CLOSURE: THE DEATH PENALTY, RESTORATIVE JUSTICE, AND ARIZONA VICTIM SERVICES

One of the biggest justifications for the continued use of capital punishment in the United States is that the practice brings closure to co-victims, the family members of the murdered victim. However, this argument does not resonate with all co-victims due to various factors, including religious beliefs, moral convictions, and the emotional toll of the post-conviction appeals process. This thesis begins by evaluating victim services in Arizona, a death penalty state that prides itself in being victim-centered. Interviews from victim advocates, individuals in victim services, and a research review will offer insight into where victim services can be improved, and-what victims need in capital cases in Maricopa, Pima, and Pinal County. Second, the thesis will offer interviews and analysis with victims impacted by capital and non-capital offenses, their experiences with closure and thoughts about capital punishment. Third, the thesis will then explore the idea of restorative justice practices, such as victim offender dialogue, and their relationship to closure while also discussing the issue of the word closure for co-victims. Fourth, the thesis will highlight the hidden victims of the death penalty through discussion/analysis of an interview of a family member of a death row defendant and interviews of innocent people who spent time on Arizona and Florida's death row. Finally, the thesis will argue that the death penalty does not bring closure and healing to victims, but instead creates new victims, and that a more restorative approach to justice would better serve victims everywhere, including those in Arizona

Sodic Soil Hazard from Irrigation Water

This article, in the VegIPM Newsletter (Vol. 16, No. 19), explains how recent rainfall increased sodic soil hazards in the lower Colorado River Valley, highlighting temporary soil crusting issues and the return to stable conditions with Colorado River irrigationDocuments in the Arizona Pest Management Center collection are made available by the Arizona Pest Management Center (APMC) and the University Libraries at the University of Arizona. For more information about items in this collection, please contact https://acis.cals.arizona.edu/about-us/arizona-pest-management-center

Story-ing Possibility Space: Becoming With/in Refugee/(Im)migrant Education

This dissertation is a story—one among many intra-active (Barad, 2007) stories in a web of differing versions (Gómez, 2019)—that is being told about refugee/(im)migrant education. Theoretical, methodological, and practical in its goals and applications, the project described in this dissertation brought together fourteen teachers/learners/leaders across the United States to discuss, explore, and (re)imagine refugee/(im)migrant education through co-created and co-creative story-ing processes and diffractive methodologies. As a research community, we didn’t start with an end in mind but rather followed our stories where they took us, stepping into curiosity and making knowledge “otherwise—as a mode of wondering and wandering, as a matter of what happens if?” (Taylor, 2021, p. 32). The project articulated in this dissertation, including through three co-written texts that comprise chapter five, shares methodological entanglements and theoretical weavings that may allow for different ethico-onto-epistemological engagements in refugee/(im)migrant education policy, practice, and research. Through story-ing and space making—intra-activity rooted in love and of an intimacy often forgotten in education leadership and policy research—possibility space is forming, becoming with (Haraway, 2016) and in refugee/(im)migrant education

Precipitation Interactions with the Earth's Surface

Precipitation is a critical component of the Earth’s water cycle and energy budget. It can shape the environment via erosion and flooding as well as support life on Earth via access to fresh water for agriculture and drinking. However, precipitation is one of the most difficult atmospheric parameters to quantify and its relationships with the Earth’s surface require further study. The challenges in understanding precipitation’s relationship with the Earth’s surface vary depending on the region and environment where the precipitation is taking place. In polar environments, precipitation is sensitive to sea ice conditions and vice versa, while in continental environments, precipitation is sensitive to soil moisture and vice versa. In both polar and marine environments in situ observations of precipitation are limited due to the remote nature of the regions. In all environments, there are difficulties in measuring solid precipitation at the surface, as winds can more easily blow snow away from gauges and the liquid water content of snow varies depending on atmospheric conditions. Since precipitation can occur at such small temporal and spatial scales in all environments and over remote regions, it can be difficult to capture globally complete precipitation rates from in situ measurement or to parameterize them in climate models. This dissertation takes a holistic approach to addressing these challenges by investigating the impacts of precipitation in marine, polar, and continental environments. The first study (Marcovecchio et al. 2023), analyzed the relationship between precipitation and marine boundary layer clouds using measurements and retrievals from field campaigns the East North Atlantic and Southern Ocean. Both regions are in marine environments with relatively high frequency occurrences of low-level, liquid dominant MBL clouds, but are in different hemispheres with different weather patterns. A summary of the study is as follows: we compared the cloud and drizzle macrophysical and microphysical properties of single-layer, liquid dominant marine boundary layer clouds and associated drizzle from the two field campaigns. Using field campaign data allows us to address the lack of in situ precipitation measurements at a consistent temporal and spatial resolution in marine regions. The results have shown that the Southern Ocean campaign has a higher drizzle frequency rate and a lower specific humidity that leads to a higher drizzle base than that of ENA. By improving our process level understanding of drizzle in each location, we may help to address the difficulties in parameterizing precipitation at small temporal and spatial scales in models. This work was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres. While the first study (Marcovecchio et al., 2023) investigates process level understanding of precipitation within the marine boundary layer atmosphere, the second study (Marcovecchio et al., 2021) investigates the relationship between precipitation and sea ice melt onset in a polar environment in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea. Sea ice season melt onset timing can vary interannually by up to three weeks, but models are still unable to pinpoint the timing of melt onset accurately. In the study, the results have shown when changes in precipitation phase and intensity may be significantly different before and after the melt onset of sea ice. One important conclusion of this study was that precipitation contributes to the initiation of ice melt and precipitation might also initiate albedo feedback processes. Specifically, we compare four years with early melt onset to four years with late melt onset in the area of focus to better compare the different responses to melt onset timing. The area of focus was selected because the atmosphere is most sensitive to sea ice melt onset in this region. There is not yet a high-quality ground-truth Arctic precipitation data product, so a consistency check is performed between MERRA-2, ERA-Interim, and ERA5 reanalysis Arctic precipitation products and the GPM GPCP satellite- and ground-based observational product. We found that all three reanalyses would yield the same conclusions, but spotlight one reanalysis in the article based on how it represents seasonal trends. For early melt years, we found that surface sensible flux loss and precipitation are above average in the days before and after the first major melt event, which represents heat and moisture transport coming into the area of focus from the midlatitudes. However, surface sensible heat flux loss and precipitation are below average in the month leading up to the first major melt event during late melt years. Instead, melt onset in late melt years is associated with the atmosphere reaching average seasonal conditions, as they had been below average in the weeks leading up to the first major melt event. This work is published in the International Journal of Climatology. Since the first and second study focus on marine precipitation, in the third study we investigate the relationship between precipitation and the land surface. As mentioned previously, in continental environments, precipitation is sensitive to soil moisture and vice versa. Accurate soil moisture information is important because it can be used to predict flood events, soil strength, and streamflow. The third study uses the Noah-MP land surface model to investigate how uncertainties in precipitation and other meteorological forcings propagate through Noah-MP and impact soil moisture. This study analyzes soil moisture and surface turbulent fluxes (sensible heat and latent heat) Noah-MP outputs as well as precipitation and temperature from ERA5 (ECMWF Reanalysis Version 5), GDAS (Global Data Assimilation System), and US Air Force Weather Analysis (AFWA) meteorological forcing datasets. Soil moisture from Noah-MP is compared to in-situ measurements from the USCRN (U.S. Climate Reference Network) and Level 3 satellite observations from SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive). Model output of sensible heat (SH) and latent heat (LH) are compared to in-situ flux tower measurements at ARM Southern Great Plains. We found that ERA5 has the best statistical comparisons for precipitation, with a bias lower two orders of magnitude smaller than the other forcing datasets. This contributes to ERA5 having a statistically the best soil moisture with a slightly better correlation, RMSE, and ubRMSE than AFWA relative to in situ data. In investigating how precipitation forcing uncertainties propagate through the Noah-MP model, we help to address one of the difficulties in parameterizing precipitation in models. Overall, this dissertation takes a broad approach to improving our understanding of precipitation interaction with the Earth’s surface in three different environments: marine, polar, and continental. The first study (Marcovecchio et al., 2023) improves our understanding of microscale process-level knowledge of drizzle formation, which can help improve precipitation parameterizations in marine regions, and also uses field campaigns to address the sparsity of in situ measurements. The second study (Marcovecchio et al., 2021) compares precipitation data sources to address limited in situ observations in the polar environment and addresses relationships between sea ice and precipitation. Finally, the third study investigates the impacts of precipitation and meteorological forcings on soil moisture in a continental environment. It addresses the high variability of precipitation by seeing how its uncertainty propagates through land surface models and discusses how precipitation can impact soil moisture conditions at the land surface. The diverse focus areas of each study enable the exploration of precipitation over land, ocean surfaces (including sea ice), and within the marine boundary layer, enhancing our understanding of how precipitation interacts with the Earth's surface

Focused Ultrasound-Induced Blood-Brain Barrier Disruption for Targeted Drug Delivery and Therapeutic Treatment of Neurodegenerative Disease

Neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Parkinson’s Disease affected an estimated 7.7 million Americans in 2020 (Alzheimer's Disease Facts and Figures, 2024) and has resulted in $392 billion in healthcare-related costs and lost wages (Understanding Parkinson's, 2024).A major obstacle for treatment of neurodegenerative disease is the blood-brain barrier (BBB), a layer of endothelial cells, astrocytes, and tight-junction proteins that prevent most therapeutic agents from crossing into the brain. Focused ultrasound (FUS + MB) with intravascular microbubbles (MB) has been introduced as a novel method of transiently opening the BBB for drug delivery and therapy in neurodegenerative disease. The gold-standard for confirmation of BBB opening after FUS + MB is T1-weighted MRI with gadolinium-based contrast agent (GBCA) enhancement. While this method provides reliable and accurate localization of BBB opening within the brain, MRI does not have the spatial resolution to resolve local distribution or kinetics of solute delivery to the brain tissue. Currently, it is not established which vessels are opened via FUS + MB or the spatiotemporal distribution of solutes relative to the targeted cells. In this dissertation, in vivo 2-photon microscopy (2PM) was used in combination with MRI FUS + MB to better understand the effect of FUS + MB on tissue microvasculature and parenchymal kinematics. Results from such multimodality experiments are presented, where FUS + MB, MRI and 2PM are carried out in the brains of mice to investigate the effects of FUS + MB on microvasculature and the movement of molecules across the blood-brain barrier in healthy and disease-model mice

Quantifying Deep Learning Algorithm Performance for CT Image Segmentation of Composite Material Damage and Microstructures

Deep Learning Algorithms (DLAs), particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have gained popularity for image segmentation of computed tomography (CT) scans because modern CNN architectures like U-Net remain effective even when trained on heavily augmented data. This significantly reduces human workload, requiring only a small fraction of the original dataset to be segmented manually. However, adoption for composite damage and microstructure segmentation tasks remains limited due to a lack of standardization in training methodology and accuracy reporting. In this work, statistical performance metrics from binary classification theory are used alongside application-specific metrics to quantify the accuracy of DLA image segmentations and illustrate the effects of image segmentation errors on the analysis of composite materials. These metrics revealed opportunities for improving segmentation performance through optimized training data selection and CNN architecture choice. Since small training datasets often poorly represent their parent datasets, a method for selecting representative training data using an image similarity algorithm is proposed. Each image is scored on its similarity to the overall dataset, and the local extrema are used to select images with common and unique features. This method significantly improved 2D U-Net’s segmentation accuracy of impact damage in carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites when given minimal training data. Architectural comparisons of CNNs revealed that 2.5D FC-DenseNet statistically significantly outperformed 2.5D U-Net for generalized CFRP impact damage segmentation tasks but took 52% longer to train. For ceramic matrix composite (CMC) microstructure image segmentation tasks, FC-DenseNet statistically matched U-Net’s accuracy while training 48% faster but was more susceptible to noise and artifacts based on qualitative analysis. These proposed methods and insights support ongoing efforts to optimize image segmentation workflows and automate future composite material characterizations.Thesis not available (per author’s request

Innovative Precision Alignment, Stray Light Suppression Solutions for UV Space-Borne and Suborbital Missions

This dissertation addresses key optical engineering challenges in modern astronomicalinstruments, focusing on stray light contamination, optical misalignments, and design limitations that affect the performance of space-based and balloon-borne telescopes. These challenges hinder the precision of measurements critical for scientific discovery, and this work presents novel solutions to optimize instrument performance. In Chapter 2, we focus on re-aligning the FIREBall-2 spectrograph, a NASA/CNES balloon-borne telescope designed to study the circumgalactic medium. During its first flight, optical misalignments led to suboptimal resolution, with spatial resolution degrading to 7′′ and spectral resolution to 1300. Post-flight evaluation revealed significant misalignments of optical elements beyond tolerance. We detail a re-alignment procedure that uses Computer-Generated Holograms (CGHs) with a Zygo interferometer to achieve precise alignment of the focal corrector system, resulting in improved performance in the 2023 re-flight. Chapter 3 addresses stray light contamination in the Aspera SmallSat mission, a NASA-funded project aimed at studying galaxy evolution by detecting diffuse O VI emission at 103.2 nm. Stray light degrades the signal-to-noise ratio in spectroscopic observations of galaxy halos. To mitigate this, a two-stage baffle design is proposed, featuring optimized vane geometries and strategically placed shared baffles coated with Acktar Magic Black. Simulation results show that this design effectively meets the mission’s stringent stray light suppression requirements. A third study in Chapter 4 investigates the performance of a dual-ruled grating spectrometer as part of the Spatial Heterodyne Extreme Ultraviolet Interferometer (SHEUVI) project. SHEUVI is a wide-field, all-reflective spatial heterodyne spectrometer that utilizes a single, dual-ruling grating to diffract incoming normal-incidence light into symmetric orders, thereby generating a dispersion-based interference pattern on a detector. Designed to operate at wavelengths below the transmissive optics cutoff (approximately 105 nm), this innovative design minimizes optical path differences by producing both interfering beams from the same grating location. Experimental characterization of the 800 gr/mm ruling, optimized for approximately 590 nm at m = ±1 with a symmetric blaze angle of 13.8, confirms the grating’s effectiveness in isolating and sampling discrete passbands. In conclusion, Chapter 5 of this dissertation presents solutions to common optical challenges including stray light suppression, optical alignment, and diffraction efficiency, that affect astronomical instruments. These contributions enhance the performance of current space missions and provide valuable insights for optimizing the design of future telescopes.Release after 03/19/202

Mobility Behavior and Urban Planning Challenges of Formal and Informal Transportation Systems in San Martín de Porres, Lima, Peru, 2025

Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone ProjectThe San Martín de Porres district, located in northern Lima, Peru, faces limitations on urban mobility due to uncontrolled urban growth, centralized opportunities, and the ineffective coexistence of formal and informal transport systems. The study analyzes how these factors affect citizens’ mobility behavior and how the lack of integration between the two transport systems affects the efficiency of the north-south transition in Gerardo Unger Avenue. The mixed-methods approach included participant observation, surveys, and document analysis to identify mobility patterns, inequities in accessibility, and high dependence on the north-south route. The data collection found that travel choices and mobility behavior depend on estimated travel times, perceived security, historical events, and cost-benefit alternatives. Urban mobility in northern Lima requires Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) strategies, the reorganization of road space, and urban design to support the coexistence of formal and informal transportation. It also proposes a multimodal mobility hub model that can be replicated according to uncontrolled urban growth. The model promotes equitable mobility, local development, and environmental improvements in complex urban contexts like northern Lima.This item is part of the Sustainable Built Environments collection. For more information, contact http://sbe.arizona.edu

The Impact of mPFC-vHC Oscillatory Synchrony on Age-Related Deficits in Spatial Working Memory

Among the cognitive functions susceptible to age-related decline, spatial and working memory functions are particularly affected. The hippocampus (HC) and medal prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are two brain regions essential for executing these cognitive processes. Communication between these regions is thought to be facilitated by theta (6-12Hz) oscillations, and increased theta synchrony between these regions is has been shown to correlate with improved performance on spatial working memory tasks. However, the impact of aging on interactions between these regions and their relationship to declines in spatial working memory function is unclear. To investigate these differences, we trained healthy young (9 months) and aged (22 months) Fischer 344 rats on the Morris watermaze and the W-maze spatial alternation tasks. Aged rats exhibited impaired performance on both the spatial and spatial working memory components of the tasks relative to young animals. Following acquisition of the spatial alternation task, rats were surgically implanted with dual-bundle hyperdrives that simultaneously recorded electrophysiological signals from the prelimbic and infralimbic regions of the mPFC and the CA1 regions of the intermediate and ventral HC (ivHC) during the spatial alternation task. Robust theta was observed in both the mPFC and ivHC of young and aged rats during task completion. When evaluating theta coherence between the mPFC and ivHC, we found that young rats had greater synchrony when making the correct spatial choice compared to the incorrect choice. In contrast, no correlation between task performance and theta coherence was observed in aged rats. These results indicate that aged rats may rely less on hippocampal-prefrontal circuits during complex spatial navigation and instead engage alternative pathways for task completion, or alternatively, may use oscillations at different frequencies to synchronize between these regions.Release after 04/13/202

Groundwater Fluoride Exposure and Potential Effects on Arizona Livestock

Fluoride (F-) is a naturally occurring mineral commonly found in surface and groundwater. It is present in water sources due to the erosion of F- containing rocks and soil found throughout the United States. While chronic, long-term F- exposure in livestock, particularly cattle, may lead to dental and skeletal fluorosis, the risk to human health through meat consumption remains low, though uncertain due to limited previous research. Despite this limitation, previous work has demonstrated that chronic F- accumulation in cattle, primarily through water, feed, forage, and crops, is an important consideration for livestock health. Due to its widespread occurrence in groundwater through Arizona, continued research is needed to address knowledge gaps regarding F- accumulation in cattle and refine our knowledge of how to effectively diminish risks to maintain livestock health and well-being.Funding that supported this work was provided by the National Institutes of Health (P50MD015706, 2P42ES004940, P30 ES006694), US Geological Survey (G24AC00083) and the Waverly Street Foundation