UC Riverside

The transition to adulthood for young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) is known for its unique challenges, such as limited or non-existent services after high school and poor outcomes faced in adulthood. Given these challenges, it is important to further explore the transition planning experiences of caregivers and young adults with and without IDD, Individualized Transition Program (ITP) involvement and satisfaction, and predictors of adulthood outcomes. This study used qualitative data from caregiver (n=116) and young adult (n=99) interviews to further explore the needed support and existing support during the transition from high school into adulthood. Thematic analysis results found that across diagnostic groups (IDD vs. neurotypical), reports were similar regarding support needed and existing support provided. Supports needed included employment/career planning, adaptive skills, transition involvement, and financial education. One support needed that was unique to the IDD group was the accessibility of services/information. Existing supports included social support, adaptive skills, employment/career preparation, and transition-specific preparation. These existing supports overlapped with needed supports, indicating a need to enhance and coordinate these supports across different domains, not just within the home but at school and through other government-funded agencies. ITP results found that over 96% of caregivers reported involvement in the ITP process, but only 59% reported being satisfied with the ITP. Over 66% of young adults were reportedly involved in their own ITP, and about 59% actively participated. As for adolescent predictors of transition outcomes in early adulthood, externalizing behaviors at age 15, social skills at age 15, IQ at age 13, and diagnostic category were all significant predictors of adulthood outcomes. These findings may provide insight into how to individualize transition support for young adults with IDD.

Multilayer vias play a crucial role in the interconnection of different layers within electronic devices, enabling the transmission of signals and facilitating complex circuit designs. This abstract presents a comprehensive overview of the structural analysis and fabrication approach for multilayer vias, focusing on their importance, fabrication techniques, and characterization methods.

The abstract emphasizes the significance of multilayer vias as key components in modern electronic devices, enabling efficient signal transmission and improving overall circuit performance. It highlights the importance of understanding the structural properties of these vias to ensure their functionality and reliability.

The abstract also discusses various fabrication techniques employed for multilayer vias, such as deposition, lithography, and etching processes. It emphasizes the need for precise control and optimization of these fabrication steps to achieve high-quality vias with desired dimensional and geometric characteristics.

In addition, the abstract briefly mentions the characterization methods utilized to assess the structural properties of multilayer vias, such as optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). These characterization techniques provide valuable insights into the morphology, surface roughness, and dimensional accuracy of the fabricated vias.

Overall, this abstract serves as a concise overview of the structural analysis and fabrication approach for multilayer vias. It highlights the importance of understanding their structural properties, discusses key fabrication techniques, and briefly mentions the characterization methods used to assess their quality. This information provides a foundation for further research and development in the field of multilayer via technology.

Accurate measurements of an object’s fundamental physical properties like mass, volume, and density can provide valuable insights about an object and how it behaves. This is especially true for biological or bioengineered samples that reside in liquid environments. In this thesis, we demonstrate a new method for quantifying the mass, volume, and density of samples in their native liquid environments using resonating mass sensors. By vibrating a liquid-filled glass tube at its resonance frequency and passing a solid sample through the tube, the tube’s resonance frequency changes by an amount that is inversely proportional to the sample’s buoyant mass. This enables microgram-scaled objects to be measured in their native liquid environment with nanogram resolution, without the need for labels or tags. Sensor applications are demonstrated by studying the degradation rates of biomaterials, measuring the physical properties of hydrogels, and evaluating the dissolution rates of drug delivery systems.

In addition to vibrating glass tubes, a low-cost method for measuring liquid density is presented utilizing a 3000-year-old musical instrument called the Mbira. By modifying the metal tine of the Mbira, a density resolution of 0.012 g/mL is achieved, making it an accessible tool for resource-limited settings. This low-cost method has the potential to be a powerful tool for determining the authenticity of liquid medications in developing countries. This idea is expanded by exploring alternative designs for low-cost density meter designs for chemical analysis. We present a simple 3D-printed sensor capable of measuring the density of a substance with high precision. The plastic tuning forks are shown to offer several advantages over their metal counterparts, including reduced costs, increased durability, and improved design flexibility. By providing an inexpensive and easy-to-use method for testing the purity or chemical identity of a sample, these plastic resonators can find uses in many applications, particularly in low-resource settings and developing regions at a low cost.

“‘Odd Feelings About Books’: Affective Attachments to Middle English Literature” examines how and why certain Middle English texts and textual objects come to be associated with extra-institutional forms of intellectual production and ‘amateurish’ modes of readerly response. I examine how Middle English authors and scribes, and the modern scholars who study them, respond materially to the literary work of the period and express feelings for their objects they study. Specifically, I consider relationalities between an individual and their object of study that are largely deemed by others to be modern criticism incongruous, inappropriate, curious, or “queer.” My dissertation examines the role of affective attachment––and its opposite, affective aversion––in the creation, alteration, and use of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English manuscripts, codices, and textual objects. Rather than being antithetical to the study of medieval literature, I argue that the kinds of attachments detailed in this project represent, in fact, deeply medieval modes of knowing and being. In the vein of scholars such as Lauren Berlant, Rita Felski, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Stephanie Trigg, my work theorizes attachment to objects as both a relational state of being and an emotionally invested interpretive practice. In a field such as medieval book history, commonly known for its philological disinterest and technical, scientific objectivity, to what extent has feeling and emotion played an invisible yet vital role? As a concept, attachment thus asks us to consider not only how individuals imagine themselves in relation to art objects and their creators, but how that affective relationality often meaningfully alters one’s understanding of the object to which one is attached. Following Sianne Ngai’s work on ugly feelings and negative affect, I examine a variety of modern reactions to medieval manuscripts, Middle English authors, and early editors of medieval works that have been overwhelmingly criticized for their aesthetic peculiarities. This dissertation thus demonstrates how this well-attested tendency to upset, disturb, and unsettle readerly expectations provides a fruitful site of critical engagement with both the perceived eccentricities of the medieval past and the hegemonic aesthetics of our present.

The Salton Sea is a large inland lake located in California on the border between Riverside and Imperial Counties. The communities surrounding the Salton Sea have unusually high rates of asthma. In this dissertation, I explain how different aerosol sources play a role in pulmonary inflammation. We used a specially designed environmental exposure chamber that allows mice to be exposed to a controlled and consistent dose of aerosols for up to 7 days without having to open the chamber. Once mice were exposed, we collected bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and lung tissue and analyzed whole lung tissue gene expression, inflammatory cell infiltration, performed histological analysis, and determined changes in airway hyperreactivity. We found that aerosolized Salton Sea Water, selected to mimic the effects of aerosolized sea spray, resulted in a minor change in inflammatory gene regulation without overt inflammatory cell infiltration. This was in stark contrast to a T2-like response to the fungal allergen Alternaria alternata and Alternaria tenuis. To understand if there was a link between these, we exposed mice to the water followed by Alternaria sp. We found that there was no sensitization from pre-exposure to the water, which suggests that the primary aerosol driving the pulmonary inflammation is not the sea spray from the Salton Sea. To investigate other avenues of potential pulmonary inflammation, we exposed mice to aerosolized dust extract collected from around the Salton Sea. This produced a neutrophilic response with substantial upregulation of genes related to innate immune response. This was greater at 48-hours than at 7-days, mimicking the kinetics of acute, innate inflammation. This closely matched the response to TLR2/4 agonists LTA and LPS, providing insight into a potential mechanism for dust-related pulmonary inflammation.

Dust attenuation refers to the absorption and scattering of light by interstellar dust particles within a galaxy. This effect, which depends on wavelength, is also known as dust reddening due to its more pronounced impact on shorter wavelengths. Studying dust attenuation is important in the field of galaxy evolution as it helps astronomers to gain insight into various aspects of galaxy formation such as accurate measurements of galaxy properties, star formation history, metallicity, and chemical evolution, galaxy morphology, and classification. Dust extinction/attenuation curves are used to express the dependency of dust reddening on wavelength. I use the spectroscopic data from SDSS, MOSDEF, and MOSDEF/LRISsurveys to constrain the nebular and stellar dust attenuation curves and explore their variations with physical properties of the local and high-redshift (z ∼ 2) star-forming galaxies.

My dissertation aims to examine how nebular and stellar attenuation curves relate to the physical properties of a galaxy including stellar mass, star formation rate, and metallicity. To accomplish this, I utilize techniques such as the Balmer decrement and reconciling various Hα− and SED-based star formation rates. The motivation for examining nebular attenuation curves stems from evidence suggesting a more significant reddening for nebular emission lines compared to the stellar continuum. This disparity could be due to the presence of dust grains with distinct size and mass properties in nebular regions, resulting from strong radiation fields around massive stars. Additionally, the dust/star geometry might differ between nebular and stellar regions. We use the spectroscopic data with the availability of the first four Balmer emission lines from the SDSS survey and derive the nebular attenuation curve for a sample of 78,340 galaxies. Our results suggest that the nebular curve does not exhibit variations with respect to stellar mass, star formation rate, or metallicity.

The stellar dust attenuation curve plays a crucial role in modeling stellar populations within galaxies. These models are essential for understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies and require accurate accounting for dust attenuation effects on various stellar populations. Employing a sample of 412 star-forming galaxies with MOSFIRE optical spectra and BPASS models, we identify optimal model combinations for reconciling Hα and SED-based SFRs, finding sub-solar metallicity populations with SMC reddening provide the best agreement. We also explore stellar dust attenuation curve variations with stellar mass in 124 galaxies using Keck/LRIS far-UV spectra, revealing consistent average metallicities and the SMC curve as the best match for SFRs across both low- and high-mass galaxies. Another focus of my dissertation is to test whether the Hα-to-UV luminosity ratio (L(Hα)/L(UV)) is a reliable tracer of bursty star-formation histories (SFHs) of star-forming galaxies. Verifying the reliability of the Hα-to-UV ratio in tracing burstiness is crucial for accurately characterizing the star formation history of galaxies, interpreting observational data, and refining our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. We analyze L(Hα)/L(UV) for 310 star-forming galaxies in two redshift bins from the MOSFIRE Deep Evolution Field (MOSDEF) survey. Using CANDELS/3D-HST imaging, we construct star-formation-rate surface density (ΣSFR) and stellar age maps and examine far-UV spectra from a 124-galaxy subsample. Our results show no significant evidence of bursty star formation based on ΣSFR distributions within a galaxy. We identify two populations with low and high average L(Hα)/L(UV) ratios but find no variations in age-sensitive FUV spectral features. Thus, we cannot conclusively confirm the reliability of the L(Hα)/L(UV) ratio in tracing burstiness for ensembles of star-forming galaxies at z ∼ 2. We introduce alternative tracers of recent star-forming activities, such as the equivalent widths of SiIV λλ1393, 1402, CIV λλ1548, 1550 P-Cygni, and HeII λ1640 stellar wind features, which are less susceptible to uncertainties known to impact the reliability of the L(Hα)/L(UV) ratio. These tracers provide valuable insights into the properties of massive stars, stellar winds, and their surrounding environments. By using multiple indicators of recent star formation, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the star-forming activities in galaxies and reduce potential biases introduced by using a single metric like the L(Hα)/L(UV) ratio.

Parental psychological control (PPC) is characterized by parental manipulative, inhibiting, and/or invalidating tactics to control youth’s socioemotional development, which are linked to negative youth adjustment outcomes. However, PPC effects on youth’s adjustment may vary across domains, and, consistent with transactional models of development, youth’s adjustment may reciprocally influence PPC expression. This investigation evaluated unidirectional and transactional relations between PPC and youth’s internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and parent-youth attachment security from late childhood (i.e., age 10) to early adolescence (i.e., age 12) as expressed in diverse groups based on youth’s sex assigned at birth, ethnicity-race, and neighborhood risk. Parent-youth dyads (N = 214; 49.5% female; 45.8% Latine; 36.5% in poverty) were drawn from a longitudinal study of child development. PPC was observationally rated by trained coders, youth’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms were reported by examiners, parent-youth attachment security was indicated by youth’s reports, and neighborhood risk was composited across multiple Census and FBI indicators. After controlling for family socioeconomic status, bivariate latent difference score models showed within-person variability in PPC and youth’s adjustment from ages 10 to 12, with PPC demonstrating growth, whereas youth’s externalizing problems and parent-youth attachment security, but not youth’s internalizing problems, declined. Transactional analyses supported a parent effect model wherein PPC predicted less change (i.e., more stability) in youth’s internalizing problems, and a youth effect model wherein youth-reported attachment security predicted increased PPC. Although changes in PPC were not related to changes in youth’s adjustment, there was a significant association between changes in youth’s externalizing problems and changes in PPC for families residing in higher-risk neighborhoods. In higher-risk neighborhoods, youth’s externalizing problems predicted less growth in observed PPC, but this relation was not significant for families in lower-risk neighborhoods. This study revealed directionally and contextually nuanced relations between PPC and youth’s multi-domain adjustment. The obtained pathways speak to the reciprocity of parent and youth effects such that PPC is not unilaterally deleterious for youth’s development, and youth’s adjustment may differentially influence PPC as a function of broader contextual risks. Therefore, applied efforts to enhance the parent-youth relationship in early adolescence must entail careful consideration of both transactional and contextual dynamics to promote positive parenting and youth’s adjustment.

With a focus on Black women who identify as victims and/or survivors of domestic violence (DV) and who have experience navigating DV non-profit systems, my dissertation considers how DV services replicate structures of punitivity and carcerality. As argued by a growing number of scholars, the experiences of women of color in the U.S. exist at the intersections of race, class, and gender, intersections which have enabled pathways between intimate partner violence to jails, prisons, and detention centers. However, very little research about DV victim advocacy services as itself a function of the carceral state exists. In my dissertation, I argue that the DV non-profit maze of advocacy services reproduce a carceral relationship between women of color – particularly Black women--and those same DV services, creating what I argue is a DV non-profit carceral system. My work seeks to account for how class, race, and gender have shaped, formed, and continue to feed what I argue is a DV non-profit carceral system.  I investigate the demands that Black victims and/or survivors of DV are subjected to by DV non-profit programs that organize services around the concepts of "good” behavior, surveillance, and mothering classes, and I contend that these elements of advocacy ultimately constitute a form of carceral "sentencing” of victims and/or survivors. My research also engages with ideas and practices of community and advocacy in order to expand this analysis by accounting for criminalizing practices within the services themselves, an area that has been largely neglected within the field of feminist studies of gender- based violence as well as critical scholarship on systems of criminalization.

Collective apologies on behalf of governments to historically mistreated minorities have become more common. It is unclear, however, how we should respond to these apologies and other practices that invoke collective responsibility for oppression (chapter 1). I review the current literature on collective responsibility to better understand the obstacles facing an account of collective responsibility for oppression (chapter 2). I then argue that we can make sense of these practices by holding powerful organized collectives (chapter 3) and privileged disorganized collectives (chapter 4) responsible for oppression. These practices then can be what I call “morally legitimate” if they are confessions of self-blame, and this self-blame contains an element of collective-self protest (chapter 5).

My dissertation focuses on multi-racial, Maya and ladino, labor migrations in Southern California’s Inland Empire. This project uses quantitative and qualitative methods to provide a reliable data set and analysis for a population demographically invisiblized by multiple factors: fear of law enforcement agencies, reluctance to participate in state demographic and census surveys due to past and ongoing traumas with state repression, small size within Latina/o/x and indigenous communities in the region, in-group bigotries and racialized segmentation within minoritized communities; and general U.S. white supremacy. Accordingly, I developed an original survey that captures the demographic profile of approximately 160 Guatemalan migrants across the Los Angeles metropolitan region including Riverside and San Bernardino. I also conducted 30 structured and semi-structured interviews with multiple Maya and ladino migrants within the Guatemalan diaspora in the Los Angeles area. Moreover, I immersed myself in over three years of participant observation that involved solidarity and service. This project is shaped by Ethnic Studies methodologies such as accompaniment, which Barbara Tomilson and George Lipsitz (2013) define as a methodological and philosophical approach to research built on trust, collaboration, and solidarity through service to the community groups, such as MayaVisión and Tejiendocentroamérica, that have informed the overall the research project. I also draw upon historical materialist and critical race studies to make sense of the forces shaping indigenous and ladino displacement from Guatemala over time. I employ Marxist Latin American Dependency Theory and Racial Capitalism to argue how the complex forces of contemporary capitalism are displacing multi-racial and multi-ethnic migrants across Guatemala, and how they are being absorbed into low wage “Latino” segmented labor markets in Sothern California’s Inland Empire. Key Words: Inland Empire, Guatemalan Migration, Racial Capitalism, Marxist Latin American Dependency Theory, Central American Studies, Latinx Studies, Subaltern Latinx Politics, Latino Labor Markets, Accompaniment