Keynote: Alpha: The Next Generation

Generation Alpha, the cohort born from 2010 to the present, is the current student population in our elementary, middle, and high schools (9th grade). Unlike any previous generation, these students are true digital natives as they were born into a time when iPads, Instagram, Siri, and Alexa were integral parts of their formative years. In less than four years’ time, these Alphas will be our incoming collegiate freshman class. Are we ready? Let's discuss how Open Education can support these learners

A Frisch-Waugh-Lovell-type theorem for GMM using oblique projections

I derive a Frisch-Waugh-Lovell (FWL) theorem for GMM estimators in regression models with significant nonlinearities using oblique projection matrices

Monday Keynote

In a time of political and technological uncertainty, open education remains a powerful tool for expanding access to knowledge, strengthening learning, and fostering resilience. This talk will explore how open education advocates can navigate shifting policies, co-opted language, and institutional challenges while continuing to make an impact

The purposes, politics, and practical impact of peer and shared governance in academic libraries.

This paper explores the implications of more or less peer and shared governance among academic librarians. Beginning with the conceptual framework that university administrators and educators have divergent aims, we posit that educators be evaluated by peers with shared aims rather than administrators. We consider the role of shared and peer governance in library collections, instruction, research, personnel decisions, and university decision-making. The paper outlines threats to shared and peer governance in libraries including administrative opposition, siloed university units, political influences, and affective barriers among librarians

An APC Trap?: Privilege and the Perception of Reasonableness in Open Access Publishing

Introduction This article investigates funding sources reported by authors of open access (OA) articles at four R1 universities in the United States along with these authors’ perceptions of Article Processing Charges (APCs). The study suggests a cognitive dissonance among many respondents, where there appears to be a desire and willingness to participate in open access publishing which is at odds with a sense of unreasonableness and an uneven distribution of ability of researchers to participate. Literature Review Much of the literature on APCs centers on rising prices, how commercial publishers profit from this model, and the resulting inequities in OA publishing. Some information exists about resources for funding APCs, including grant funding, library programs, and fee waivers. Methods We surveyed authors who published an OA article in the calendar year 2022. The survey asked whether there was an APC, the funding source for the fee, and the author’s perception of the reasonableness of APC prices and their relative ability to pay compared with their peers. Results From 321 total respondents, grant funding was the largest source of APC funding, and authors reported fees of over US$1500 as unreasonable. Discussion This study confirms the hypothesis that external grants are the primary support for authors paying APCs, and beyond that, authors use a variety of sources to support their publishing fees. Respondents characterized APCs in general as unreasonable for less-well-resourced colleagues. Conclusion Though authors were generally able to find funding or have fees waived, they perceive a threshold of reasonableness for APCs

Associations of Environmental Pollutant Mixtures and Red Blood Cell Folate Concentrations: A Mixture Analysis of the U.S. Adult Population Based on NHANES Data, 2007-2016

Folate is critical for many physiological processes, and low folate levels have been associated with a wide range of health outcomes, including chronic diseases and developmental outcomes. Many environmental chemicals are suspected to contribute to the etiology of health outcomes related to folate deficiency. However, little is known about how these pollutants influence folate levels as potential mechanistic pathways. Objective: To investigate the individual and joint associations between a mixture of 39 pollutants and red blood cell (RBC) folate concentrations in the U.S. population. Methods: We used available data on 27,938 participants, aged 18-80 from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination survey (2007-2016), with available RBC folate concentrations and 39 environmental pollutants' concentrations. We estimated covariate-adjusted independent and joint associations between environmental pollutants and RBC folate, and compared evidence from two complimentary mixture approaches: exposome-wide association study (ExWAS) and quantile-based g computation (Q-gcomp). Results: In the ExWAS analysis, 12 environmental chemicals, including metals (cadmium, arsenic, lead, and mercury), perfluoroalkyl substances, phthalates, phenols and parabens, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, were inversely associated with RBC folate, whereas four environmental pollutants, including metals (manganese and selenium) and two phthalate metabolites, were positively associated with RBC folate. Q-gcomp showed convergent results with the ExWAS analysis; a quartile increase in the metal and PFAS mixtures was significantly associated with a decrease of -38.4 ng/mL (95%CI: -52.3, -24.4) and -48.9 ng/mL (95%CI: -57.6, -39.6) in RBC folate concentrations, respectively. Conclusion: The present study shows that higher exposure to PFASs, metals, and PAHs are associated with lower RBC folate concentrations. However, given the cross-sectional design, we cannot make inferences about the directionality of the observed associations

Stay / Present

A collection of lyric poems set to the rhythms of a thinking, feeling human being in an epoch when truly inhuman/antihuman forces are using increasingly sophisticated methods to steal our attention, which is our present. These poems participate in American pragmatism's ongoing projects of a privileging of experience over dogma; an emphasis on outcomes for theorization, i.e. the self-evident character of truth; and an embrace of formal heterogeneity. George Oppen wrote—pleaded even—in his paean to the bicycle, “Let us agree / Once and for all that neither the slums / Nor the tract houses / Represent the apex / Of the culture.” That is a useful statement for the aesthetics priorities found in this collection. There are also persona poems, elegies, and poems of praise for cities and nature. The poem at the book’s heart “The Mountain Elegy,” is an eight-part poem, and it is the book’s major achievement. The poem develops a staggered line. The gesture of the line, set off by an indent, is to capture distraction, an alternative, parallel, non-constructive thought process. Explored elsewhere in the collection, this line finds it ultimate articulation in the “The Mountain Elegy,” where the indented lines recall lines from a ghost book, The Mountain, and the flush lines articulate an emotional and imaginary present cantilevered against those remembered lines. The influences on this book are many. Creeley’s “I Know a Man” and Paul Blackburn “Brooklyn Narcissus” inspired “Hudson Runway.” Thom Gunn’s “Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt” is behind “Star Pilot.” Wallace Stevens’s “The Reader” is in “Diegesis in Third.” C.D. Wright’s “Our Dust” contributes to “It Would Have Been Assembled Elsewhere and Moved On Rails.” C.S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road, Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, and Lutz Seiler’s Pitch & Glint were near at hand for a longer duration than most during my writing. Ashbery, Clifton, Eliot, Olson, and Williams are in the groundwater.Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)2030-05-1

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Communication and Civil Applications

This dissertation focuses on using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for communication and civil applications. Nowadays, UAVs have found numerous applications across a proliferation of fields, such as aerial inspection, photography, precision agriculture, traffic control, search and rescue, package delivery, and telecommunications. While most related works use UAVs for single-task operations, an interesting idea is to design UAVs capable of simultaneously performing multiple tasks. This approach could significantly improve system efficiency. For example, consider a residential area where drones are used as last-mile delivery tools. However, it is unclear whether such mobility patterns for package delivery can provide uniform coverage within the area of interest. In this dissertation, we aim to design UAV trajectories that efficiently perform transportation operations (e.g., package delivery) while simultaneously providing uniform coverage over a neighborhood area. Such coverage is essential for applications like network coverage, Internet of Things (IoT) data collection, wireless power transfer, and surveillance. We first consider multi-task UAVs in a simplified scenario where the neighborhood area is a circular region. In this case, UAV missions start from the center, with destinations assumed to be uniformly distributed along the circle's boundary. We propose a trajectory planning process that achieves uniform coverage while preserving delivery efficiency. Subsequently, we explore a more practical scenario where transport destinations are arbitrarily distributed in an irregularly shaped region. We demonstrate that simultaneous uniform coverage and efficient transport trajectories (e.g., package delivery) are achievable in such realistic settings. This is substantiated through rigorous analysis and simulations.\\ Additionally, this dissertation examines the use of UAVs in disaster management. UAVs offer significant advantages in disaster response, search and rescue operations (SAR), and wildfire detection. For instance, in critical scenarios such as wildfires, avalanches, or searches for missing persons, UAVs can expedite disaster management and SAR efforts. Search efficiency is crucial in such operations because the likelihood of survival diminishes over time, and wildfire containment becomes increasingly challenging. In this work, we aim to optimize flight paths that maximize the probability of locating missing persons or detecting wildfires. The path optimization algorithm ensures full coverage of the area of interest by leveraging prior knowledge of target distribution. In the case of finding missing persons, this knowledge may be derived from behavioral analyses, while for wildfire detection, it can be obtained through expert assessment of terrain and emergency factors. The UAV follows the optimized flight path, collecting data for processing. We employ machine learning techniques to quickly and accurately identify targeted objects or detect fires. Specifically, we use residual neural networks (ResNet) to detect fire and smoke in wildland areas and to locate missing persons in snow-covered regions.Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.

LOCUS COERULEUS NOREPINEPHRINE IN ACTIVE AVOIDANCE AND REWARD SEEKING BEHAVIOR

Cue driven behavior relies on the ability to appropriately respond to stimuli in the environment to obtain resources (food, water, etc.) or avoid threats/danger. This behavior is driven by a desire to achieve a beneficial outcome, to obtain something positive (reward seeking) or avoid something negative (active avoidance). Many brain regions and neuromodulatory systems are involved in active avoidance and reward seeking behavior including the noradrenergic system and the locus coeruleus, the major originator of brain wide norepinephrine. This dissertation aims to identify if the role of locus coeruleus and norepinephrine is the same in reward seeking vs. active avoidance behavior. We found that locus coeruleus and norepinephrine are differentially involved in active avoidance and reward seeking behaviors. We first probed the role of noradrenergic receptor activation using pharmacology during an operant active avoidance and reward seeking task in rats. Our results showed that norepinephrine acting on separate noradrenergic receptor subtypes influenced reward seeking and active avoidance in a distinct sex dependent manner. Norepinephrine acting on α1 and β receptors disrupted active avoidance behavior in males and females while reward seeking was only disrupted in males. We next characterized locus coeruleus neural activity at baseline prior to investigating task related activity. Locus coeruleus activity at baseline differed across some biological factors such as sex and age. Last, we investigated locus coeruleus neural activity during the active avoidance and reward seeking task. We found separate and distinct populations of LC neurons that responded during active avoidance vs reward seeking trials. Our findings support our hypothesis that locus coeruleus and norepinephrine are differentially involved in active avoidance and reward seeking. Although the behavior is the same and the outcome is positive in both cases, the valence of reward seeking vs active avoidance engages distinct components of the locus coeruleus-noradrenergic system at the nucleus itself and at efferent targets. Understanding the function of locus coeruleus and norepinephrine in these tasks will inform our understanding of how the noradrenergic system is involved in behaviors important to survival and will provide insight into how these systems may go awry.NIH F31-MH131348Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)2026-09-0