through the territorial reconfigurations of 1948 and 1967 and into the contemporary West Bank. It argues that war functions as a critical juncture that reorganizes the conditions under which colonization proceeds, opening space for actors to reconfigure territorial rule and set durable trajectories of expansion. Colonial violence emerges through relational mechanisms: settler actors deploy territorial and vigilante violence and, together with state actors, give rise to deprivation, predation, constraints on social reproduction, and manipulations of futurity. Their articulation is mediated through mechanisms such as social appropriation, entryism, bureaucratic forbearance, and role collapse, which blur the boundary between state and non-state authority. Palestinian contention, in turn, reshapes these dynamics by delaying, disrupting, exposing, and possibly entrenching practices of domination. By foregrounding process over teleology, the dissertation shows that dispossession and displacement arise from shifting configurations of embedded rule. In so doing, it contributes to sociological debates on state formation, the organization of political violence, and the nature of colonial rule.SociologyHistoryAsian historypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ks0f30zetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt53m527p52026-06-05T06:33:18Zqt53m527p5Hopi Wicker Basketry: A look at the state of tangible and intangible preservationMoore, RachelWharton, Glenn2026-06-01Hopi wicker basketry is a living tradition integral to Hopi ways of life despite ongoing threats of environmental and social changes. This thesis explores the state of tangible and intangible preservation of wicker basketry through a condition survey of selected baskets from the Heard Museum, Museum of Northern Arizona, and Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, and semi-structured interviews with four Hopi weavers from Hotevilla village. This method of inquiry centers Indigenous perspectives as a part of developing collaborative conservation practice in future research. The survey provides insight into material condition issues with particular attention to structural damage, color fading, and pests/pesticide use. Interviews covered topics of intangible and tangible preservation. Taken together, the survey and interviews underscore the resilience of Hopi wicker basketry while pointing to difficulties in the preservation of the craft in the face of environmental, social, and cultural changes. This research considers changes in approaches to basketry conservation, works to illustrate a model to establish community collaboration as part of conservation inquiry, and contributes to a broader understanding of preservation needs for Hopi wicker basketry.ArchaeologyCultural resources managementNative studiesBasketryConservationHopiIndigenouspubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/53m527p5etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt5wk302372026-06-05T06:33:13Zqt5wk30237A Longitudinal Analysis of Expressive Language Trajectories in Autistic Individuals and the Influence of Receptive LanguageByrne, KatherineLord, Catherine2026-06-01There is considerable heterogeneity in the expressive language development of autistic individuals across the lifespan. Some children score in the average (or even above average) range on language or vocabulary tests but exhibit more nuanced or subtle semantic and pragmatic language difficulties. At the other end of the continuum, a significant subset of the autistic population – estimated at around 30% – do not acquire functional expressive language, even after intensive interventions. Another approximately 40% of autistic individuals fall somewhere in between these endpoints. The heterogeneity in rate of language development and linguistic outcomes is not well understood. Furthermore, variable methods of expressive language measurement have complicated comparisons across autistic samples. The current study characterized trajectories of expressive language from ages 2 to 25 years and analyzed the influence of receptive language (as opposed to aspects of nonverbal cognition, such as nonverbal problem solving or fine motor skills, which have been widely studied) on these trajectories. Group based trajectory modeling revealed five distinct expressive language trajectory classes best characterized as: Stable No Words, Stable Single Words, Phrase Speech Never Complex, Early Catch-Up, and Stable High-Language. Multinomial logistic regression using the Stable High Language group as the reference group revealed that higher receptive language raw scores were associated with a significantly lower likelihood of belonging to all four alternative expressive language trajectories, even after controlling for age and symptom severity. Language growth slowed after age 5 years and plateaued around age 9 years. Results confirmed the immense heterogeneity in expressive language of autistic individuals across time. Furthermore, results point to the use of receptive language as a potentially important intervention target within language interventions. Finally, the use of a valid, well-established observational measure commonly used in autism research, the ADOS, to characterize the complexity of expressive language use in a semi-structured and naturalistic way allowed for better comparison of fine-grained language abilities across samples, thereby fostering increased consistency within autism research.PsychologyLanguageDisability studiesautismlanguagelongitudinaltrajectoriesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/5wk30237https://escholarship.org/content/qt5wk30237/qt5wk30237.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0d96g4pb2026-06-05T06:33:08Zqt0d96g4pbVoltage-Controlled Magnetization Dynamics: From Memory Switching to Neuromorphic FunctionalitySHU, QINGYUANWang, Kang L.2026-06-01Magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) is a candidate for next-generation non-volatile memory due to its high speed, endurance, and compatibility with Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Among different MRAM writing approaches, voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) enables low-energy operation by modulating the magnetic energy landscape of perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions (pMTJs). However, VCMA-based switching faces reliability challenges, particularly elevated write error rates (WER) in the sub-nanosecond regime.
This dissertation investigates the dynamical behavior of VCMA-driven magnetization switching and explores approaches to improve device performance and functionality. First, a macrospin framework is introduced to understand VCMA and spin-orbit torque (SOT) dynamics under in-plane magnetic field. Based on the understanding, SOT-assisted VCMA switching is experimentally demonstrated. The results show that a moderate SOT bias can reduce WER by modifying the switching dynamics, leading to improved switching reliability and energy–delay characteristics.
We further report the observation of a VCMA dynamics in a bottom-pinned VCMA MTJ where the magnetization switching probability is independent from the applied pulse width, in contrast to conventional precessional dynamics. This dynamics originates from a finite barrier under sub-critical VCMA voltage that traps the switched magnetization. The results provide a potential pathway to deterministic VCMA write mechanism, which could be useful to solve the operation window challenge of VC-MRAM.
Finally, the dynamical properties of VC-MTJs are utilized to implement a nanoscale spintronic neuron without in-plane magnetic field. The proposed neuron device exhibits leaky integration and dendritic filtering within a single device. The device operates on nanosecond timescales with low energy consumption per spike. When evaluated in a spiking neural network for gesture recognition, the system achieves high inference accuracy.Electrical engineeringComputer engineeringComputer sciencepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0d96g4pbetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1ns8r6fv2026-06-05T06:33:03Zqt1ns8r6fvIn Pretrained Models We Trust: Effectiveness of XLNet and DistilBERT on Predicting User RatingsHalabi, AyahHandcock, Mark S2026-06-01This study evaluates the effectiveness of pretrained transformer-based language models, DistilBERT and XLNet, for predicting categorical Yelp review ratings from text. Using datasets derived from the Yelp Open Dataset, the study examines model performance under varying class imbalance conditions and experimental configurations, including raw baseline, class weighting, and binary classification. The results show that pretrained language models significantly outperform the Random Forest baseline across all tasks. XLNet consistently achieves higher performance than DistilBERT, particularly in multi-class classification. However, both models exhibit reduced effectiveness in imbalanced multi-class settings, especially for intermediate classes. Performance improves substantially when the task is simplified to binary classification, while class weighting provides limited benefit. Additionally, the models demonstrate stable performance across state-level datasets, indicating strong geographic generalization.StatisticsComputer scienceData ScienceMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingPretrained ModelsReviewsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1ns8r6fvhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1ns8r6fv/qt1ns8r6fv.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9bz0m4nm2026-06-05T06:32:58Zqt9bz0m4nmWhat We Talk About When We Do: On Knowledge Found in ConversationSindhu, Sahiba KaurJulius, Alexander J2026-06-01What do I know when I know someone and how do I know it? This dissertation is an answer to this question. Whereas I do not need to talk to someone in order to know about them, knowing someone essentially involves talking to them. If having a conversation with someone is how I get to know them, then my knowledge of someone is not the knowledge I have about them but rather is my knowledge of what I can do with them. Following G.E.M. Anscombe, we know that practical knowledge is the knowledge I have of what I am doing. In this dissertation, I show how my practical knowledge of the conversation I am having with someone is my knowledge of that person insofar as this is how I am getting to know them.PhilosophyEthicsHistoryPolitical scienceconversationethicshistorypoliticsrelationshipsunderstandingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bz0m4nmhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9bz0m4nm/qt9bz0m4nm.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9vb6g1d22026-06-05T06:32:53Zqt9vb6g1d2Genetic contributions to risk of coccidioidomycosis disseminationJensen, Samantha LeeArboleda, Valerie A2026-06-01Coccidioidomycosis, also known as valley fever, is a fungal pathogen endemic to the Americas that kills thousands annually, yet the host factors that lead to increased risk of life-threatening dissemination of coccidioidomycosis, remain poorly understood. We assembled the largest, comprehensively sequenced coccidioidomycosis cohort to date, comprising 795 individuals with laboratory confirmed coccidioidomycosis and clinical disease severity phenotyping, many with paired whole blood genomic and transcriptomic data. Individuals with greater than 50% African genetic ancestry are significantly enriched in disseminated coccidioidomycosis (DCM) cases (OR=13.37, p=1.08×10⁻¹⁸), reflecting ancestry-associated differences in allele frequencies at immune loci. Transcriptomic profiling (n=267) revealed upregulation of interferon inducible genes IFI44 and IFI44L, the fungal recognition receptor CLEC4D, and pro-inflammatory protein S100A12, with sex specific expression differences in immune cell composition. Among a set of immune response genes, we assessed rare coding variants and identified a rare coding variant in IFI27, p.Ser63Leu, carried only by DCM individuals. Gene-burden testing identified NOD-like receptor NLRX1 as carrying significantly more damaging rare variants than expected by chance, including a missense variant carried by five patients with disseminated coccidioidomycosis and not seen in uncomplicated cases, implicating a role of LC3 associated phagocytosis as a mechanism driving dissemination risk. Together, these findings reveal both ancestry-linked immune dysregulation and rare-variant architectures underlying severe coccidioidomycosis, and identify new targets for risk stratification and treatment.GeneticsBioinformaticsMedicineMolecular biologyImmunologyCoccidioidomycosisGenetic ancestryGeneticsGWASInfectious diseaseRare diseaseapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vb6g1d2https://escholarship.org/content/qt9vb6g1d2/qt9vb6g1d2.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8t59q83r2026-06-04T06:46:16Zqt8t59q83rThe Preparedness of K-12 Charter School PrincipalsSmith, Virginia FrineFranke, Megan2026-06-01This qualitative study examined the preparedness of K-12 public charter school principal leaders in Georgia and how they understood their role in ensuring schools’ academic, fiscal, and operational success while navigating challenges that can contribute to school closure. Grounded in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and systems theory, the study explored how principals’ lived experiences shaped their ability to fulfill required responsibilities and the supports available to sustain their work. The study examined leaders’ educational backgrounds, experiences in charter and traditional public schools, student populations, facilities, and whether schools operated as standalone or network charter schools. It further investigated principals’ preparedness across key operational domains, including financial management, human resources, curriculum, community engagement, special education, staff support, enrollment, and teacher professional development. Drawing on survey data from 20 participants and interview data from 10 participants, the study found that leaders in standalone and network charter schools were similar in education, experience, and reported preparedness. Across both groups, principals described playing an essential role in school success, yet they faced substantial challenges related to facilities, funding, enrollment, and limited resources. Although preparedness varied across domains and among leaders with different backgrounds, the findings showed that charter school leadership requires a broad set of capacities that extend beyond traditional principal preparation. Overall, the study concludes that charter principal leaders are central to school success but need stronger systems of support to navigate the fiscal, operational, and structural demands of their roles effectively.Educational leadershipEducational administrationEducationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8t59q83rhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt8t59q83r/qt8t59q83r.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3943b6r62026-06-04T06:46:11Zqt3943b6r6Majorization-Minimization Algorithms and Their Applications in Neuroimaging, Clustering and Graph EmbeddingZhou, GaitingLange, KennethTward, Daniel2026-06-01This dissertation develops majorization–minimization (MM) algorithms for structured optimization models arising in image registration and sequential image reconstruction, clustering, graph embedding, and matrix equations with applications in computational biology and biomedical data analysis. Neuroimage registration and histological reconstruction are essential for building three-dimensional brain volumes, aligning time-series images, and mapping biological data into common coordinate systems. However, these tasks are complicated by high dimensionality, nonconvexity, image artifacts, and the need for accurate and robust optimization. To address pairwise neuroimage registration, we propose a gradient-independent rigid-motion algorithm that avoids step-length selection and improves performance over gradient descent on simulated and mouse brain microscopy images. To address sequential neuroimage alignment and reconstruction, we extend the MM framework to estimate 3D reconstructed volumes together diffeomorphic transformation parameters, using a robust loss function that downweights corrupted observations and accommodates heterogeneous microscopy data. We test our algorithms on mouse brain microscopy data and simulated phantoms under various imaging artifacts, and compare the results with other established methods. Beyond imaging, many biological data-analysis problems also require scalable solvers for structured matrix equations, especially in graph-based models where spatial, regional, or network relationships are encoded algebraically. We therefore derive MM algorithms for Sylvester equations AX + XB = C and transposed Sylvester equations AX + XTB = C, focusing on the common setting where A is large and sparse and B is small and dense. These solvers avoid large Hessian computations, line searches, and repeated large-matrix inversions, and are applied to spatial transcriptomics clustering in the mouse brain and joint graph embedding of brain regional networks. Together, these contributions show that carefully designed MM surrogates can convert difficult high-dimensional optimization problems into simpler, stable, and computationally efficient subproblems, providing reusable tools for analyzing biomedical imaging, spatial transcriptomics, and graph-structured biological data.Medical imagingApplied mathematicsBiomedical engineeringNeurosciencesGraph embeddingImage RegistrationMM AlgorithmNeuroimagingSpatial TranscriptomicsSylvester Equationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3943b6r6https://escholarship.org/content/qt3943b6r6/qt3943b6r6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt17v4k2p22026-06-04T06:46:06Zqt17v4k2p2When Homes Overheat: Examining the Role of Housing in Heat-Health Inequities in a Warming Los AngelesCaballero-Gomez, HasibeCushing, Lara2026-06-01In the United States, climate change projections estimate increases in average temperatures, amidst existing thermal inequities, presenting increasingly uneven risks to public health and a critical need for interventions. In this context, this dissertation aims to explore heat risk, heat-health outcomes, and ethno-racial disparities in Los Angeles County, and assess housing as a potential point of intervention to reduce health disparities. In Chapter 2, I present findings from a longitudinal cohort study measuring bedroom air temperature, humidity, and sleep health over three weeks, supplemented with outdoor temperature and humidity measurements from a nearby weather station. To assess the role of housing, I conducted a visual inspection and documented modifiable household characteristics common to climate change adaptation programs. I found evidence that rising summertime temperatures reduced sleep health in a disproportionately heat-burdened community, suggesting that climate change will worsen existing sleep health disparities if left unaddressed. I also identified double-paned windows and operable bedroom air conditioners as housing features that improved indoor-outdoor temperature differences and sleep efficiency, respectively.In Chapter 3, I link 2015 - 2019 Los Angeles County administrative birth records to 2022 tax parcel data to estimate disparities in heat exposure via the following heat-risk related factors: individual-level housing thermal performance, occupation in high-heat-risk professions, tract-level urban-heat-island (UHI) intensity, and zip-code-level extreme ambient temperature exposures. Further, I conduct a survival analysis to evaluate whether ambient extreme heat exposure has a synergistic effect with housing, occupation, or neighborhood built environments on preterm birth. As a result, I found housing, occupation, and land cover compound heat-risk exposures among ethno-racially marginalized and socio-economically disadvantaged birth parents in Los Angeles, contributing to preterm birth. In Chapter 4, I use my linked birth-tax parcel records and develop a novel heat metric capturing the frequency of extreme temperatures above historical thresholds by gestational period to assess its association with fetal growth, and how housing thermal performance modifies this association. I found repeated exposure to extreme heat during pregnancy was associated with a higher likelihood of term, low birthweight, and small for gestational age infants, particularly in later trimesters and among parents in thermally inefficient housing. In sum, I argue that indoor thermal environments are a critical driver of heat risk and health inequities. I urge future research to further evaluate the role of housing in heat-health outcomes and inequities. My dissertation findings highlight the need for investigating chronic heat exposures among heat-vulnerable populations and multi-sited, dynamic heat exposure measurements for a more holistic understanding of heat risk and sites of intervention. Finally, I suggest routes for improving housing thermal performance by restructuring funding priorities within existing weatherization programs, adapting prenatal care visits to include visual housing assessments, and broadly greater investment in communities and households already facing thermal inequities as a way towards reducing unsafe indoor temperatures and heat-health disparities.Environmental healthEpidemiologyPublic healthClimate changebirth outcomesclimate changeextreme heathousingsleep healthpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/17v4k2p2etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4v91n27t2026-06-04T06:46:02Zqt4v91n27tIn Search of the Black Star Line: Preservation and Digitization of the 20th-Century Pan-African Shipping CompanyHumphrey, Jewell Ruth-EllaDunnavant, Justin P.Acabado, Stephen2026-06-01This project explores how digital archaeological methods can reshape interpretations of the spatial and cultural legacy of the 20th-century Pan-African shipping company, the Black Star Line. This study contends that Black digital humanities methodologies can benefit archaeological methods by enabling the archiving and documentation through a community-engaged practice. Drawing on material culture related to the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), this project argues that the impact of the BSL extends beyond the usual interpretation of failure and pushes for the digital preservation of material culture. Black Digital Humanities and the Black Radical Tradition, in conjunction with archaeological research, are useful for interpreting material related to the African diaspora. Theoretically founded in Kim Gallon’s definition of “Black Digital Humanities” and specifically geospatial technologies such as ArcGIS or remote sensing, the project combines frameworks utilized in anthropology, Africana studies, and archaeology. The leading questions for analysis include; How can digital archival archaeological methodologies be deployed to document and exhibit the scattered legacy of the UNIA? and How can the Black Radical Tradition, as articulated by Dr. Greg Carr, extend the possibilities of digital humanities towards a more community-engaged Black digital heritage recovery praxis? The results will be intentionally made public, and continuously shifting to encourage digital heritage preservation.Black studiesArchaeologyCaribbean studiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4v91n27tetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1z07z8ht2026-06-04T06:45:57Zqt1z07z8htSymbolic Language, Embodied Worlds: Multimodal Intelligence in Humans and MachinesJiang, YanruDale, Richard Alan Clarke2026-06-01Language and perception operate over fundamentally different representational regimes: language (especially in its textual form used to train models) tends to promote more discrete, symbolic processing, whereas perception and action are more continuous, gradient, and grounded in embodied experience. This distinction shapes how both humans and machines learn, generate, and evaluate information. This dissertation advances a unified account of how these representational differences influence model behavior and human–AI interaction, integrating theoretical analysis, computational modeling, and human experiments.
Chapter 1 synthesizes prior work in cognitive science, language models, and multimodal AI to argue that, while language encodes substantial information about embodied experience through statistical regularities and compositional structure, it remains constrained by its reliance on representations of prior experience. Incorporating multimodality provides access to continuous signals that support the construction of novel shared experiences, while also enhancing communicative clarity in human–AI interactions.
Chapter 2 introduces a model explainability approach that characterizes the learning trajectories of recurrent neural networks processing linguistic versus behavioral signals. Through computational modeling, this chapter demonstrates that sequential models encode linguistic and gestural inputs in distinct ways, highlighting differences in how discrete and continuous signals support information processing and learning.
Chapter 3 examines human evaluations of AI-generated news image captions. Despite strong performance in language generation, models exhibit weaker perceptual and cross-modal capabilities. This chapter shows that cross-modal context mitigates linguistic heuristics that would otherwise bias judgments under text-only evaluation. Chapter 4 introduces Visual Narrative Freedom, a property emerging from loosely coupled image–text relationships in real-world multimodal communication. By systematically varying textual constraints, this chapter illustrates that higher degrees of freedom increase the diversity of generated images and can shift user preferences—sometimes favoring AI-generated images over human-selected ones in high-stakes civic domains.
Overall, these contributions establish a theoretical and empirical framework linking representational structure to model behavior and human perception. This dissertation demonstrates that multimodal intelligence is not merely an additive interface, but is fundamentally shaped by the structure of the representations through which information is encoded, influencing both system performance and human–AI interaction.CommunicationArtificial intelligenceInformation technologyCognitive psychologyCognitive ScienceHuman-AI InteractionMultimodal AIMultimodal CommunicationVision-Language Modelsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1z07z8hthttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1z07z8ht/qt1z07z8ht.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3099h15f2026-06-04T06:45:51Zqt3099h15fBiomechanically Constrained Quantitative MRI: Enhancing the Fidelity of Perfusion, Morphometric, and Radiomic Markers in Obstetric and Oncologic ApplicationsRamirez, Raymi OdalysSung, Kyunghyun2026-06-01This dissertation develops and applies advanced quantitative magnetic resonance imaging pipelines to investigate functional and structural tissue adaptations in two complex clinical applications; obstetrics and oncology. The overarching objective is to bridge the gap between raw, high-dimensional radiological data and reliable clinical diagnostic accuracy through investigating the feasibility of spatially and biomechanically constrained imaging markers.In the obstetric application (Aims 1 and 2), multiparametric MRI, morphometrics, and radiomic analysis were utilized to evaluate early-gestation placental function and predict infant growth trajectories. Results demonstrated that early deviations in placental volume and spatial perfusion heterogeneity independently shape birth percentiles. Furthermore, specific morphometric features, such as elongation and sphericity, and habitat-wise radiomic texture features significantly outperformed clinical and mean multiparametric MRI features in classifying complex postnatal growth outcomes, such as early downward growth and Small for Gestational Age trajectories. These findings highlight structural and vascular adaptations that precede clinical detection.In the oncologic clinical application (Aim 3), the study evaluated the impact of rigid versus deformable image registration on the extraction of pharmacokinetic (PK) parameters (?!"#$%, ?&', ?&) from qDCE-MRI. While deformable registration improved global image alignment, as shown by higher Mutual Information (MI) scores, validation revealed a critical "Mutual Information Paradox" For highgrade, biomechanically stiff cancers (PI-RADS: 4–5), the uniform elasticity assumptions of the deformable algorithm failed catastrophically. This introduced severe local spatial warping, which artificially shifted the ROIs into healthy tissue. This corrupted downstream pharmacokinetic parameters and produced falsely significant statistical correlations.Ultimately, this work establishes that extracting feasibly reliable predictive imaging markers requires a rigorous balance of localized spatial heterogeneity and anatomically specific biomechanical constraints. Relying solely on global similarity metrics is insufficient; local biomechanical integrity must be preserved to translate pharmacokinetic data into diagnostically accurate clinical outcomes.Medical imagingBiomedical engineeringMedicineBiomechanicsMachine LearningModelsMRIPlacentaProstateRadiomicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3099h15fhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3099h15f/qt3099h15f.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt65m1j2wd2026-06-04T06:45:46Zqt65m1j2wdDevelopment of Isothermal, Additively Manufactured, Infrared Aluminum Mirrors for Space ApplicationsLohser, Julian RydaleYang, Jenn-Ming2026-06-01The successful development of future space-based infrared mirrors requires agile manufacture of high-quality mirrors. Aluminum has been identified as an ideal mirror material for these applications due to the speed of manufacturing and resulting mirror quality. However, traditionally manufactured aluminum mirrors suffer from low mirror efficiency and thermal distortion. Laser-powder bed fusion (L-PBF) of aluminum mirrors can improve performance through stiffness-optimized structures, integrated iso-thermalization, and novel alloys. This dissertation investigates the mechanisms controlling the diamond turning performance of L-PBF modified aluminum alloys and identifies critical factors affecting the capillary performance to produce the next generation of highly reflective, isothermal aluminum mirrors.The first part of this work focuses on understanding the critical factors controlling mirror performance in nucleation-modified, additively manufactured (AM) 7xxx-series aluminum alloys. Several candidate alloys with different grain-refining strategies were identified. Grain-refining agents successfully eliminate hot-cracking in these high-strength alloys, but the high-melting point of the inoculants results in frequent, incomplete dissolution. The mechanical performance is not impacted by the un-dissolved particles. However, the diamond turning performance is severely degraded by large, hard inclusions. This led to the down-selection of a TiC-modified 7xxx-series alloy due to its reduced grain-refining agent size, which minimized the size of the inclusion in the microstructure and maximized the surface quality.The TiC-modified alloy was then characterized and developed to understand the critical mechanisms affecting the final surface quality. A dual-scanning strategy was optimized that reduced grain size and orientation. Chemistry changes due to printing parameters were analyzed with computational modeling and thermal analysis, revealing changes in phase stability that affected the critical homogenizing heat treatment range. Nano-scratch analysis revealed the influence of print orientation, precipitation state, and cutting depth on the micro-machining characteristics of the material. Single-point diamond turning confirmed the applicability of the nano-scratch methodology as a screening tool and further revealed the sensitivity of the technique to spatter contamination. Elimination of spatter contamination combined with the findings from the nano-scratch testing resulted in a process to produce mirrors with extremely high surface quality.Finally, the influence of print processing and post-processing parameters was evaluated to produce high capillary performance wicks for thermal gradient control in heat pipes and vapor chambers. Surface energy of the TiC-modified alloy was found to depend on print orientation and heat treatment parameter, which modified surface chemistry. A two-step chemical process was developed to maximize surface energy by varying concentrations and exposure times. The developed treatment was applied to additively manufactured wicks to correlate the changes in surface energy with capillary performance. The optimized treatment resulted in a simultaneous increase in capillary performance and wick efficiency. This treatment enables high performance thermal gradient control in future additively manufactured aluminum mirrors to eliminate thermal distortion.Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that detailed consideration of processing parameters is critical to ensuring the surface quality of the material as well as the capillary performance. These results represent the building blocks for modified-7xxx series aluminum alloys to be well positioned to excel as the next generation of space-based infrared mirrors.Materials scienceCondensed matter physicsEngineeringThermodynamicsadditive manufacturingaluminummirrorsvapor chamberapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/65m1j2wdhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt65m1j2wd/qt65m1j2wd.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt22t781fr2026-06-04T06:45:41Zqt22t781frBrokers of the Humanitarian Interface: Humanitarian Entrepreneurship, Gendered Brokerage, and the Politics of Aid in LebanonGhaddar, SimaKligman, GailHarris, Kevan2026-06-01Lebanon has long hosted one of the world’s most concentrated and institutionally layered humanitarian aid apparatus. Over the past two decades, multilateral institutions and aid agencies have built administrative infrastructures, social protection systems, and coordination architectures within otherwise collapsing and hollowed out state institutions— simultaneously distrusting the institutions they partnered with and deepening their entanglement with them. The result is not a humanitarian system operating parallel to or in place of the state but one that inhabits its institutional shell while also interpenetrating civil society organizations, local governance structures, and the everyday lives of crisis-affected populations. This dissertation examines how the humanitarian apparatus in Lebanon produces institutional capacity and local governance effects—and for whom—at the point of encounter with communities in crisis. It draws on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the popular quarters of Wadi Al-Nahleh- Mankoubin in Tripoli city, Lebanon’s second-largest and most impoverished Sunni-majority city. These quarters constitute a Sunni Muslim community in which tribal authority, kinship obligations, and Islamic moral order structure everyday social and political life. My research combines participant observation within community spaces, aid distribution spaces, households, community-led NGOs with fifty-seven in-depth interviews with humanitarian professionals, managers and volunteers of community-led NGOs, local administrators, tribal elites, aid recipients and participants in aid projects. I triangulate these methods with a longitudinal tracing of global aid policies between 2005 and 2025 and an analysis of Lebanon’s successive humanitarian policies and social protection frameworks.Lebanon’s compounding crises created an incentive structure that made the NGO form an aspirational vehicle for local actors embedded in the communities aid is meant to serve. Male tribal members in Wadi al Nahleh—with pre-existing kinship authority and patronage networks— fashion themselves into what I term “humanitarian entrepreneurs:” self-styled brokers accumulating resources, institutional recognition, and maneuvering room across multiple domains of transnational aid. Women navigate the same interface from a structurally different position—as household welfare administrators, primary cash recipients, outreach volunteers, and the core care work on which humanitarian programming runs. This gendered aid architecture becomes a defining feature of institutional effectiveness. Designated as the preferred node between the humanitarian system and the household, women perform the flexible and care labor on which the system depends at its most local scale. The brokerage practices they occupy lie at the institutional seams of local state bureaucracies, localized humanitarian programming, and kinship dynamics. Their labor is less visible yet indispensable, and more extractive of care and relational labor. Oscillating between aid beneficiary and care broker, women become the capillary infrastructure through which global aid logics permeate households and community. Humanitarian policy frameworks reframe this as empowerment, self-entrepreneurialism, and local ownership; in practice, it materializes as precarious labor that builds women’s soft capacities while offloading institutional disruptions, public scrutiny, and the management of patriarchal anxieties onto them.SociologyPolitical scienceMiddle Eastern studiesWomens studiespubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/22t781fretdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6s57d0fk2026-06-04T06:45:36Zqt6s57d0fkThe Impact of Threat and Anxiety on Latino Political BehaviorAlegre, ClaudiaPérez, Efrén O2026-06-01Why do Latinos who face no personal risk of deportation mobilize politically in response to anti-Latino rhetoric and immigration enforcement? This dissertation argues the answer lies in a distinction existing frameworks have overlooked: the difference between anxiety experienced as an individual and anxiety experienced as a member of a group. Group-based anxiety, appraised as a collective threat to one's racial and ethnic community rather than a personal vulnerability, generates fundamentally different behavioral consequences than individually experienced anxiety, producing action tendencies oriented toward collective engagement rather than individual avoidance.Drawing on appraisal theory and intergroup emotions theory, I develop the Racialized Group Anxiety framework, which specifies a causal pathway through which racialized political threat produces collective political mobilization among racially marginalized groups, tested here among Latino adults in the United States. The framework makes three core claims: group-based anxiety mobilizes pro-group political participation in ways individually experienced anxiety does not; this mobilizing effect is moderated by pan-ethnic identification; and group-based anxiety can strengthen pan-ethnic identity among lower-identifying Latinos. I test these claims across three studies. Using observational data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, I show that anxiety among Latino adults is positively associated with collective and expressive forms of political participation but not voting. Because this measure cannot distinguish individual from group-based anxiety, findings are suggestive rather than causal, motivating the experiments that follow. Two survey experiments with Latino adults in October 2024 and April 2026 provide causal evidence that group-based anxiety increases pro-group political participation where individually experienced anxiety does not. Both reveal a pre-treatment effect: the mobilizing effect is concentrated among Latinos with lower and moderate levels of pan-ethnic identification, attenuating among high identifiers already oriented toward collective engagement. Suggestive evidence from the second experiment indicates group-based anxiety may strengthen pan-ethnic identity, pointing toward an identity strengthening pathway. These findings contribute to scholarship on emotions and political behavior, Latino politics, and minority political mobilization, demonstrating that emotional mechanisms of political engagement are not racially uniform and that anxiety felt on behalf of one's group can function as a catalyst between lower pan-ethnic identification and collective political participation.Political sciencePsychologySociologyEthnic studiesEmotions and politicsGroup-based anxietyLatino politicsPan-ethnic identificationPolitical mobilizationRacialized threatapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6s57d0fkhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6s57d0fk/qt6s57d0fk.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9z0877p92026-06-04T06:45:31Zqt9z0877p9Quantifying the Complexity of Multilevel Confirmatory Factor Analysis ModelsKim, Yun KyungCai, Li2026-06-01In multilevel modeling, as in any statistical modeling, model selection requires balancing goodness-of-fit (GOF) against model complexity, yet the complexity of multilevel models and how it operates differently across levels have received little systematic attention. This study quantified and decomposed the fitting propensity (FP) of multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (ML-CFA) models, a class of models widely used to validate multilevel constructs. The 12 ML-CFA models under scrutiny had comparable numbers of freely estimated parameters but differed in specification, including the number of latent factors, relationships among the latent factors, or the presence of cross-level measurement invariance constraints. The FP of each model was decomposed into level-specific components that represent the capacity of the model to fit any data at the within- and between-group levels, respectively.Two new mechanisms for generating multilevel data were developed: the covariance decomposition (CD) and marginal composition (MC) approaches, where the former was a constrained instance of the latter. Using the more flexible MC approach, multilevel data were generated across 18 conditions defined by the number of groups, expected intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) level, and per-group sample size. In each data condition, level-specific FPs of ML-CFA models were examined by two complementary approaches: comparing the distributions of level-specific GOF indices and visualizing the data space occupied by each model. Three findings were central. First, cross-level measurement invariance constraints disproportionately reduced between-group level FP while leaving within-group level FP largely unaffected, which is a substantial asymmetry that parameter counts alone do not anticipate. Second, parameter nesting did not guarantee data-space nesting. For instance, configural models that are parametrically nested within their unconstrained counterparts were capable of representing some data better than their unconstrained counterparts. Third, models with identical parameter counts differed substantially in their level-specific FPs, and their relative ordering could vary depending on data conditions. These results contribute to the literature on multilevel measurement invariance, the relationship between parameter nesting and covariance matrix nesting, and the customization of GOF index cutoff thresholds to candidate models as well as data conditions.Quantitative psychologyEducational tests & measurementsStatisticsData space nestingFitting propensityMeasurement invarianceModel complexityModel fit evaluationMultilevel factor analysispubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9z0877p9etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3cp0q1hj2026-06-04T06:45:26Zqt3cp0q1hjHow Artificial Intelligence is Affecting the Teaching of Teaching: Examining the Changing Practices of Teacher Education Program FacultyCarroll, Ian MichaelFranke, Megan2026-06-01Artificial intelligence has the potential to dramatically reshape how we teach, learn, and generate knowledge, and indeed is already doing so. As teachers, designers of academic programs and standards, and educational administrators seek to grapple with the novel challenges and opportunities posed by this technology, a thorough understanding of the changing practices of teacher education program (TEP) faculty can provide a roadmap to intentional program design. This is a mixed-methods study with a convergent design, using UTAUT2 as a lens, wherein TEP faculty at a local 4-year university were surveyed and interviewed to investigate their perceptions, changing practices, and support needs.The data show this population being characterized by general belief that lessons on AI would be beneficial for their students, and high intent on doing so, but lagging follow-through into actual implementation, which is primarily an issue of establishing new pedagogical habits. Those faculty who have taken the leap into implementation point to AI forcing a critical reevaluation of their practices, offering opportunities for the development of new, more inclusive and dialogic pedagogies. For these educators, teaching is an essentially human-relational endeavor, for which AI cannot be a replacement, but a tool or a lens to help enable greater educational opportunities. Furthermore, they voice their concerns about the need for critical AI literacy skills to be built into the curriculum at all levels, not only as part of their teacher education classes. Finally, AI represents a new type of technological development, the harnessing of which requires support systems which blend functional technical assistance with content-specific pedagogical development, placing unforeseen needs on university support systems. A multitude of specific examples and experiences are shared in support of these core claims.Teacher educationPedagogyArtificial intelligenceCurriculum developmentArtificial intelligenceCurriculumFormative assessmentPedagogyTeacher educationUTAUT2application/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cp0q1hjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3cp0q1hj/qt3cp0q1hj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4fn6w88f2026-06-04T06:45:21Zqt4fn6w88fLongitudinal functional connectivity during risky decision making in youth across the anxiety spectrumSmith, CharlesUddin, Lucina Q2026-06-01Adolescence is a critical period of development during which the brain undergoes massive reorganization. Excess synapses are pruned away, and key synapses are refined resulting in improved cognitive control, increased reward seeking behavior, and changes in decision making circuitry. Activation in the ventral striatum (VS) is known to peak during adolescence while the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) displays a delay in maturation in relation to subcortical regions. However, little is known about the functional connectivity (FC) among these key brain regions and how their coupling with other brain regions changes across time. Additionally, adolescence is also a time during which the emergence of anxiety disorders becomes increasingly prevalent and can have a negative impact on the development of regions such as the VS and vmPFC and their connectivity. Thus, this dissertation aimed to understand VS and vmPFC whole brain FC during cautious and risky decision making longitudinally and uncover how anxiety may impact the development of this neural circuitry. To achieve this, data from the Development of Anxiety in Youth Study (DAYS), an accelerated longitudinal study aimed to examine the changes in brain activation and connectivity over time in youth across the anxiety spectrum, was utilized. To examine FC and activation related to risky decision-making, the driving task was used. The aim of this fMRI task is to try and reach the finish line as quickly as possible. Throughout the task participants approach a yellow light at which they must choose to either stop (i.e., cautious), adding a 3-second delay or go (i.e., risky). If they choose to go, there is a 50% chance that they crash, adding a 6-second delay. In Chapter 2 of this dissertation, we observed that anxiety was associated with faster cautious responses across time, and while cautious trial engagement was shown to increase, this engagement wasn’t moderated by anxiety. Consistent engagement across timepoints was also seen for cautious and risky trials and, notably, an effect of anxiety was shown at year 3 in the lateral PFC. Expanding beyond functional activation, in Chapter 3 we then explored whole brain FC for cautious and risky trials using psychophysiologic interactions both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Positive VS-vmPFC coupling for the cautious condition was observed, which was significantly more strongly connected compared to the risky condition. Additionally, cautious trial engagement was shown to be correlated with VS-vmPFC coupling. Finally, to elucidate the effect of anxiety on adolescent brain development, in Chapter 4, we implored a latent modeling technique (latent transition analysis, LTA) to identify latent anxiety trajectories and classify differences in VS and vmPFC FC between trajectories. This LTA identified three latent states which we then classified into four anxiety trajectories (i.e., low, high, improved, worsen). Analysis revealed that cautious VS connectivity with the caudate and pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC)/vmPFC for the low anxiety trajectory (AT) group, vmPFC and PCC for the high AT group, and vmPFC and sgACC for the improved AT group. Connectivity for the vmPFC during cautious trials was consistent across all groups, with connectivity of vmPFC-IPL and vmPFC-PCC coupling observed. Overall, this dissertation has shown that anxiety may influence the rate at which adolescents make decisions, but not their level of engagement in cautious nor risky conditions. Additionally, different anxiety trajectories display unique, albeit nonsignificant, differences in FC at baseline, suggesting a potential marker for persistent versus improved anxiety, which may help to inform early interventions of adolescent anxiety disorders and aid in the reduction of anxiety on adolescent development.NanosciencePsychologyNeurosciencesBehavioral psychologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4fn6w88fhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4fn6w88f/qt4fn6w88f.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1zg1c7102026-06-04T06:45:16Zqt1zg1c710Describing the sequence-structure-function relationship of pathogenic New World Hemorrhagic Fever Mammarenavirus glycoproteinsTaylor, Lily JaneRodriguez, Jose A2026-05-29Clade B New World Mammarenaviruses (NWMs) are endemic to South America; they include human pathogens: Junin, Machupo, Guanarito, Chapare, and Sabia. These viruses can cause lethal hemorrhagic fevers resulting from zoonotic transmission from rodents to humans. A tripartite glycoprotein complex (GPC) decorates the surface of all Clade B NWM particles. Despite low sequence similarity across glycoproteins in this Clade, most bind a single conserved site on a cell surface receptor (human transferrin receptor, hTfR1) to mediate cellular entry and initiate infection. The natural role of hTfR1 in facilitating the internalization of the iron-rich transferrin from the cell surface into acidic compartments provides an efficient route for NWM cellular entry. Though, the specificity of infection is largely determined by the NWM receptor binding domain, GP1. The low sequence identity across NWM GP1s (25-48%) curtails efforts to develop broadly neutralizing therapeutics and limits our ability to identify new variants that pose a serious risk to human health.The work presented in this dissertation aims to first describe a computational, biochemical, and structural workflow to investigate and predict cryptic Machupo/Junin-derived GP1 sequence variants capable of internalizing through hTfR1 and eliciting cross-neutralizing immune responses, giving rise to promising avenues for the development pan-acting NWM vaccine candidates. Then, this work details the in situ structural determination of the Junin glycoprotein complex bound by neutralizing antibodies, describing the molecular architecture of the natively embedded viral glycoprotein and its neutralization by receptor-mimicking therapies. Lastly, this work describes the molecular and structural basis for fusion inhibition of the NWM glycoprotein complex by small-molecule and antibody-based therapeutics, detailing routes of therapeutic escape and the structural basis for fusion function.Together these results aim to illuminate specific routes of sequence adaptation that may give rise to new pathogenic NWM variants, provide a better understanding of mechanisms and factors that contribute to viral entry and infectivity, and detail important avenues for broad-based therapeutic action against these lethal pathogens.BiochemistryCellular biologyPathologyMolecular biologypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1zg1c710etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9405r7n62026-06-04T06:45:10Zqt9405r7n6Arguments for RAM Programs: Doubly Efficient, Black-Box, and Zero-KnowledgeShah, Akash AmritlalOstrovsky, Rafail2026-06-01Proving statements about small subsets of a large database, and in particular proving the correct execution of RAM programs on committed databases when the running time is sublinear in the size of the database, is a problem of substantial practical interest. Indeed, most real-world computations are naturally expressed as RAM algorithms in high-level programming languages such as C/C++, Python, and Rust. Efficient solutions to this problem have applications in searching data structures, sequence matching, such as for genomic data or blockchains, statistical analysis, secure inference, and proofs of training.
Motivated by this goal, we introduce and study the notion of projection codes. A standard error-correcting code allows one to encode a message x into a codeword X, such that even if a constant fraction of X is corrupted, the message x can still be recovered. A projection code extends this guarantee to any subset of the bits of x. Concretely, for every projection of x to a subset s of its coordinates, there is a subset S of comparable size such that the projected encoding X|_S forms a robust encoding of the projected message x|_s.
Our first result constructs projection codes with near-optimal overhead in both codeword length and projected-subset size. We then use them to obtain doubly efficient arguments for RAM programs on large committed databases, with near-optimal communication and prover and verifier computation time even when the computation is much smaller than the database. Our construction makes only a black-box use of collision-resistant hash functions, giving the first black-box alternative to prior non-black-box constructions with comparable asymptotic efficiency. Finally, we extend this result to support both zero knowledge and database updates, obtaining the first doubly efficient zero-knowledge implementation of RAM programs that relies only on a black-box use of symmetric cryptography.Computer scienceInformation scienceapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9405r7n6https://escholarship.org/content/qt9405r7n6/qt9405r7n6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9f57j5jh2026-06-04T06:45:05Zqt9f57j5jhPathways to Equity in Travel Demand Modeling: An Evaluation of Auto Ownership ModelSrisan, TatBills, Tierra Suzan2026-06-01Transportation is fundamentally the means through which individuals access essential socioeconomic opportunities, yet existing travel demand forecasting tools may inadvertently overlook the experiences of transportation-disadvantaged populations. This dissertation addresses a critical gap in contemporary auto ownership modeling: the systemic failure to formally account for the structural, financial, and psychological constraints that dictate the transportation outcomes for disadvantaged populations. Across four interrelated essays, I demonstrate that conventional models, which assume universal, unconstrained choice, fail to capture the realities of low-income, minority, and spatially isolated households.The first essay establishes the foundational empirical case by examining racial residential clustering and micro-regional spatial effects in Los Angeles County, demonstrating that composite models incorporating explicit racial and spatial indicators significantly outperform standard race-neutral specifications. The second essay introduces an auto insurance burden index as a supply-side constraint, revealing that insurance affordability functions as a financial gatekeeper that disproportionately restricts vehicle access in low-income and majority-minority communities. The third essay implements Manski's two-stage probabilistic choice set formation framework, showing that incorporating explicit constraint indicators into the choice set generation stage significantly improves predictive accuracy for Black households and those with lower educational attainment. The fourth essay synthesizes these insights into a novel Hybrid Choice Set Formation model that integrates latent psychological constructs—Financial Strain and Car Dependency—directly into the choice set formation stage, formally distinguishing between preference-driven and structurally captive auto ownership outcomes. The empirical results from these studies suggest that structural constraints are central determinants of auto ownership. Specifically, race-neutral models systematically overestimate built-environment effects and misrepresent mobility barriers for Black and Hispanic households. On the supply side, incorporating the Auto Burden Index sharpens the identification of households facing binding ownership constraints. The choice set formation framework reveals that standard models perform poorly for constrained subgroups, yielding prediction error rates exceeding 30\% for Black households. Furthermore, the Hybrid CSF model demonstrates that latent Financial Stain functions as a strict filter removing auto ownership from consideration sets. Moreover, the Hybrid CSF model consistently outperforms standard compensatory models in goodness-of-fit and predictive power, particularly for disadvantaged groups. Consequently, these captive populations are substantially more inelastic to policy interventions than standard models predict.These findings carry immediate implications for policy and practice. Standard models overpredict the effectiveness of price-based or land-use interventions for disadvantaged populations, risking misdirected long-range planning and infrastructure investments. Effective transportation planning requires forecasting tools that distinguish between households that choose not to own a vehicle and those structurally excluded from doing so. By bridging the divide between sociological understandings of transportation disadvantage and the formal econometric theory of travel demand modeling, this dissertation provides the analytical foundation to design targeted policies, accurately evaluate infrastructure investments, and ensure mobility access for all segments of the population.TransportationManagementCivil engineeringAuto ownershipDiscrete choiceTravel demandpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f57j5jhetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt4rb0g9jn2026-06-04T06:45:00Zqt4rb0g9jnMachine Learning for Materials Modeling: End-to-End Differentiable and Batched Atomistic SimulationGangan, AbhijeetTaciroglu, ErtugrulMarian, Jaime2026-06-01Atomistic simulations like molecular dynamics are essential tools for studying materials at the scale of individual atoms. Their usefulness depends on two things: the quality of the interatomic potential used to compute properties, and the efficiency with which simulations can be run. As machine-learned interatomic potentials become more common, simulation workflows increasingly need to connect model development with downstream material properties, many of which are not used as training labels and require running simulations. A second challenge is computational throughput: existing simulation workflows often run these systems one at a time, leaving modern accelerator hardware underused.This dissertation addresses these needs through differentiable and batched atomistic simulation. The first part develops methods for differentiating simulation outputs with respect to interatomic-potential parameters. This makes it possible to train potentials using material properties beyond energies and forces, including elastic constants, vibrational properties, and radial distribution functions.The second part focuses on running many atomistic systems together. It develops data representations and algorithms for heterogeneous systems and implements them in TorchSim, a PyTorch-based simulation engine for machine-learned interatomic potentials. The resulting workflow connects physical observables to parameter fitting while making large collections of simulations practical on accelerator hardware.Computational chemistryComputational physicsMaterials scienceArtificial intelligenceCivil engineeringapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rb0g9jnhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt4rb0g9jn/qt4rb0g9jn.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3br9x5xx2026-06-04T06:44:54Zqt3br9x5xxDevelopment of Novel Immunotherapeutic Strategies for Generating Effective T Cell Responses against Pancreatic Ductal AdenocarcinomaLee, Hailey RoseRadu, Caius G2026-06-01Pancreatic ductal carcinoma (PDAC) remains a deadly solid tumor type with 90% of cases resulting in death within 5 years of diagnosis. The arid immune landscape of PDAC is intensely immunosuppressive, leading to a paucity of CD8+ T cell responses against the tumor. As such, immunotherapeutic strategies aimed at stimulating proinflammatory responses in the patient could yield potential in overturning the immunologically cold setting and facilitate the generation of anti-tumor CD8+ T cell responses. Essential inflammatory mechanisms act through key pattern recognition receptors, many of which are based in sensing of RNA or DNA species as a readout of pathogen presence or cellular distress. Next generation agonists of stimulator of interferon genes (STING), a dsDNA-sensing pathway, induce potent systemic immune response but require a pharmacodynamic biomarker for monitoring the amplitude and duration of such responses. We found that systemic STING agonists induced T and B cell metabolic alterations commensurate with STING agonist-induced activation, which could be monitored through 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose PET imaging. To address how RNA-sensing mechanisms could be critical for immunotherapeutic intervention, we developed a novel N1-methylpseudouridine-modified dsRNA construct complexed in lipid nanoparticles (m¹Ψ dsRNA-LNP). m¹Ψ dsRNA-LNP enhanced innate immune activation compared to that of unmodified dsRNA-LNP sensing and elicited inflammation through canonical dsRNA-sensing pathways of Toll-like receptor 3 (TLR3) and mitochondrial antiviral signaling protein (MAVS). Novel multi-component development of an RNA-LNP-based cancer vaccine platform, consisting of m¹Ψ dsRNA-LNP and an antigen-encoding m¹Ψ mRNA-LNP, elicited robust CD8+ T cell activation and memory formation in the setting of targeting tumor-associated antigen glycoprotein 100 (gp100). Further, the dual component RNA-LNP cancer vaccine platform suppressed tumor growth in mice bearing orthotopic gp100-expressing PDAC tumors. The optimization of the dual component RNA-LNP cancer vaccine platform was further evaluated in the setting of highly relevant and prevalent tumor neoantigen mutant KRAS. Immunizations utilizing a mutant KRASG12V-encoding m¹Ψ mRNA-LNP and the m¹Ψ dsRNA-LNP elicited CD8+ T cell responses against known nonamer and decamer epitopes of mutant KRASG12V. Overall, these results reveal next generation immunotherapies for enhancing engagement of nucleic acid sensors as a strategy to rationally design vaccines aimed at boosting T cell responses in PDAC.ImmunologyPharmacologyOncologyCellular biologyGeneticsnucleic acid-sensingpancreatic cancerT cellsvaccinepubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3br9x5xxetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6hv4n9b42026-06-04T06:44:49Zqt6hv4n9b4Common Ground: Exegetical Methods in Origen’s and Proclus’ CommentariesGram, Zakarias DimitriBlank, David L2026-06-01The imperial and late antique periods saw a proliferation of commentary-writing in various communities, including among the early Christians and the Neoplatonists. While these commentaries have been studied independently of each other, the present investigation identifies and explores methodological similarities between the two traditions. In particular, it analyzes Origen’s Commentary on John and Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus as representative and innovative exegetical works with the aim of identifying common interpretative methodologies. Both authors use a multi-layered allegorical approach to their texts, in which the literal or historical meaning of the text is generally set aside in favor of a deeper theological meaning. The use of allegory and the claim to divine inspiration allow both commentators to exercise control over the meaning of the text (Chapter 1). Furthermore, both authors conceive of similar goals for their work, including preserving the supposed original meaning of the text, educating their reader in theology, and correcting heterodox interpretations (Chapter 2). Finally, the study considers how Origen and Proclus use the Hebrew Bible and Homeric epic in their commentaries, respectively, as additional sources of evidence and authority to back up their innovative and at times controversial interpretations (Chapter 3). As a result, we are better able to understand how scholars and philosophers in the imperial and late antique periods approached authoritative texts in their traditions, regardless of institutional affiliation.Classical studiesPhilosophyReligionPhilosophy of religionTheologyAllegoryCommentariesOrigenProclusText interpretationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hv4n9b4https://escholarship.org/content/qt6hv4n9b4/qt6hv4n9b4.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6b82r5b32026-06-04T06:44:44Zqt6b82r5b3Addressing Shape and Phase Heterogeneity in EEG Signals: A Bayesian PerspectiveLandry, Emma Valentine MarieTelesca, Donatello2026-06-01Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings arise as a noninvasive and low-cost clinical imaging technology for monitoring brain development, facilitating earlier and more effective interventions. Their analysis, however, presents a rich set of statistical challenges due to the complex structure of the data, requiring methodological tools that preserve the underlying geometry of the observations. Motivated by the study of autism, this dissertation develops novel Bayesian methodology to address shape and phase heterogeneity in EEG power spectral densities. The proposed models focus on functional and distributional data analysis techniques aimed at identifying and quantifying biomarkers associated with autism. Chapter 2 introduces warped functional mixed membership models. Existing approaches for handling misalignment in functional observations typically assume that the data is governed either by a single common shape or by a finite mixture of population-level shapes. We instead propose a more flexible framework based on mixed membership models, allowing subject-specific variation across multiple latent features. A Bayesian hierarchical model is constructed to jointly estimate the underlying shape functions, individual time-transformation functions, and subject-specific membership weights. Chapter 3 adopts a distributional data analysis perspective by modeling EEG power spectra as density functions. We develop a Bayesian Fréchet framework for distributional data under the Wasserstein metric that leverages a Hilbert space representation of the observations through quantile functions. This representation enables the use of standard functional techniques within a coherent Bayesian framework, including function-on-scalar regression and functional principal component analysis, while preserving the Wasserstein geometry. Finally, Chapter 4 explores extensions of the preceding methodology to the multichannel setting. We first consider a mixed membership framework that accounts for cross-electrode dependence through a hierarchical model leveraging repulsive priors to improve identifiability of the latent membership structure. We also propose a distributional modeling framework in which electrode-specific deviations are represented through optimal transport maps relative to a subject-level latent Wasserstein barycenter. These two directions are presented as preliminary methodological proposals, with full theoretical and computational development left as future work.BiostatisticsBioinformaticsMedical imagingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6b82r5b3https://escholarship.org/content/qt6b82r5b3/qt6b82r5b3.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9hq8c8qh2026-06-04T06:44:39Zqt9hq8c8qhAntimicrobial Polymer Delivery via Bacteriophages for Improved Biocompatibility and Reduced Resistance PotentialVexler, ShelbyChen, Irene A2026-06-01The rise of antibiotic resistance necessitates developing alternative treatments with minimal potential for bacterial adaptation. Two promising solutions include membrane-disruptive polymers and phage therapy, which utilizes viruses specific to bacteria, but they face opposite shortcomings; many polymers lack specificity for bacterial cells, resulting in poor biocompatibility, while phages are restricted to a very narrow host range. In this dissertation, we aim to circumvent each agent’s individual shortcomings through the synergistic approach of engineering the non-lytic M13 bacteriophage into a polymer delivery platform. Our first goal was to modify M13 bacteriophage, which normally infects Escherichia coli, to target the pathogenic bacteria Staphylococcus aureus. We expressed an antibody fragment specific to a conserved surface polysaccharide, poly-N-acetylglucosamine, on the receptor-binding protein. Successful binding of the anti-PNAG phage was quantified through enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) and visualized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Next, we assessed the antimicrobial activity of three separate libraries of bio-inspired polymers with either methacrylate, hydroxybenzoate-co-lactide, or peptide backbones. We explored the differing trends in activity for each library with respect to degrees of polymerization, hydrophobicity, and charge. Our results highlight the diversity of antimicrobial polymers while demonstrating the combined utility of synthetic biology and chemistry for designing them. Lastly, antimicrobial polylysines varying by degrees of polymerization (48, 90, or 170) were loaded onto the anti-PNAG phage through electrostatic interactions or EDC crosslinking. Characterization determined higher drug-to-phage ratios for electrostatic loading compared to crosslinking, yet both attachment strategies improved potency, reducing the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) five-fold towards S. aureus. Critically, all bioconjugates demonstrated improved biocompatibility compared to polylysine alone; mammalian cells exposed to covalent polylysine-phages with DP ≤ 90 exhibited the highest viability over a five-day period. Furthermore, no resistance was induced in S. aureus after thirteen rounds of selection with covalent polylysine-phages, confirming bioconjugates retain the “resistance-resistant” nature of antimicrobial polymers. In summary, the findings of this dissertation present phage-based delivery of antimicrobial polymers as an effective strategy to target pathogenic bacteria while minimizing harm to human cells and potential for resistance.ChemistryPolymer chemistryBiochemistryAntibiotic ResistanceAntimicrobial PolymerBacteriophageapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hq8c8qhhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9hq8c8qh/qt9hq8c8qh.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt88m0p4tg2026-06-04T06:44:34Zqt88m0p4tgIon-Induced Electron Emission from Facility Walls during High-Power Electric Thruster TestingFERNANDEZ-COPPEL VELASCO, JORGEMarian, Jaime2026-06-01High-power electric propulsion systems are increasingly used for spacecraft station-keeping, orbital transfer, and deep-space missions, yet their ground-based qualification relies on measurements performed inside vacuum facilities. In these facilities, energetic plume species interact with chamber walls and diagnostic surfaces, producing electron emission that can modify plasma sheaths, alter local charge balance, and contribute to facility effects. While electron-induced secondary electron emission has been widely studied for relevant materials and energy ranges, ion-induced electron emission from low-energy propellant ions incident on facility-relevant surfaces remains comparatively under-characterized, particularly in the energy regime relevant to electric propulsion ground testing.
This dissertation investigates ion-induced electron emission from facility wall materials during electric thruster testing. A physics-based computational framework is developed to describe electron emission from ion-surface interactions through potential and kinetic electron-emission mechanisms. Potential emission is modeled through Auger neutralization as the incoming ion approaches the surface, while kinetic emission is described through electron excitation processes associated with ion transport in the solid. These include direct excitations from binary collisions between the ion and quasi-free conduction electrons, as well as Firsov-type inelastic energy transfer during atomic collisions. A Monte Carlo ray-tracing algorithm is also developed to model electron transport, tracking excited electrons as they undergo elastic and inelastic scattering before either thermalizing in the target or escaping through the surface barrier.
The resulting framework is applied to xenon, krypton, and argon ions incident on molybdenum, copper, tungsten, gold, silver, nickel, iron, stainless-steel, and amorphous-carbon surfaces over low-to-intermediate impact energies. The calculations provide predicted electron yields, emitted-energy distributions, angular distributions, excitation-depth distributions, and inelastic energy-loss spectra. These results clarify the relative importance of kinetic and potential emission mechanisms, the role of material properties in controlling emission probability, and the extent to which low-energy ion impacts can contribute to facility-induced perturbations in electric propulsion experiments.
Overall, this work provides a computational basis for estimating ion-induced electron emission under electric propulsion ground-test conditions and supplies material and energy-dependent emission data for use in predictive engineering models of facility effects, or other fields were IIEE may be relevant.Applied physicsAerospace engineeringMaterials scienceEngineeringPlasma physicsElectric propulsionElectron emissionFacility effectsion-induced electron emissionPlasma physicsSolid-state physicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/88m0p4tghttps://escholarship.org/content/qt88m0p4tg/qt88m0p4tg.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0qm0g0pj2026-06-04T06:44:29Zqt0qm0g0pjFor Justice to Last: A Stability-Based Argument for a Duty of StewardshipPensler, Samuel LevinHerman, BarbaraShiffrin, Seana2026-06-01In politics, questions of “feasibility” often concern whether proposed political change, such as the expansion of justice, can be achieved. But there is a second dimension of feasibility: whether just institutions and practices can be sustained over time. An acceptable theory of justice must therefore be feasible in the sense of being sustainable—or, in Rawls’s terminology, stable. This dissertation examines whether liberal democratic theories of justice are stable in this way. Taking Justice as Fairness as a central test case, I reconstruct and assess Rawls’s powerful argument for its stability. While I argue that Rawls succeeds in showing that Justice as Fairness can stably regulate a liberal democratic society, his account also reveals the inadequacy of coercion-centered explanations of political stability. The enduring maintenance of liberal democratic justice must depend very little upon coercive enforcement and primarily on citizens’ shared sense of justice, expressed through their active democratic support for just institutions.In this vein, I argue that liberal democratic justice such as Justice as Fairness cannot be sustained by a citizenry whose civic life may only manifest in intermittent and often private acts such as voting and taxpaying. Rather, stability requires that citizens relate to one another and their institutions as “civic stewards.” Civic stewards take advancing the justice of their polity to be among the organizing principles of their lives. Practically, this means being personally involved in civic or civic-minded institutions, engaging with some regularity in civic deliberation and conversation, tracking the trajectory of justice within their polity, and remaining prepared to participate in collective democratic action when necessary to establish and sustain their just institutions.PhilosophyLawPolitical sciencePublic administrationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0qm0g0pjhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt0qm0g0pj/qt0qm0g0pj.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7qc4j8ch2026-06-04T06:44:24Zqt7qc4j8chMultimodal Sensing and Robot Manipulation for Automated Needle Access in Deformable TissueForoutani, YasaminTsao, Tsu ChinBarzelay, Aya2026-06-01Needle-based ophthalmic procedures require precise interaction with soft, deformable tissues under limited visualization, depth perception, and tactile feedback. In applications such as vascular cannulation and subretinal injection, success depends not only on accurate positioning, but also on reliable tissue penetration, confirmation of access, and safe response to failure. These challenges motivate robotic systems that can combine precise motion with intraoperative sensing and feedback at the tool--tissue interface.
This dissertation presents robotic methods for safe, reliable, and repeatable needle access in ophthalmic procedures. First, a multimodal robotic framework is developed for vascular cannulation using microscope imaging, optical coherence tomography (OCT), and pressure sensing. The system localizes the vessel, aligns the needle, confirms successful access, detects failure modes, and enables reset-and-retry behavior. Bidirectional axial needle rotation is introduced to improve needle--tissue interaction and increase cannulation repeatability in ex vivo vessel experiments. Second, the same rotational insertion concept is extended to robotic subretinal injection, where the required precision is substantially higher. To prevent unintended tooltip motion during rotation, a dual iterative learning control strategy is developed to compensate kinematic and dynamic errors, enabling high-precision rotational insertion and improving subretinal access in ex vivo porcine eyes. Finally, an intraocular OCT A-scan probe is developed to extend sensing beyond the limitations of microscope and transpupillary OCT imaging. Through calibration and learning-based interpretation of A-scan signals, the probe supports local distance measurement, peripheral tissue mapping, tissue recognition, and deformation sensing. Together, these contributions advance tissue-aware robotic eye surgery by integrating improved manipulation, multimodal sensing, and feedback-driven decision making for delicate intraocular procedures.RoboticsOphthalmologyHealth care managementOphthalmologySurgical Robotsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7qc4j8chhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7qc4j8ch/qt7qc4j8ch.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6b0538wt2026-06-04T06:44:18Zqt6b0538wtAnisotropic and Crystalline Area-preserving Mean Curvature Flow in the PlaneKim, EricKim, Inwon2026-06-01This thesis investigates the dynamics of area-preserving anisotropic mean curvature flow in the plane, with a particular emphasis on long-time behavior. The evolution is a gradient flow of the anisotropic surface energy and is thus expected to converge to a critical point. We study the flat flow solution in two regimes: smooth elliptic and crystalline anisotropies. In both regimes, we establish the unconditional exponential convergence of bounded initial data to a disjoint union of Wulff shapes. In the smooth elliptic setting, we also prove that certain reflection comparison symmetries are preserved under the flow, allowing us to specify further constraints on the convergent profile depending on the initial data. In the crystalline setting, we show that the flat flow solution coincides with a classical ODE evolution for regular initial data, which further implies the eventual regularity of the flat flow for arbitrary initial data. Our analysis mainly adopts variational perspectives, employing techniques such as energy dissipation estimates and geometric barrier arguments.MathematicsTheoretical mathematicsApplied mathematicsAnalysis of PDEsCalculus of variationsInterfacial evolutionsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6b0538wthttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6b0538wt/qt6b0538wt.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3mg258g72026-06-04T06:44:13Zqt3mg258g7Structured Group Mentorship Program for New-Graduate PMHNPs Transitioning into PracticeSanchez, AlexanderChoi, Kristen2026-06-01Background: New-graduate psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioners (PMHNPs) often begin practice without structured mentorship, contributing to role stress, reduced clinical confidence, and early turnover.Objectives: To evaluate a structured, virtual group mentorship program for new-graduate PMHNPs and examine feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary changes in self-rated competence, job stress, job satisfaction, and intent to stay.Methods: This single-group, pretest-posttest professional development program enrolled 10 PMHNPs with fewer than 12 months of experience who practiced in Southern California. Participants completed an 8-week virtual mentorship program delivered via Kajabi. Weekly 60-minute sessions led by an experienced PMHNP integrated case-based clinical reasoning and facilitated peer support. Outcomes measured at baseline and week 8 included perceived role competence, job satisfaction, perceived stress, retention intent, and program feedback. Non-parametric bivariate tests were used for pre/post comparisons.Results: Median perceived role competence increased significantly from 16 (range, 13-35) at pretest to 29.5 (range, 15-37) at posttest (p = .022). Median overall job satisfaction increased from 179 to 188.5 and approached statistical significance (p = .059), while perceived stress did not change significantly (p = .44). Exploratory analyses showed significant improvements in selected job satisfaction subscales and multiple competence items. Retention indicators and posttest feedback were favorable: 90% had not considered leaving their current NP position, 100% had not left their position since program start, and mean program feedback ratings ranged from 4.5 to 4.7 on a 5-point scale.Conclusion: Structured virtual group mentorship was acceptable and associated with improved self-rated role competence among new-graduate PMHNPs. Larger-scale evaluations are warranted to examine sustained competence, stress, satisfaction, retention, and patient or organizational outcomes, and efforts are needed to implement PMHNP mentorship models in practice.NursingOccupational psychologyHealth sciencesMental healthHealth care managementMentorshipNursingapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mg258g7https://escholarship.org/content/qt3mg258g7/qt3mg258g7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt9ch8s24n2026-06-04T06:44:08Zqt9ch8s24nUltra-low Frequency Waves at Mars: Exploring the Connection Between Surface and Space Through InSight and MAVEN ObservationsWebster, KyleCao, HaoMa, Yingjuan2026-06-01The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander is a stationary lander located on Elysium Planitia that returned the first magnetometer data from the Martian surface. Arriving in November 2018, InSight observed the repeated occurrence of ultra-low frequency (ULF) electromagnetic waves during the nighttime. While ULF waves had been observed extensively in planetary magnetospheres throughout the solar system, including Mars, their common existence on the surface of Mars was not expected. In this dissertation, we embark on a journey to connect the observations of ULF waves on the surface with their origins throughout the Martian space environment.We catalog 444 nighttime ULF wave events throughout the InSight mission duration. The characteristic frequencies range from 1 mHz to 16 mHz, with a median frequency of about 7 mHz. ULF wave activity is found across all nighttime hours, but the activity is more commonly observed after midnight and before dawn local times. The ULF wave events show a ubiquitous signature of decreased power in the vertical component, suggesting that currents flowing through the Martian subsurface are responsible for this reduction. We suggest that ULF waves are likely produced in the Martian magnetosphere by at least two different mechanisms and that the occurrence is sensitive to the solar wind interaction with the Martian crustal fields. Next, we statistically investigate how the ULF wave power differs between the north-south, east-west, and up-down components. The median east by north and horizontal by vertical power ratios remain consistent throughout the entire InSight mission dataset, not just during InSight ULF wave events. Preliminary results from MAVEN observations show that we cannot rule out the magnetotail as a source of the east by north power anisotropy; however, the conducting subsurface remains the most consistent hypothesis for the regulation of directional ULF wave power.Two observational case studies are presented with evidence for ULF wave source mechanisms. The first event occurred on October 04, 2019, when the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft transited through the Martian magnetotail. MAVEN observed wave-like oscillations, which exhibited characteristics of both types of magnetotail flapping waves, large-scale steady flapping of the magnetotail current sheet and propagating kink-like flapping. At the same time, InSight also records a ULF wave event on the surface of Mars, with a similar characteristic frequency. Using a simplified Martian ionosphere model, we determine that the nightside ionosphere is too weak to significantly shield the surface from waves in the ULF band. Therefore, we interpret the simultaneous magnetotail flapping waves and ULF waves observed at the Martian surface as having the same origin. The second event occurred during an interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME) on December 10, 2021. MAVEN and Tianwen-1 observed a near-simultaneous magnetic field reversal in the magnetosheath. The reversal is well explained by a large current sheet, possibly the heliospheric current sheet at the leading edge of the ICME. At the arrival of the ICME, InSight observed a ULF wave packet (for about 1 hour) with high coherence (> 0.85) and a consistent phase response. The source mechanism for this event is possibly due to the draped current sheet structure, which makes it a unique space weather driven ULF wave source.Plasma physicsGeophysicsAstrophysicsMagnetic FieldMagnetosphereMarsULF Wavesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ch8s24nhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt9ch8s24n/qt9ch8s24n.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7t74j65q2026-06-04T06:44:03Zqt7t74j65qThe Space of Letters: Correspondence and Narrative in Kagerō NikkiPrice, Deborah AlexisDuthie, TorquilEmmerich, Michael2026-06-01Like many vernacular kana texts of the Heian period (794–1185), the writing of Kagerō nikki (ca. 972-974) is predicated on correspondence as the essential mode of informal writing for men and women. The records of poetry composition and exchange throughout Michitsuna’s Mother’s (935–995) diary emphasize how correspondence between figures in the aristocratic social world of the Imperial capital and across geographies in the material world of the Heian realm utilized epistolary and poetic conventions to negotiate for real-world benefits, play with literary convention, and experiment with vernacular forms of individual expression. Moreover, Kagerō’s autobiographical narrative of these exchanges reveals how the abstract, discursive spaces in which the social, political, and literary intersect: Letters, poems, and the messengers who carry them traverse the geographic, social, gendered, and ritual spaces of the Heian capital and beyond, and the poetic content of these missives takes advantage of poets’ knowledge of their environment, even though this knowledge must be tacitly recognized by readers. As such, geographic and material spaces are implicated in certain social and cosmological discourses of movement and access, which are then implicated in sociopolitical discourses unique to the Heian capital. Because correspondence is a written/literary expression of movement, moments of epistolary exchange in Kagerō illuminate the elements of space and provide for the dedicated analysis of place, rather than merely time, in the narrative. This dissertation considers space as a lens for bringing into focus a narratological approach in considering the literary techniques that Michitsuna’s Mother inscribes and the interpersonal contexts she ascribes to imagined, poetic geographies, which also have social and material significance to herself. Through her narrativization of these correspondences in her diary, the author and other contributors advocate and negotiate for social and material outcomes through a poetic logic that expands with Michitsuna’s Mother’s literary experience into a more individualized vernacular prose style. Ultimately, my examination of space in Kagerō nikki considers both the material and cultural conditions of space and place through the social practice of written poetic correspondence that constructs the unique literary space of the diary.Japanese literatureLanguageEast Asian studiesdiary literatureKagerō Nikkinarratologyapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7t74j65qhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt7t74j65q/qt7t74j65q.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3f83m5jb2026-06-04T06:43:58Zqt3f83m5jbSearching for Support: A quantitative exploration of the role of online, digital and interpersonal information sources in the dynamics of mental health information seeking and help-seeking among Black emerging adults in the United States.Ofei, LeonaPrelip, Michael L2026-06-01Poor mental health is a significant contributor to morbidity and Black young people are reporting accelerated suicide rates, yet treatment use for this group is minimal. Prior work also indicates that they encounter mental health stigma in their communities and interpersonal networks and may be turning to online and digital sources for mental health information. These sources can be beneficial for mental health support, but they can facilitate exposure to further stigma and misinformation. Yet, mental health information seeking is an understudied area of research for this population.This dissertation focuses on a sample of Black emerging adults (18-29 years old) in the US and examines mental health information exposure and professional help-seeking patterns, with a focus on online, digital and interpersonal sources. Participants were recruited via convenience sampling from online research panels and data were collected via an online survey in 2024.The first study (N=1,193) examined socio-demographic and psychological factors as predictors of past year mental health information exposure from: social media, a Google search, health websites, mental health apps, a health provider, family, in-person friends. Findings show some variation in mental health information exposure based on health insurance access, LGBTQ+ identity, and multiracial identity. In addition, those who meet study criteria for a mental health need and report current treatment use are most likely to be exposed to mental health information from all sources, with the highest odds reported for social media. Further, among those who do not meet this study’s mental health need criteria, a self-assessed perceived need for mental health support is related to increased exposure to information from social media, mental health apps and family.The second study (N=1,193) identified three latent class groups based on the information sources in the first study. The first group (~20% of sample) is classified as the “saturated exposure group” with a high probability of mental health information exposure across all sources. The second group is the “fragmented exposure group” (50% of sample) reflecting a high probability of mental health information exposure from social media, a moderate probability of exposure from family, in-person friends and Google, and a lower but considerable exposure from a health provider, mental health apps and health websites. The last group is the “mostly social media exposure group” (30% of sample), with lower but considerable exposure to mental health information from social media and negligible exposure from all other sources. Findings show that age, education and health insurance access predict latent class group membership. In addition, having a criteria-based need also predicts latent class group membership but this depends on treatment status and the type of mental health need. Further, both higher stigma agreement and higher mental health literacy are associated with greater exposure to a wider variety of mental health information sources (saturated exposure).The third study examined the association between past year mental health information exposure and current professional treatment use and the role of mental health literacy and stigma as mediators. The analysis focused on the most popular platforms for the sample with a criteria-based mental health need (N=746) i.e. social media, a Google search, mental health apps, family, and in-person friends. Results indicate that past year exposure to mental health information is positively and directly associated with current treatment use for social media, mental health apps, and family. Moreover, mental health literacy mediates the association between past year mental health information exposure on Google and current treatment use, and stigma and literacy jointly (but not independently) mediate this association for mental health apps.Overall, findings indicate that Black emerging adults with poor mental health are exposed to mental health information from online and digital sources, particularly those who are currently in treatment. The findings also suggest that exposure to mental health information from social media, mental health apps and family is related to improved professional help-seeking although underlying mechanisms need to be explored further. These findings indicate the need for mental health help-seeking interventions that leverage the benefits of online platforms while minimizing harms. Findings also point to the value of family-oriented help-seeking interventions.This study’s limitations include the cross-sectional nature of the data, the convenience sampling approach and limitations with the mental health information exposure measure. However, the study utilizes recent data and analyzes a large sample of a very specific population, to investigate an understudied but important area of research. Overall, understanding mental health information seeking and professional help-seeking patterns among Black emerging adults is valuable. As Viswanath et al. (2007) argue, “communication could offer one potent explanation for inequalities in health” and “may play a role in linking SES, resources, and final health outcomes” (p. 286).Mental healthHealth educationWeb studiesAmerican studiesdigital healthhelp-seekinginformation seekinginternetmental healthsocial mediapubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3f83m5jbetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt8ww5378g2026-06-04T06:43:54Zqt8ww5378gIntegrating Multiple Sources of Validity Evidence Using Cross-Classified Item Response Theory ModelingFeng, TianyingCai, Li2026-06-01In technology-based and data-rich research, integrating outcome data with process data is increasingly common. Outcome data, such as item-level responses on traditional assessments, capture what individuals know or can do. Process data, generated as individuals engage with computerized tasks, games, and simulations, capture how they engage with the content. Existing methods are limited in their ability to integrate these different data sources, accommodate explanatory predictors, and account for dependencies introduced by study design within a flexible and unified framework. This dissertation proposes a three-level cross-classified item response theory model and develops a variant of the Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro (MH-RM) algorithm for its estimation, in which the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin sampler is used to draw the missing data. The model jointly analyzes data from different sources (e.g., assessment and game-based measures), design and background variables, and nesting from study design. The Langevin-based MH-RM algorithm uses gradient information to guide proposals, motivated by the need for sampler efficiency in higher-dimensional settings. Two simulation studies were conducted to evaluate parameter recovery and computational performance under data conditions plausible for technology- and game-based evaluation research. The model and algorithm were applied to a multisite evaluation dataset to examine intervention effects and the interplay among assessment, gameplay, and design features. By combining process and outcome data within a coherent analytic framework, this dissertation shows how process data can serve as a valuable source of evidence for hard-to-measure behavioral and cognitive processes and for informing decisions about evaluation and improvement.Educational tests & measurementsStatisticsEducational technologyEducational psychologyCross-classified modellingEstimationGame-based evaluationItem response theoryMultilevel modellingTechnology-based evaluationpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ww5378getdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7158c7932026-06-04T06:43:49Zqt7158c793Probing the Physicochemical Determinants of Self-Assembly of Plant Virus-Like Particles for RNA DeliveryHarpell, Nina MirandaGelbart, William MRodriguez, Jose A2026-06-01Plant-derived virus-like particles (VLPs) can self-assemble and package non-native, therapeutic RNAs, making them promising platforms for RNA delivery. However, the rational design of VLPs for therapeutic use depends on understanding the physical and chemical principles that govern self- assembly across different viral platforms. This thesis investigates the limits of viral self-assembly across three plant virus platforms: Cowpea Chlorotic Mottle Virus (CCMV), Brome Mosaic Virus (BMV), and Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV). Chapter 2 investigates the effect of a single surface mutation of alanine to cysteine on CCMV capsid assembly. While the mutation is useful for site-specific conjugation of targeting ligands, it impairs assembly efficiency, with most of the mutant capsid protein forming incomplete, aggregated structures. A gel electrophoresis framework is developed to quantify mutant subunit incorporation into mixed wild type/mutant VLPs, demonstrating that the number of incorporated mutant capsid proteins into the capsid is linearly related to the number of mutant capsid proteins in the assembly mixture. Chapter 3 maps the structural phase diagram of BMV capsid protein across a broad range of pH and ionic strength, revealing that the predominant assembly states are in thermodynamic equilibrium, rather than kinetically controlled. Additionally, the phase diagram work is used to guide optimization of the two-step in vitro assembly protocol of BMV to produce a higher yield of complete particles. Chapter 4 demonstrates that CCMV and BMV can package precursor microRNA. Because this cargo is shorter than the ~3000 nt RNAs these capsids evolved to package, both platforms assemble non-canonical structures. CCMV produces uniform T=1 icosahedral particles, while BMV yields a heterogeneous population dominated by pseudo-T=2 particles and a minority of T=1 particles. Chapters 5 and 6 investigate growing tobacco for TMV production and the structure of TMV VLPs by packaging a truncated TMV genome (10% of the native length) to produce “mini” TMV rods 30 nm in length. These short particles provide a novel platform for interrogating the TMV capsid ends, which are implicated in co-translational disassembly of RNA and remain structurally unresolved. Finally, chapter 7 investigates methods to conjugate gold nanoparticles for RNA end modification. Taken together, this thesis maps the solution conditions, RNA cargos, and surface modifications that yield intact, functional VLPs. These findings establish a set of physicochemical rules that govern the tolerance of plant virus capsids to perturbation and reveal where that tolerance is most usefully harnessed for biomedical design, advancing the foundation for plant-virus-based RNA delivery vehicles.BiochemistryMolecular biologyGeneticsNanoscienceVirologyBiochemistryChemical Biologyplant virusesRNAStructural Biologyvirus-like particlesapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7158c793https://escholarship.org/content/qt7158c793/qt7158c793.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7kj3n9mk2026-06-04T06:43:43Zqt7kj3n9mkHolding Contradiction Together: Countering Relational Abandonment in the Figueroa CorridorFuentes, KimberlyRitterbusch, Amy E2026-06-01Despite decades of sex work research, minimal scholarship has directly addressed the relationship of sex workers, specifically street-based sex workers, to the places and communities they inhabit. Meanwhile, communities facing the brunt of organized abandonment consolidate their political agency on eradicating the sex trade. To address this gap, I organized five cohorts of three art-based workshops within the Figueroa Corridor with sex workers, motel owners, residents, and youth (n=41) in the Summer of 2025. This dissertation centers on the Figueroa Corridor, a contemporary site of urban warfare, where gentrification, human trafficking task forces, and a nonprofit-led moral contagion campaign to “Free the Land” mobilizes safety discourses towards carceral logics. Our methodological approach utilized collage, writing exercises, the construction of collective timelines, and mapping. The workshops provided insight into the remembered, the imagined, and the unsaid of the participant’s embodied geographies. Methodologically, this study demonstrates the utility of art-based, collective methods for accessing embodied and contested geographies.Drawing on Gilmore’s organized abandonment (2007), I conceptualize the relational organization of abandonment: the process through which we come to sort each other and (re)produce broader conditions of fragmentation through everyday social relationships. Principal findings offer three interrelated mechanisms of relational abandonment: the silencing of dissent as boundary enforcement, the fabrication of moral contagion narratives that produce material fortress logics, and the nonprofit gaze as the subjectivation of marginalized communities into nonprofit subjects. These findings contribute to scholarship on sex work, placemaking, and abolition geographies by tracing the symbiotic relationship between systems-level abandonment and its grassroots accomplice that is produced and maintained in multiply-marginalized communities. I contribute to critiques of the nonprofit-industrial complex (Rodríguez, 2007) by elucidating how the proliferation of nonprofits in marginalized neighborhoods creates emotional displacement, the consequence of being both resource-dense and community-poor. In contending with how to interrupt fragmentation, I offer sites of insurgent pedagogy as a method for civil society to organize against their abandonment and generate liberatory geographies through collective knowledge production. These insights can inform efforts to disrupt carceral safety regimes and reimagine responses to harm that do not rely on carceral intervention.Social workGeographyCriminologyabolition geographiessex workpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kj3n9mketdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt7b92r8kh2026-06-04T06:43:38Zqt7b92r8khStrategies for broad pathogen neutralization through benign antibody-mediated targeting of human transferrin receptor 1Munoz, Aldo JavierRodriguez, Jose A2026-06-01Transferrin receptor 1 (TfR1) is at the intersection of cellular iron internalization, infectious disease, oncology, and neurological delivery. Its main role is to regulate iron uptake into cells by binding the iron carrier, transferrin (Tf), and internalizing it into acidic endosomes for iron release. However, it has been observed that TfR1 is a target of a variety of pathogens. Many of which target the apical domain, a subdomain of TfR1. This creates an opportunity to target TfR1 as a novel strategy to develop broadly neutralizing therapeutics. In this regard, chapter 2 discusses the use of apical domain binding antibodies to prevent the cellular entry of pathogenic New World Mammarenaviruses (NWM). Additionally, high-resolution structures of the antibody fragments bound to TfR1 were determined to explain the mechanisms of pathogen neutralization and pH dependency of the antibodies. In chapter 3, we then discuss the humanization of the murine antibodies to engineer them into better therapeutics. In chapter 4, we shift focus to elucidating the yet to be described structural conformational changes that occur to the TfR1-Tf complex as it cycles into acidic endosomes for iron release. We reveal the highest resolution structure of TfR1-Tf at physiological pH to date, and a novel high-resolution structure at pH ~5, near the pH seen in the acidic endosomes. This work gives a structural explanation on the mechanisms of pathogen neutralization of deadly pathogenic NWMs by antibodies that can be used to neutralize the many other pathogens that bind TfR1. The engineering of the antibodies means that they would not only be useful for pathogen neutralization but also for cancer targeting or delivery across the blood-brain barrier. Both of which are areas of observed increased TfR1 expression. Lastly, this work structurally illuminates an essential biochemical mechanism that underlies nearly every fundamental category of metabolism.BiochemistryMolecular biologyImmunologyAntibodycryo-EMIronStructure-based humanizationTransferrinTransferrin Receptor 1publiceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/7b92r8khetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2x31b6vs2026-06-04T06:43:33Zqt2x31b6vsMechanisms of efficacy and toxicity in enhanced CAR-T cell therapy for liquid and solid tumorsShih, RyanChen, Yvonne Y.2026-06-01Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy has led to impressive clinical responses in patients with advanced hematological malignancies, encouraging efforts to translate those benefits to patients with solid tumors. However, both liquid and solid tumors pose unique challenges to cell therapies, including propensity for antigen escape, immunosuppressive signaling, antigen heterogeneity, and polarization of endogenous immune cells toward pro-tumoral phenotypes. Additionally, engineering synthetic biology circuits into T cells can lead to diverse pathological processes of immune activation that, when severe, can be fatal. Achieving sufficient anti-tumor efficacy in the face of multiple resistance mechanisms while simultaneously avoiding severe immune toxicities is therefore a primary objective. Accordingly, diverse functional enhancements to improve the efficacy and/or toxicity profile of CAR-T cell therapy have been explored, and understanding the mechanisms that drive those improvements are of paramount importance to inform rational combinatorial approaches and provide foundational understanding about expected effects in clinical translation. Here, we present mechanistic investigations of three enhanced CAR-T cell therapies designed to improve efficacy or toxicity:(1) To prevent the common toxicity of cytokine release syndrome (CRS) in treatment of leukemia, our group engineered CD19-targeted CAR-T cells to secrete immunomodulatory proteins to disrupt inflammatory signaling cascades. We find that secretion of a tocilizumab-derived single-chain variable fragment improves both efficacy and toxicity through a transcriptional balance of effector and memory function.(2) To oppose immunosuppression mediated by transforming growth factor (TGF)-β in glioblastoma, our group engineered IL-13Rα2–targeted CAR-T cells that sequester TGF-β and rewire its signaling to stimulate, rather than suppress, CAR-T cells. We find that these enhanced CAR-T cells safely improve control of orthotopic glioma by remodeling endogenous immune compartments in the brain without negative systemic effects.(3) To oppose antigen heterogeneity and immunosuppressive myeloid cells in glioblastoma, our group engineered IL-13Rα2-targeted CAR-T cells that inducibly secrete cytokine armors to repolarize endogenous immune cells and stimulate native anti-tumor immunity. We find that this “armoring” strategy profoundly alters intrinsic CAR-T cell function, leading to marked pro-inflammatory changes in diverse immune lineages. While toxicity was observed, our investigations identify the Bhlhe40/GM-CSF axis as a potential ablation target for toxicity mitigation.ImmunologyCellular biologyOncologyMolecular biologypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2x31b6vsetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt2t1731jh2026-06-04T06:43:26Zqt2t1731jhMicrobial Regulation of Serotonin in Gut Neuroimmune Interactions and Colorectal Canceryu, lewis wHsiao, Elaine Y2026-06-01The gut microbiome is increasingly recognized as a central regulator of host physiology, influencing immune, neural, and metabolic systems through complex host–microbe interactions. Emerging evidence demonstrates that the microbiome actively shapes the neuroimmune landscape, impacting the development and function of immune and nervous system networks in both the intestine and distal organs, including the central nervous system. Dysregulation of microbiome–neuroimmune interactions has been implicated in a wide range of inflammatory, neurological, and neoplastic diseases, highlighting the importance of understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying these interactions.Recent studies suggest that classical neurochemicals serve as key mediators of communication between microbial, immune, and neural systems. Among these, serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine; 5-HT), a tryptophan-derived signaling molecule produced predominantly by intestinal enterochromaffin cells (ECs), has emerged as an important regulator of microbiome–neuroimmune interactions. The gut microbiome modulates serotonin bioavailability through microbial metabolites and signaling pathways, leading to downstream effects on immune responses, neuronal activity, and microbial fitness. However, how microbiome-responsive serotonin signaling shapes local immune networks and contributes to disease pathogenesis remains poorly understood.In this dissertation, I demonstrate that microbial induction of EC-derived serotonin promotes immune tolerance and increases susceptibility to colorectal cancer. These findings identify EC-derived serotonin as a microbiome-regulated instructive signal that links epithelial sensing of the microbiota to dendritic cell programming, immune tolerance, and colorectal tumorigenesis. Collectively, this work establishes serotonin as a mediator of gut neuroimmune homeostasis and reveals a novel microbiome–epithelial–immune axis that can be subverted to promote cancer.ImmunologyNeurosciencesMicrobiologyCellular biologyOncologyColorectal cancerImmuneMicrobiomeNeuroimmuneSerotoninpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/2t1731jhetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt63t1d6b62026-06-04T06:43:22Zqt63t1d6b6Genomic and Epigenomic Analysis for Forensic ApplicationsFlores, MariaPellegrini, Matteo2026-06-01Forensic investigations increasingly rely on genomic and epigenomic analyses to extract identifying information from complex biological evidence. Advances in forensic DNA technologies have enabled the interpretation of mixed DNA profiles from multiple contributors and the estimation of chronological age from trace biological samples. However, these approaches depend on statistical frameworks that must account for substantial biological and technical variability. A central challenge is that forensic models may exhibit systematic inaccuracies or biases when underlying assumptions fail to capture the complexity of human genetic and epigenetic variation. Understanding these limitations is critical for improving the reliability and equity of forensic methodologies. In chapter 2, we investigate the accuracy of forensic DNA mixture interpretation across human genetic variation. Using simulated DNA mixtures generated from allele frequency distributions representing 83 human groups, we evaluate false inclusion rates across varying numbers of contributors and reference population specifications. We demonstrate that false inclusion rates increase with mixture complexity and are elevated in groups with lower genetic diversity, particularly when inappropriate reference populations are applied during likelihood ratio calculations. These findings highlight the importance of population genetic diversity in forensic DNA interpretation and support the need for more conservative and carefully validated approaches to complex mixture analysis. In chapter 3, I examine forensic age estimation using DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks. Many forensic age prediction models rely on linear regression approaches despite methylation changes exhibiting non-linear dynamics across the lifespan. To address the limitation, I compare multivariable linear regression, random forest regression, and a LOESS-based maximum likelihood framework using publicly available droplet digital PCR methylation datasets. I show that the non-linear maximum likelihood framework consistently reduces age-associated residual bias relative to traditional approaches while maintaining competitive predictive accuracy. These results demonstrate the value of non-linear modeling techniques for improving the reliability and interpretability of forensic epigenetic age estimation. Together these studies emphasize the importance of statistical rigor, bias evaluation, and biological variability in the development of forensic genomic and epigenomic tools for forensic investigations.BioinformaticsForensic sciencesForensic anthropologyGeneticsDNA methylationDNA mixture interpretationepigenetic age estimationforensic genomicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/63t1d6b6https://escholarship.org/content/qt63t1d6b6/qt63t1d6b6.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6sp2d3ds2026-06-04T06:43:17Zqt6sp2d3dsPost-school Engagement Outcomes and Predictors for High School Leavers with DisabilitiesKim, Eunice KunyoungKasari, Connie L2026-06-01Transitioning from high school to adulthood presents unique challenges for students with disabilities, particularly given the abrupt end of school-based services upon graduation or aging out. Despite federal mandates under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) to support postsecondary transition, students with disabilities continue to lag behind their peers without disabilities in postsecondary engagement, college enrollment, and employment. This study examined demographic characteristics and in-school experiences as predictors of three postsecondary outcomes: postsecondary engagement, college enrollment, and competitive employment among high school leavers with disabilities in a large, diverse urban school district in Southern California. Using special education administrative records spanning 2008 to 2019, this cross-sectional study analyzed data from 13,823 students with documented postsecondary outcomes within one year of exiting high school. Multilevel logistic regression models were estimated to account for clustering within five geographic regions. Predictors included disability type, race/ethnicity, sex, free and reduced lunch status, English language learner status, inclusion in general education, diploma attainment, school type, and parental participation in the Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Results revealed persistent inequities shaped by both demographic factors and school-based experiences. Students with Emotional Disturbance faced the highest rates of disengagement, with 35.93% having no postsecondary engagement. Hispanic and African American students had significantly lower odds of postsecondary engagement and college enrollment compared to White peers. Students with Intellectual Disability had higher odds of engagement but substantially lower odds of college enrollment, often being routed toward adult programs. Inclusion in general education and diploma attainment were consistently associated with higher odds of postsecondary engagement and college enrollment across all models. In contrast, employment outcomes followed a distinct pattern, with students not graduating with a diploma and those attending continuation or alternative schools showing higher odds of competitive employment, suggesting divergent postsecondary pathways. Findings underscore the importance of equitable access to inclusive education, rigorous transition planning, and family engagement in supporting diverse postsecondary trajectories for students with disabilities. Limitations include the use of secondary administrative data, a one-year follow-up window, and the absence of school-level identifiers. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.Special educationDisability studiesBehavioral psychologycompetitive employmentdisabilitiesinclusionpostsecondary outcomesspecial educationtransitionsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sp2d3dshttps://escholarship.org/content/qt6sp2d3ds/qt6sp2d3ds.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1jz310z12026-06-04T06:43:12Zqt1jz310z1Backlash from the Streets: Public Demonstrations and their Impact on the Trade Agreement Ratification Process in Latin AmericaTrejo, AlfredoPeters, Margaret E2026-06-01Do public demonstrations by anti-trade activists affect the ratification process of preferential trade agreements in Latin America? Past research on the trade agreement process has largely focused on the composition of the trade partners and the domestic political actors with veto power. Yet, neoliberal market-driven reforms, like trade agreements, have been the catalyst for significant protest campaigns for the past 50 years. This project examines the relationship between protests against trade agreements in Latin America and the duration of the ratification process using event history modeling and an original data set. I find that public demonstrations can delay the ratification process, but that those effects can be mitigated by other factors, such as power asymmetries between the partner countries. The project examines the events that led to the creation of the Dominican Republic–Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) with the United States, and the effect of public demonstrations during the ratification process of the treaty in Costa Rica. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Costa Rican experts on DR-CAFTA, this study offers insights into why the “No” campaign started and what they accomplished.Political scienceLatin American studiesInternational relationsPublic administrationCAFTACosta RicaDominican Republic--Central American Free Trade AgreementpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1jz310z1etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt67c390x52026-06-04T06:43:07Zqt67c390x5Next-Generation Innovations for Liver Transplant Diagnostics and Tissue EngineeringTang, Rui ChianDi Carlo, Dino2026-06-01Innovations in diagnostic tools and tissue engineering technologies have been indispensable in advancing healthcare and biomedical research. In the context of liver transplantation, these technologies can facilitate clinical decision-making before and after transplantation, improve post-transplant patient care, and contribute to future regenerative strategies that may reduce reliance on donor organs.This dissertation develops point-of-care diagnostic and biomaterial platforms to address key bottlenecks across the transplant continuum, including rapid pre-transplant graft evaluation, accessible post-transplant drug monitoring, and scaffold designs for future regenerative and organ-replacement strategies. For the diagnostic components, this work uses a vertical flow assay (VFA) platform, a paper-based testing format in which liquid samples flow through stacked assay layers to generate visible signals that can be captured by a portable reader or smartphone. This approach enables rapid and accessible measurement of multiple biomarkers or drug levels outside of centralized laboratory settings. For the biomaterial component, this work also develops a microporous annealed particle scaffold that supports three-dimensional cell organization and tissue ingrowth for future regenerative applications.In Chapter 1, we present a multiplexed diagnostic test for evaluating inflammatory markers in donor livers during normothermic machine perfusion. Although inflammatory cytokines such as IL-6, TNF-α, and IL-8 have been associated with transplant outcomes, they are not routinely screened because conventional laboratory assays are time-consuming, instrument-dependent, and difficult to implement during time-sensitive graft assessment. By adapting these biomarkers to the vertical flow assay platform, this work enables their simultaneous detection through a sandwich immunoassay format. Colorimetric signals generated on the assay membrane are captured with portable imaging and interpreted using a machine learning-based decision model to classify perfusate inflammatory status, correctly identifying elevated inflammatory status in a perfusate sample from a clinically discarded donor liver. This diagnostic tool may support more timely liver graft assessment, improve organ utilization, and reduce post-transplant complications.In Chapter 2, we develop a hydrophobic drug extraction workflow and a point-of-care diagnostic for detecting an immunosuppressant drug, tacrolimus, in post-transplant patient-blood samples. Proper control of tacrolimus levels in post-transplant patients is key to preventing nephrotoxicity from overexposure and enhanced risk of organ rejection from underexposure. However, the current LC-MS-based monitoring relies on centralized laboratory workflows, which can prolong result turnaround and delay timely dose adjustment. To address this limitation, we present a competitive vertical flow assay for tacrolimus, integrated with a liquid-liquid extraction method that isolates tacrolimus from the blood matrix into an aqueous phase that is compatible with the paper-based immunoassay. Together, the assay and extraction workflow provide a foundation for rapid therapeutic drug monitoring and may be adaptable to other hydrophobic small-molecule drugs that are difficult to detect directly in complex biological matrices.While Chapters 1 and 2 focus on diagnostic bottlenecks in transplantation, Chapter 3 addresses the longer-term engineering challenge of engineering scaffold architectures that may support tissue formation and future organ-replacement strategies. Specifically, we manufacture hydrogel microparticles that assemble into microporous granular architectures to facilitate cell migration and proliferation. By engineering individual particles into a crescent shape, we enhance scaffold porosity and pore interconnectivity. These geometric cues enhance cell infiltration and proliferation both in vitro and in vivo without the addition of chemoattractant or biochemical cues. This chapter highlights the critical role of three-dimensional geometry in cellular recruitment and its potential for next-generation regenerative scaffolds and future organ-replacement strategies.Overall, this dissertation introduces platform technologies to address the clinical need for organ transplantation, including pre-transplant graft assessment, post-transplant therapeutic monitoring, and regenerative scaffold design. These technologies have the potential to be applied to other biofluid-based diagnostic applications, small-molecule drug extraction workflows, and biomaterial systems for three-dimensional cell expansion. By expanding on these innovative technologies, we can advance the forefront of diagnostics and tissue engineering, eventually improving patient care and biomedical translation.BioengineeringBiomedical engineeringHealth care managementDiagnosticsLiver TransplantMicrofluidicsPoint of CareTissue EngineeringpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/67c390x5etdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6wx946c72026-06-04T06:43:03Zqt6wx946c7Label-Efficient Learning for Medical Imaging and Multimodal Healthcare AIVepa, Arvind MurariSun, Yizhou2026-06-01Deep learning has seen remarkable advancements in machine learning, yet it often demands extensive annotated data. In healthcare, vast clinical datasets are available, yet several barriers limit their use for training medical deep learning models, including privacy constraints, noisy or missing clinical annotations, and imperfect label extraction methods. These challenges slow both research progress and real-world deployment. In my PhD, I explore active learning and various forms of weak supervision to reduce annotation cost while preserving model performance. I then apply what we learned to emerging problems in medical AI, demonstrating strong performance relative to clinicians and highlighting the feasibility of developing low-cost, clinically useful medical foundation models.Computer scienceArtificial intelligenceHealth care managementArtificial IntelligenceDataHealthcareMultimodalSegmentationapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wx946c7https://escholarship.org/content/qt6wx946c7/qt6wx946c7.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6hp234bz2026-06-04T06:42:57Zqt6hp234bzAugmented Causal Diagrams and Estimands for Causal Inference in Non-Communicable and Infectious Disease EpidemiologyCoates, Matthew MajerusArah, Onyebuchi A2026-06-01Causal questions in public health research are often posed about exposures and outcomes that are situated within complex systems. The studies used to answer these questions are often observational, and data can be messy, containing mismeasured or misclassified variables, omitting information about key confounders, and reflecting only partially observed causal processes. In these contexts, careful causal inference – including defining a meaningful and clear causal estimand and specifying a causal model that describes the causal processes underlying the relationships between the exposure and the outcome – is necessary to produce valid, policy-relevant analysis. This dissertation focuses on causal diagrams and estimands. The first study proposes an algorithm for constructing causal diagrams for interventionist causal inference using published causal loop diagrams and illustrates its use in cancer screening and COVID-19 vaccination applications. Automated software that accepts user inputs about the exposure(s) and outcome, as well as additional assumptions, could facilitate easier translation of CLDs to DAGs, which can be arduous for large, complex CLDs. The second study uses augmented causal diagrams, causal estimands, and simulation to understand lead-time bias and co-occurring biases in cancer screening studies. Lead-time bias can be classified as information bias arising from measurement error in the outcome (survival from diagnosis rather than from some other fixed time point) that is differential with respect to screening. It generally co-occurs with selection bias resulting from restricting analysis to people who have been diagnosed. The study also demonstrates that specification of a clear causal estimand is necessary to understand the nature and magnitude of the bias and explores challenges with target populations related to cancer status, which is only known after the intervention of interest. The third study uses augmented causal diagrams to inform an empirical study examining whether pregnant and postpartum women remain at continued risk of more severe COVID-19-related outcomes than non-pregnant women using commercial health insurance claims data. Concerns about measurement and uncontrolled confounding led to analytical choices regarding outcomes and to sensitivity analyses to strengthen the validity of the study findings, which indicate that pregnant women continue to be at increased risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes in the post-pandemic period.EpidemiologyPublic healthHealth sciencescausal diagramCausal infereceCOVID-19lead-time biaspregnancypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hp234bzetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3d25478n2026-06-04T06:42:52Zqt3d25478nCounterinsurgent Care: Social Work, Policing, and the Management of Black LiberationMurrray, Bethany JoTurner, David CRoy, Ananya2026-06-01This dissertation, Counterinsurgent Care: Social Work, Policing, and the Management of Black Liberation, examines how social work has been mobilized as a bureaucratic technology to maintain state legitimacy by absorbing Black rebellion and critiques of law enforcement into palatable reforms that maintain racial domination. Focusing on Los Angeles between the Watts Rebellion (1965) and the Tax Revolt (1978), this study situates this era of law enforcement reform within the long durée of neoliberalism, an era characterized by fiscal austerity and the reorganization of welfare and social care. Across these decades, social work was deployed not only as a “caring” response to police violence amidst racial unrest but as an instrument of bureaucratic violence, translating demands for structural change into administrative reforms that stabilized white supremacy and state authority.Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of conjuncture and Stuart Hall’s method of conjunctural analysis, the dissertation conceptualizes this period as a care conjuncture: a moment in which the meaning of care, safety, and reform was rearticulated through struggle. The Watts Rebellion and Proposition 13 Tax Revolt emerge as two “overdetermined events” that bookend this conjuncture. The first organic crisis (police violence) revealed a hegemonic struggle over who is deemed worthy of care and safety, and exposed how anti-Blackness underpins the state’s social order. The second crisis (fiscal responsibility) arose in backlash to investment in care and social services, reasserting white dominance through austerity, privatization, and propertied wealth. Together, these crises illuminate how neoliberal carceral governance transformed racialized fear and resentment into fiscal discipline, institutionalizing scarcity as a mode of social care.Through archival research, oral histories, and policy analysis, this study traces how social work was repeatedly reconfigured at the nexus of care and coercion, expanding through post-Watts welfare reforms and contracting amid the white suburban tax revolt and austerity politics of the late 1970s. Later, echoes of this unaddressed care conjuncture would reemerge in twenty-first-century “community safety” and “trauma-informed” frameworks following the 2020 uprisings. In each instance, social work’s ostensibly benevolent reforms operated as what Gramsci terms passive revolutions, absorbing elements of oppositional critique (such as calls for accountability or community control) to reconstitute hegemony without dismantling the racial state.Social workHistoryLaw enforcementPolitical scienceBlack studiesAbolitionCarceral StudiesCritical theoryOral historyPolice reformSocial work historypubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3d25478netdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt6wc341zp2026-06-04T06:42:47Zqt6wc341zpInvestigating Mitochondrial Heat Shock Stress in Non-Small Cell Lung CancerRodriguez, Jocelyn DianeShackelford, David B2026-06-01Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The 5-year survival rate for advanced NSCLC is 6%, highlighting the need for targeted therapies. While recent advances have improved outcomes, many patients develop resistance to therapies. Limited studies have mapped the mitochondrial heat shock protein (mHSPs) and the regulation of mitochondrial stress in NSCLC. mHSPs are crucial signaling molecules for protein folding and maintaining mitochondrial homeostasis. In this study, we dissect the metabolic vulnerabilities regulated by HSP75, a mHSP in NSCLC. HSP75 prevents apoptosis, protects cells from cellular stress and is selectively expressed in multiple cancers. Here, we show that HSP75 localizes to the mitochondrial matrix in both lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and squamous (LUSC) carcinomas. Genetic and pharmacological inhibition of HSP75 exhibits differential sensitivity in lung cancer cell viability. Notably, pharmacological inhibition of HSP75 in vivo significantly attenuated tumor growth, suggesting therapeutic vulnerability. Our study highlights targeted HSP75 inhibition can potentially be used as a therapeutic regiment for NSCLC.Molecular biologyCellular biologyOncologyBiochemistryImmunologyHeat Shock proteinsHSP75Lung CancerMitochondriaMitochondria StressTRAP1publiceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wc341zpetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt1dn7v3xx2026-06-04T06:42:42Zqt1dn7v3xxQuantum Averaging Theory: Effective Hamiltonians Beyond the RWA for Multi-Timescale Driven Quantum SystemsBarajas, KristianCampbell, Wesley C2026-06-01Driven quantum systems are central to quantum computation and quantum control across every major hardware platform. In the simplest setting, a qubit driven near resonance is well described by the rotating-wave approximation, which eliminates rapidly oscillating counterrotating terms and retains the slowly-varying resonant interaction. This picture breaks down when drives span multiple frequencies at incommensurate values, when near-resonant beat notes arise from higher-order interactions, or when corrections beyond leading order cannot be neglected. The existing toolkit handles each of these regimes separately: Floquet–Magnus and Van Vleck high-frequency expansions preserve unitarity for periodic drives but fail at resonance, while adiabatic elimination and Schrieffer–Wolff transformations break down as the detuning approaches the coupling strength. No single method treats the general multi-timescale case within a systematic, unitarity-preserving framework.We present a quantum averaging theory (QAT) that resolves this by integrating the Magnus expansion with the classical method of averaging on multiple timescales. QAT factorizes the unitary evolution into a slow propagator governed by a Hermitian effective Hamiltonian and a dynamical phase operator encoding the fast oscillatory dynamics, with unitarity preserved at every order.In the far-detuned regime, QAT recovers and generalizes Magnus-based high-frequency expansions to almost-periodic multi-modal drives, with explicit error bounds. The central result is the multi-timescale extension, where near-resonant drives are not averaged away and the effective Hamiltonian retains a slow time-dependence. Two complementary derivations are given: a deductive two-timescale derivative expansion and an inductive Partitioned Expansion by Timescale Separation (PETS), shown to be equivalent and extendable to arbitrarily many timescales through an iterative renormalization procedure.We further extend QAT to open quantum systems by replacing the Schrödinger equation with the Lindblad master equation, yielding an effective Lindbladian that captures the coarse-grained dynamics and a dissipative dynamical phase encoding fast decoherence at off-resonant frequencies.Together, these results constitute a unified framework for driven quantum systems, demonstrated on touchstone problems in quantum optics including Rabi oscillations and Raman transitions with higher-order corrections, with broad applicability to any driven quantum system wherever multiple timescales compete.Quantum physicsAtomic physicsPhysicsTheoretical physicsapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/1dn7v3xxhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt1dn7v3xx/qt1dn7v3xx.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt3s41v0pm2026-06-04T06:42:37Zqt3s41v0pm(Des)Madres: Motherhood in Contemporary Latin American LiteratureJaramillo, Brenda SaraíMarturano, Jorge2026-06-01This doctoral thesis links three different authors writing about motherhood in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia to analyze how women writers throughout Latin America are representing the institution of motherhood. By focusing on the dissonance between institutional motherhood and individual mothering, this dissertation explores how women produce and reproduce knowledge about motherhood, an institution that interpellates them as gendered subjects. Specifically, this dissertation explores how women strategically appropriate, reject, and subvert patriarchal motherhood, paying close attention to their unexamined expectations and the moments of negotiation that unsettle them.The principal objects of analysis include Clarice Lispector’s Laços de Família, Pilar Quintana’s La perra, and Camila Sosa Villada’s Las malas. These texts use motherhood as a site of discursive identification wherein larger institutions are navigated, subverted, or reinforced. To ground the texts in their proper thematic and cultural context, this dissertation also engages a variety of other authors and cultural productions, including novels, short stories, memoirs, and translations that illustrate by comparison the principal text’s significance.The analytical arc of this dissertation begins by studying the moment of epiphany in which a mother becomes aware of the extent of her own complicity in the institution of motherhood. From there, it moves on to a marginalized woman’s attempt to secure social significance via a strategic appropriation of institutional motherhood. Finally, it ends with a study of a queer mother’s defiant care work that directly challenges the state’s insistence on binary identification. In all three texts, institutional motherhood is revealed as a tool of control, imposed by an internalized biopolitics of gender that demands obedience and submission to another’s needs. This results in a living death: the Claricean walking slumber from which mothers awaken, terrified; a vampiric motherhood rooted in extractive logics of social death; a celebration of a dead mother’s mythic breast.By combining the interdisciplinary framework of maternal theory with the protagonism of mothers in contemporary literature written by Latin American women, this dissertation advances Guadalupe Nettel’s call to “de-sacralize” biological motherhood. This dissertation thus bridges the divide between Latin American literary studies and motherhood studies. Esta tesis doctoral vincula a tres autoras que escriben sobre la maternidad en Argentina, Brasil y Colombia, con el fin de analizar cómo las escritoras de América Latina representan la institución de la maternidad. Al centrarse en la disonancia entre la maternidad institucional y el ejercicio individual de la maternidad, esta disertación explora cómo las mujeres producen y reproducen conocimientos sobre la maternidad, una institución que las interpela como sujetos generizados. Específicamente, este trabajo estudia cómo las mujeres se apropian estratégicamente de la maternidad patriarcal —así como la rechazan y la subvierten—, prestando especial atención a sus expectativas inexploradas y a los momentos de negociación que las desestabilizan.Los principales objetos de análisis incluyen Laços de Família, de Clarice Lispector; La perra, de Pilar Quintana; y Las malas, de Camila Sosa Villada. Estos textos utilizan la maternidad como un espacio de identificación discursiva en el que se transitan, subvierten o refuerzan instituciones de mayor envergadura. Para situar estos textos en su contexto temático y cultural adecuado, la disertación dialoga también con una variedad de otras autoras y producciones culturales —incluyendo novelas, cuentos, memorias y traducciones— que ilustran, por vía comparativa, la relevancia de las obras principales.El arco analítico de esta disertación comienza con el estudio del momento epifánico en el que una madre toma conciencia del alcance de su propia complicidad con la institución de la maternidad. A partir de ahí, avanza hacia el intento de una mujer marginada por asegurar su relevancia social mediante una apropiación estratégica de la maternidad institucional. Finalmente, concluye con un análisis de la maternidad desafiante de una madre travesti cuya adopción de un bebé abandonado directamente reta la lógica binaria del Estado. En los tres textos, la maternidad institucional se revela como una herramienta de control, impuesta por una biopolítica de género interiorizada que exige obediencia y sumisión a las necesidades ajenas. El resultado es una muerte en vida: ese «sueño despierto» de estirpe clariceana del que las madres despiertan aterrorizadas; una maternidad vampírica, arraigada en lógicas extractivas de muerte social; una celebración del pecho mítico de una madre muerta.Al combinar el marco interdisciplinario de la teoría de la maternidad con el protagonismo de las madres en la literatura contemporánea escrita por mujeres latinoamericanas, esta disertación da continuidad al llamado de Guadalupe Nettel a «desacralizar» la maternidad biológica. De este modo, el presente trabajo tiende un puente entre los estudios literarios latinoamericanos y los estudios sobre la maternidad.Latin American literatureGender studiesLatin American studiesWomens studiesLatin American literatureLatin American motherhoodapplication/pdfpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/3s41v0pmhttps://escholarship.org/content/qt3s41v0pm/qt3s41v0pm.pdfetdoai:escholarship.org:ark:/13030/qt0tm701mz2026-06-04T06:42:33Zqt0tm701mzAutomation and AI for Data-Driven Radiotherapy Planning, Plan Quality Assessment, and Large-Scale Data IntegrationAbdulkadir, YasinLamb, James M2026-06-01Radiotherapy treatment planning relies on labor-intensive contouring, iterative optimization, and fragmented data systems, which contribute to inefficiency, inter-planner variability, and barriers to large-scale quality improvement. This dissertation develops and evaluates automation and artificial intelligence tools to improve contouring, data integration, dose prediction, and plan quality assessment in radiation oncology.First, deep learning models were developed for automated segmentation across multiple radiotherapy settings. For 0.35T MRI-guided pelvic radiotherapy, a UNet++ workflow achieved median Dice coefficients of 0.92, 0.92, 0.93, and 0.87 for the right and left femoral heads, bladder, and rectum, respectively, with 59% to 96% of contour slices accepted without modification in clinical use. For CT-guided high-dose-rate brachytherapy, models achieved median Dice coefficients of 0.95 for bladder and 0.87 for rectum on clinically relevant target-containing slices. This work also developed a multi-modal framework for head-and-neck gross tumor volume auto-contouring using planning CT, T1- and T2-weighted MRI, and PET, extending automation from organs at risk to tumor delineation.Second, a generalized software framework was developed to consolidate radiotherapy planning and delivery data from heterogeneous clinical systems. Starting from treatment records and recursively resolving DICOM relationships, the framework reconstructed complete treatment datasets across institutions. In a two-clinic deployment spanning eleven years, it retrieved and linked 13,871 radiotherapy plans from 6,164 patients with a 99.76% success rate.Third, a MedNeXt-based 3D dose prediction model was developed for heterogeneous multi-cohort radiotherapy planning. On the GDP-HMM validation set, the model achieved a mean absolute error of 2.04 Gy, and an ensemble achieved 2.071 Gy on the held-out test set, corresponding to first-place overall performance. Direct application to independent institutional head-and-neck data showed substantial domain shift, but fine-tuning reduced mean absolute error from 7.387 to 3.676 Gy. Building on this work, a plan quality assessment framework was developed using predicted 3D dose as a patient-specific benchmark compared with clinical plans through dose-volume histogram-based and spatial metrics.Together, these studies show that clinically useful radiotherapy automation requires accurate segmentation, scalable data infrastructure, adaptable dose prediction, and objective plan evaluation. The resulting framework supports efficient planning, reduced variability, and patient-specific quality assessment in a learning radiotherapy system.PhysicsBiomedical engineeringBiologyArtificial intelligenceArtifical IntelligenceAutomated SegmentationDose PredictionRadiation OncologyRadiotherapyTreatment PlanningpubliceScholarship, University of Californiahttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/0tm701mzetdoai_dc:ucla_etd:500:14476:eyJmaXJzdCI6NTAwLCJiZWZvcmUiOiIyMDI2LTA5LTA4VDA1OjAzOjA3KzAwOjAwIiwiYWZ0ZXIiOiIyMDExLTAzLTE4VDE0OjMyOjQyKzAwOjAwIiwiaW5jbHVkZSI6WyJQVUJMSVNIRUQiLCJFTUJBUkdPRUQiXSwib3JkZXIiOiJVUERBVEVEX0RFU0MiLCJsYXN0SUQiOiJxdDB0bTcwMW16IiwibGFzdERhdGUiOiIyMDI2LTA2LTA0VDA2OjQyOjMzKzAwOjAwIn0