The United States has a history of imposing its will on other countries via aggressive sanction regimes. In many of those regimes, U.S. policymakers note that support from European partner states is paramount to the regime's success. Over the past 20 years, the U.S. and its European partner state's interests have had relatively aligned, fostering cooperation and implementation of like-minded policies against target states. The end of paralleled interests left policymakers with a conundrum, which...

Automatic classification of digitally modulated signals is a challenging problem that has traditionally been approached using signal processing tools such as log-likelihood algorithms for signal classification or cyclostationary signal analysis. These approaches are computationally intensive and cumbersome in general, and in recent years alternative approaches that use machine learning have been presented in the literature for automatic classification of digitally modulated signals. This thesis studies deep learning approaches for classifying digitally modulated signals that use...

NMOS logic gates were a predecessor to the CMOS logic gates widely used today. They allow for easier process steps and take into account the limited equipment that is available in the ODU clean room. In this thesis, NMOS logic gates were studied in order to open a new field of research into logic gates at Old Dominion University. This work focuses mostly on the designs of the mask patterns and the design of the...

Washington D.C. has witnessed many watershed events throughout the history of the United States of America. One of these events was the Summer in the Parks (SITP) program organized by the National Park Service (NPS) from 1968-1976. Summer in the Parks was a community-based series of events including concerts, park visits, and exhibitions designed to quell racial tensions and promote park usage. Researchers have begun chronicling SITP, but have yet to explore how the story...

The diversity of higher education institutions is changing, and more post-traditional students, including those associated with the military, are engaging in higher education. Almost every post-secondary institution in the United States has military students. In 2020, $11.5 billion was spent on over 875,000 eligible military students. Military students often prefer online courses at community colleges due to flexibility around their military career, open-access, and affordability. Yet, few studies examine active military servicemembers alone and, when...

Low molecular weight gelators (LMWGs) are small molecules that can form gels in either organic solvents or water in their pure form or as mixtures. LMWGs self-assemble through noncovalent interactions such as hydrogen bonding, halogen bonding, van der Waals interactions and hydrophobic forces in solvents. They have shown great potential in biomedical industry, catalysis and environmental remediation to name a few. Moreover, the formation of metallogels can be used for detection of various ions as...

Empathy is known to be the basis of all human interactions and an essential component of human psychology. Empathy includes a cognitive component (perspective-taking) and an affective component (e.g., emotional contagion). The two essays of my dissertation investigate how each of these components of empathy affect consumer responses to user-generated content. Essay 1: Although both price and online review ratings are important cues in consumers’ product quality judgment, most previous studies have treated price and...

The global COVID-19 pandemic has presented notable challenges in teachers’ career paths. In the present study, Super’s life-span, life-space theory was applied to examine the interplay between K-12 teachers’ propensity to search for meaning in life and meaningfulness attributed to their work role (i.e., meaningful work) in predicting career-relevant outcomes in the face of challenging circumstances over the course of a semester. A model was proposed in which propensity to search for meaning in life...

The US Joint Force has an outstanding record over its history of superb performance at the tactical level of war. Inarguably, the United States is currently the best tactical Joint Force in the world a product of a world class tactical education, training, and development program generating and sustaining that tactical proficiency at the individual and organizational level. While tactical education and training programs have been extremely successful, the Professional Military Education (PME) responsible for...

Urban immersive residency programs have emerged from partnerships between K-12 schools and universities offering teacher candidates a year-long field experience alongside coursework aligned with the framework and practices in the schools (Zeichner & Bier, 2015). The goals of these programs include teacher candidates applying what they learn during preparation into practice and getting good student outcomes, while building their confidence in teaching diverse students. This study used situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to...

The advancement of low-cost, highly efficient solar cell devices is a major technological challenge demanding suitable materials and fabrication processes. Polycrystalline Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) appear to be one of the most promising semiconductor in thin film photovoltaic technology due to its bandgap tunability, high absorption coefficient, and tendency to produce high efficiency solar cells. High-quality CIGS materials fabricated via a three-stage co-evaporation process can convert primary materials into devices with power conversion efficiency above 23%. Increasing...

Youth apprenticeship programs are a means of bridging the middle skills gap and rebuilding the workforce while combating youth underemployment and unemployment. Previous attempts to advance these programs were unsuccessful. The study identified concepts to include or modify in draft legislation and policy statements to increase the possibility of enactment and implementation. Twenty-three youth apprenticeship advocates participated as panelists in a four-round online policy Delphi to garner opinions on posited recommendations and panelists’ responses to...

Confirmative evaluation is often noted as an important element of models of Human Performance Technology and Performance Improvement, but there exists confusion around what is and what is not confirmative evaluation. A significant issue limiting the use of confirmative evaluation is the Performance Improvement field’s inability to clearly classify confirmative evaluation in terms of its purpose and scope. Additionally, the performance improvement field lacks sufficient examples of confirmative evaluation in the literature necessary to adequately...

In the first essay, by drawing on theories of balance, social identity, and cue consistency, this research seeks to explain how in a mutual consumption customer B tie to the brand (other customer brand tie) may have an influence on customer A (new customer) brand trust and behavioral intentions. This study introduces a model integrating these constructs in a service context where there is a high chance of social encounters between and within customers and...

Spices offer an environmentally friendly method of controlling ants (Formicidae) in homes. In this study, I used three bioassays to examine the effect of Turmeric (Curcuma longa) and one bioassay to examine the effect of Chili Powder as repellents for ants. Tests were conducted near active ants outdoors. All bioassays examined paired control and treatment baits along a transect, and control baits consisted of a small sheet of corrugated cardboard (a sterile yet easy to...

Previous work from our laboratory has demonstrated the use of an accessible, open- source 3D Bioprinter can be used to produce mammary systems and understand their development. Specifically, these have culminated in projects that have allowed for the reliable in vitro generation of mammary and neuro (ectoderm) organoid and tumoroid structures within patient, foreign, and otherwise synthetic extracellular matrices. However, two problems were presented that required exploration: application of these results to mouse models and...

The purpose of this study was to reevaluate the initial validation process of the Family Resilience Assessment Scale (FRAS) and to validate the measure for use with African Americans. Although the FRAS has been previously validated using a sample from the general population in the U.S. and has demonstrated cross-cultural utility, its applicability for use specifically with African Americans is inconclusive, as demonstrated by preliminary research findings. In the current study, data were collected from...

Sexual minority women are at increased risk of negative outcomes compared to heterosexual women. Bisexual women report disparities when compared to both heterosexual and lesbian women. The disparities experienced by bisexual women also appear to vary based on the gender of their partner, with those partnered with men reporting more negative health outcomes than those partnered with women. One area in which heterosexual and sexual minority women’s experiences differ is in the experience of objectification...

Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, are an ancient group of microorganisms that use simple materials, such as sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, to produce energy while providing oxygen to the atmosphere by performing photosynthesis. Synthetic biology approaches have been employed with cyanobacteria as a platform to produce a range of products, such as biofuels, by inserting a series of genes into the cyanobacterial genome that will allow the conversion of metabolic intermediates to such...

This novel follows an adventure undertaken by a group of scientists and explorers who undertake a quest in search of knowledge. It is an attempt to explore themes such as loneliness, unfamiliarity, and the boundary (a state of mind, perhaps?) separating reverie and reality, sanity and madness, humanity and animality, and the civilized and savage.

Cosmic inflation offers the best known explanations for many of the observed features of the Universe, such as its flatness. An imprint of the qualities of this mechanism is left in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which can be instrumental to confirm inflation. Unfortunately, there is a plethora of inflationary models, which are a priori in the same footing. It is conceivable that contrasting the predictions of the various models with the measured values of...

In statistical genetics, genetic association and genomic prediction become more successful with a highly heritable trait. Identifying highly heritable components of a complex disease can thus advance scientific understanding of the disease and potentially lead to effective prevention and treatments. Using Matlab and existing large-scale genome datasets, we evaluate a restricted maximum likelihood approach to identify highly heritable components of a complex disease as a function of multiple clinical variables.

Multiscale material systems derive their effective mechanical properties through a hierarchical organization of their structural elements and components. The hierarchy of a material is related to its effective properties, material processing, and composition. The hierarchy can be defined as an identifiable structural component with a specific size scale, such as the individual fibers collimated into platelets arranged randomly and producing a complex composite system or the lamellar structure in freeze-casted ceramic with the variation of...

Mistletoes are shrubs that typically parasitize the branches of host trees and rely on avian frugivores for seed dispersal. Because mistletoes are restricted to a narrow range of suitable recruitment sites and avian frugivores are more visible than other guilds of seed dispersers, mistletoe-frugivore systems afford opportunities for assessing the roles of dispersal limitation and local environment in determining plant distribution. These mechanisms have been proposed as determinants of the observed association of oak mistletoe...