Theses and Dissertations

Anodic Aluminum Oxide (AAO) membranes can be fabricated with a highly tunable pore structure making them a suitable candidate for cellular hybrid devices with single-molecule selectivity. The objective of this study was to characterize the cellular response of AAO membranes with varying pore sizes to serve as a proof-of-concept for an artificial material/cell synapse system. AAO membranes with pore diameters ranging from 34-117 nm were achieved via anodization at a temperature of -1̊C in a 2.7% oxalic acid electrolyte.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effect of starting powder characteristics on the sintering behavior of the magnesium-manganese ferrite sheet.

In 2012 implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allowed for more than 1.5 million undocumented youth to become eligible for work authorization and to qualify for institutional and in some cases, state financial aid (Passel 2012). With these changes, access to higher education became a realistic possibility for undocumented youth all around the United States. Nevertheless, a generation of undocumented students who managed to navigate the college application process and successfully enrolled in institutions of higher education remained.

We study the existence, uniqueness, and stability of traveling waves in neural field models under various assumptions on the firing rates and kernels. In the case of Heaviside ring rates, we study unique fronts arising from oscillatory synaptic coupling types. We then use functional analysis to show that Heaviside firing rates can be continuously deformed into smooth, sigmoidal functions and the existence of fronts persists.

This thesis investigated Operations Research developed techniques for the facilities-location problem for application to this electronic engineering problem. One technique stood out as the most promising and it was applied to this problem. The technique chosen was CRAFT developed in 1963.

Utilizing a sample of 214 clinical, counseling, and school psychology doctoral students recruited from APA-accredited programs, the present mixed-methods study examined whether and to what extent demographic variables and interprofessional experiences—both educational and practice oriented—were related to their self-reported attitudes toward interprofessional health care teams (IPTs) as well as their readiness for interprofessional learning.

In this thesis an empirical relationship is developed that can be used to predict the shear plane angle for AISI C1020 HRS once the cutting conditions have been selected and without the necessity of conducting a trial cut.

Conventionally, age-hardening is effected by solution-treating at an elevated temperature, quenching down to room temperature, and then reheating to some optimum temperature to allow the precipitation of a second phase. If it were possible to solution-treat and then quench from this temperature directly to the aging bath, and still obtain the some properties as from conventional aging, a simple one-step aging treatment would be practical. This one-step treatment will be referred to as direct-quench age-hardening.

Modern machine learning practices at the interface of big data, distributed environment and complex learning objectives post great challenges to designing scalable optimization algorithms with theoretical guarantees. This thesis, built on the recent advances in randomized algorithms, concerns development of such methods in practice and the analysis of their theoretical implications in the context of large-scale structured learning problems, such as regularized regression/classification, matrix completion, hierarchical multi-label learning, etc.

The sociological interpretation of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno is based upon criticism discussed of the social implications of Melville's story.