With changes to the reproductive system from cancer and its treatment for women of childbearing age, it is important to understand how pediatric and adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer treatment impacts birth outcomes. Using large unique datasets, my dissertation aims to assess whether diagnosis...

My dissertation study aims to investigate classroom epistemic climates through students’ perceptions and teachers’ epistemic growth. This dissertation consists of two research studies. The first study exhibits how students perceive their learning activities. The second study addresses how teaching...

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine different underexplored complex transportation problems. First, vehicle routing problem (VRP) with stochastic travel times is examined. The major goal is to consider and model the impact of the correlation on the makespan-minimizing objective function...

“The Poetics of Participation” complicates conceptions of how people read fiction by combining cognitive narratology with trauma theory. I explore how, in literary trauma, textual prompts for audience imagination and visualization conflict with each other, encouraging reader projection and...

Cells plated on a stiff surface behave differently than cells plated on a surface with a similar stiffness to what they would experience in the body. Softer surfaces correlated with improved cell health when cells were exposed to either nanoparticles or a pesticide. This change came with a...

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) is a relatively new machine learning model. An open research question is how to assess convergence of BART fit to real data. My research addresses this question by deriving a formal convergence criterion provided in a novel software implementation for...

Every patient’s symptom experience is unique and dynamic. Researchers and clinicians are unable to identify which patients will develop which symptoms and when. I use nursing documentation data in electronic health records to divide patients into groups based on similarity of symptom patterns using...

Speaking fluently in a second language is what most adult learners struggle with. My dissertation explores how word variation in phrases helps learners extract the underlying grammatical pattern, which assists them in bundling words and promoting their Chinese oral fluency. Inspired by statistical...

Using an online survey of middle and high school World Language teachers in Iowa and interviews with eight of those teachers, I researched Iowa World Language teachers’ attitudes toward students with disabilities; their training to teach students with disabilities; and the amount of support they...

The ability to combine part-time employment with part-time entrepreneurship (dual work) offers a way to reduce income risk among individuals with limited resources. My dissertation investigates the importance of the dual sector as a stepping-stone toward entrepreneurship. I analyze frictions that...

Popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have millions of third-party applications (e.g. games and single-sign-on) which are regularly used by hundreds of millions of users. Unfortunately, the abuse of third-party applications to launch reputation manipulation attacks (e.g. fake...

My thesis project is focused on improving the ability to interpret copy number variants (CNVs) we don't have enough information about to clearly determine if they are disease-causing ("VUS CNVs"). We aim to do this by utilizing genic and phenotypic information about known benign and pathogenic CNVs...

Breast cancer is the leading type of incident cancer in women in the US and represents an estimated 28.1% of all new cancers among Iowa women. Utilizing Bayesian hierarchical models, we aim to learn more about breast cancer incidence by examining cohorts based on locations at birth and diagnosis...

I examine impediments and enhancements to financial market functioning. In the first chapter, I identify a regulation that is discouraging banks from providing market liquidity. In the second chapter, I examine betting prices on NBA games officiated by a crooked referee to test theories relating...

Sea spray aerosol represents one of the largest natural sources of aerosol and consequently impacts global climate. My dissertation quantifies saccharide enrichment from the ocean to aerosol using controlled laboratory studies. Simple model systems demonstrate surface activity as well as...

My research focuses on the convolutional encoder-decoder type of networks along with its applications in medical imaging and manufacturing. I investigate the encoding mechanism of image features in the central latent vector and the visualization of them in the original image space. Through a case...

Pleasurable Labors: Activist Fandom, Community and the Contested Performance of Place broadens understandings of how groups with limited access to conventional forms of power use everyday practices of fandom to persist and thrive, while, at times, challenging dominant ideologies and institutions...

This research identifies social crowding as a situational factor that influences consumer responses to personalization. Across a series of studies, I show that social crowding leads to less favorable responses to personalization because people are less willing to express themselves in crowds. I also...

The pay ratio mandate requires most US public firms to explicitly disclose the ratio of CEO compensation to the median employee. I exploit two features of the mandate which allow me to identify the effect of the mandate on CEO compensation and firm behavior. My results show that the mandate prompts...

Societal transformations and anxiety about shifting gender dynamics preoccupied many during the long reign of Queen Victoria. By reevaluating selected examples in art and literature, such as Shakespeare's Ophelia, I examine the place of lovesickness and how it expressed issues of female sexuality...

I study effectiveness of international organizations in promoting global human rights and alleviating world poverty. My dissertation focuses on the factors that decide success and failure in human rights and development cooperation. I examine two international institutions, the United Nations (UN)...

My dissertation uses Baker’s Yeast to study a pathway that cancers use to bypass the regulation that dictates how many divisions each cell can undergo, called alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT). My work has identified the frequency of ALT formation, identified the role of key genes in the...

In my dissertation I examine how institutional design affects US states. For decades, research in state politics has evaluated how single institutions, affect the relationship between public preferences and state policy. However, substantially less attention has been spent understanding how these...

The transmembrane protein butyrophilin functions as an intracellular receptor and when ligand-bound it stimulates an immune system response to bacterial infections. Because the most potent natural ligand, (E)-4-hydroxy-3-methyl-but-2-enyl diphosphate is too unstable metabolically for potential...

Commonly regarded as the power house of the cell, mitochondria are known to be important organelles responsible for energy production. However, mitochondria are less well known for their incredibly dynamic nature with the processes of fragmentation and elongation to meet different needs of cells in...

Current research in mathematics education argues mindset and persistence are necessary components that help teachers engage students, particularly those who are still learning the mathematics content and the methodology to teach mathematics (pre-service teachers). Mindset is important for pre...

Abuse of prescription opioids is a global epidemic resulting in an increasing number of deaths. Abuse-deterrent drug products add to the difficulty to improperly use/abuse opioids. Our work is focused on studying the impact of formulation and process variables along with material interactions during...

A skein module is an algebraic device that stores the data of how a circle can be knotted in an ambient 3-dimensional space. For most spaces,the corresponding skein modules are too large and complex to compute explicitly, so we settle for describing their invariant features. In this thesis, we apply...

Conventional agriculture places significant demands on natural resources and is generally inefficient. As organisms with tolerance for varied conditions, microalgae (single-cell photosynthetic microorganisms) are a promising alternative to soy for more rapidly and sustainably grown protein-rich...

Despite drug addiction being a serious and pervasive issue, very little is known about the neurobiological underpinnings of this disease. My dissertation focuses on better understanding a brain region which decreases cocaine-seeking behavior, and how this region communicates with the rest of the...

Break induced replication (BIR) is a process by which double-strand breaks in DNA incurred from environmental damages and normal cellular processes can be repaired. My research explores how vulnerabilities of and perturbations to this process can result in mutations and genomic rearrangements...

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death and the second most common cancer in the United States. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a lung disease that causes obstructed airflow in the lungs and is a leading cause of death in the United States. The goal of this dissertation work...

Heritage speakers grow up speaking a language at home that differs from the dominant language of society and educational institutions. Through ethnography and narrative inquiry, my dissertation explores the translanguaging practices of a group of U.S. college students who are heritage speakers of...

Current travel itinerary planning approaches focus on deterministic shortest path algorithms that fail to factor in variability that can lead to delays or missed transfers. This dissertation focuses on utilizing distributions from large historical datasets for flight, driving and public...

Airborne particulate matter (PM) contributes to air pollution that is the 3rd leading cause of death worldwide. This study uses molecular markers (a chemical species specific to an emission source) to identify and quantify PM sources in Nepal, where air pollution is severe. Biomass burning, garbage...

Older adults are a growing proportion of the United States population, and older adulthood is a period that includes a variety of life changes (e.g., social, physical, cognitive). My dissertation study aims to explore the longitudinal impact of a two-session group Acceptance and Commitment Training...

I study the formation and operations of committees and coalitions. I find that observing the actions a group takes can disentangle the spillovers they impose on their fellow members. I also consider how a committee member's same-type preference for other members can be attenuated if the committee...

The difficulty of constructing physically accurate models has limited the optimal control of wireless power transfer (WPT) systems to systems with very few transmitting coils and simple transmitters. Through the use of receiver feedback and blackbox modeling, I am implementing arbitrarily complex...

Magnesium is one of the most prevalent ions in a cell and is essential for many cellular processes. Until recently, the importance of magnesium in human health and disease has been undervalued. To better understand its role in different diseases, we need to observe its function in specific cell...

Loss of auditory receptor cells, hair cells, is the leading cause of sensorineural deafness. Auditory function of hair cells can be replaced by cochlear implant. However, in animal models, spiral ganglion neurons (SGNs), that connect hair cells to brain, degenerate after deafening. This might...

My dissertation uses interracial intimacies between Americans and Filipinos—in both the U.S. and the Philippines—as a lens to explore the relationship between immigration and imperialism in the early 20th century. This multifaceted project analyzes interracial intimacies as intimacies between...

My dissertation aims to understand politicians’ criminal justice rhetoric. It contributes to the literature by applying new computational methods to non-traditional data such as political ad videos. It also improves our understanding of how politicians’ gender and race affect their political...