http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/ucla_etd/rss Recent eScholarship items from UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Sat, 17 Oct 2026 11:40:55 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z42d8rw Supported Pd-Au bimetallic nanoparticles are a promising class of catalysts used for hydrogenation and oxidation reactions. Recently, the role of dynamic restructuring of Pd regions at and near the nanoparticle surface in response to modulating gas (H2 and O2) concentration was highlighted for controlling the surface Pd oxide stoichiometry. Here we investigate the mechanism of formation and decomposition of Pd hydride (PdHx) at and near the bimetallic nanoparticle surfaces, a key species for controlling the activity, selectivity, and stability of Pd catalysts in many hydrogenation reactions. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations provide additional insights into the stability and energetics of PdHx formation under varying H fractions and Pd sub-structures. Our results reveal a complex interplay between Pd ensemble size, surface structure, and hydrogen environment in determining the kinetics and thermodynamics of PdHx formation. By elucidating the mechanisms underlying surface... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z42d8rw Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Liu, Xihan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05d353jb This dissertation examines how Latino Republicans make sense of their partisan alignment in a political environment in which such alignment is widely treated as incompatible with Latino and immigrant belonging. Existing scholarship often explains Latino Republicanism as the product of weakened ethnoracial identity or attenuated ties to the immigrant experience, offering insight into movement away from the Democratic Party but less into how Latinos come to align with the contemporary Republican Party. Drawing on (N = 85) in-depth interviews conducted in five majority-Latino counties in South Texas—Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Willacy, and Zapata—this study examines how participants interpret their political commitments within a polarized party system. Participants describe arriving at Republican affiliation by relating longstanding commitments—especially around religion, family, and national belonging—to perceived differences between the parties. In these accounts, partisan alignment... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05d353jb Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Solis, Rodolfo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mx411zs Understanding and reasoning about causal relationships is central to modeling the world and making intelligent decisions. At the heart of causal inference lies the identifiability problem, which asks whether a causal query can be uniquely determined from the available information. This dissertation demonstrates the benefits of leveraging additional background knowledge - beyond causal graphs and observational data - to improve the identifiability of causal effects, a widely studied class of causal queries. In particular, we present methods that incorporate background knowledge in the form of parametric constraints on the identifiability problem, including functional dependencies (e.g., legal driving age is a deterministic function of country) and context-specific independencies (e.g., when it is warm outside, whether the heater is on becomes independent of the number of occupants), enabling the identification of causal effects that would otherwise be impossible in the classical... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mx411zs Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Yizuo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ht2z3qm Chemically-doped conjugated polymers are a class of emerging semiconducting materials with unique and advantageous properties distinct from inorganic semiconductors, including solution processability, mechanical flexibility, highly tunable electronic behavior, and intrinsically low thermal conductivity. These properties make them promising candidates for thermoelectric applications, where temperature gradients are converted into electrical energy or vice versa. Such devices are relevant for applications ranging from industrial waste heat recovery to wearable electronics powered by body heat. Research on chemically-doped conjugated polymers has historically focused on maximizing the thermoelectric power factor, which depends on the electrical conductivity and the Seebeck coefficient. However, full quantification of thermoelectric performance also requires knowledge of the thermal conductivity to calculate the thermoelectric figure of merit, a measure of the degree of energetic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ht2z3qm Thu, 8 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wilson, Reid William https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6ds4m1dd How can developing countries simultaneously participate in global markets and maintain economic sovereignty? I address this question by explaining how Maoist China (1949–1976) implemented “self-reliant” trade with the capitalist West, and especially with West Germany. Like other developing countries in the postwar period, Maoist China pursued a form of import-substitution industrialization (ISI). Unlike most other developing countries, however, China’s ISI experience adhered closely to the Maoist slogan of “self-reliance” and did not result in balance-of-payments problems and debt crises in the 1980s. Thus, China entered the decade with no external obligations, an autonomous policy environment for gradualist market reforms, and an industrial base on which to unleash them. Yet Maoist self-reliance is a puzzle for development theory. Lacking a Weberian economic bureaucracy and facing Cold War geopolitical constraints to accessing global markets, Maoist China’s internal and external... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6ds4m1dd Thu, 8 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Xu, Sandy Ni https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4ng0s99z Balancing between local capital’s requirement for labor, a shrinking local workforce, and exclusionary notions of national belonging, Taiwan’s migration regime bears similarity to a growing number of analogous migration regimes globally. Often described as ‘guest-worker’ programs, these policies exclude migrants from incorporating socially and culturally, by distinguishing between migrants based on skill. This dissertation explores the reproduction and mediation of guest-worker programs within everyday life through an analysis of migrant soccer leagues in Taiwan. The project focuses on guest-workers from Southeast Asia, but also highlights the experiences of student-workers and highly skilled migrants from Europe, the Americas, Southeast Asia, and East Asia in migrant soccer communities. The empirical evidence collected through semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observation and participation within migrant soccer communities, demonstrates overlapping processes through... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4ng0s99z Thu, 8 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Painter, Edward https://escholarship.org/uc/item/571126q4 Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has built the prevailing picture of the social brain. However, fMRI’s hemodynamic basis collapses two dimensions of neural activity that electrophysiology preserves: the millisecond timing of activity and its distribution across the frequency spectrum. This dissertation uses human intracranial electrophysiology (iEEG; N=34) to recover those dimensions for mentalizing – reasoning about mental states – and to reconcile the resulting picture with the fMRI literature it appears at points to contradict. Paper I, using high-frequency broadband (HFB) activity as a proxy for population spiking, shows that the default mode network's apparent simultaneity during mentalizing is in fact a posterior-to-anterior sequence, from visual cortex through temporoparietal DMN to medial prefrontal cortex. Self- and other-mentalizing engage near-identical populations distinguished by the timing – not the magnitude – of their activity, recasting the "other-selective"... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/571126q4 Mon, 5 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tan, Kevin Maluenda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2d89m1f8 Every school day in the United States roughly 55 million students ages 5 through 18 set out on a journey to school. Many students in the U.S. live too far from school to walk. For these students, each state and school district sets policies about school bus service—including which students are eligible for it and who pays for it—which in turn affect the school travel options from which a family can choose. Researchers have studied how children travel on this journey, especially whether they walk or bike to school, but scholars have rarely considered how public policies and funding decisions about school transportation affect students’ travel choices. To address this gap in the literature, my dissertation answers the following research question: To what extent are institutional factors, such as state and local school district policies about school bus eligibility and funding, associated with how students travel to and from school, controlling for student, school, and other... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2d89m1f8 Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Speroni, Samuel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/28884516 Sustainability disclosures are more common than ever. Yet whether they are actually useful remains an open question. This dissertation examines that question across three studies spanning different audiences, methods, and sustainability domains.The first study systematically reviews how business journal articles engage with third-party sustainability measures in sustainability-financial performance linking research. The review identifies two sources of uncertainty that limit confidence in these measures: the quality of underlying data and how data is aggregated. Methodological rigor is bimodal; researchers either scrutinize multiple dimensions of measurement quality or none at all, and choices about data quality and aggregation are shown to be related to reported financial performance relationships. The study offers practical recommendations for improving rigor and transparency in corporate sustainability research. The second study examines how job applicants price corporate sustainability... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/28884516 Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Timmer, Tyson Hayes https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jr7v2np Conjugated polymers are organic semiconductors with extended π-electron systems that enable charge transport in these lightweight, flexible, and solution-processable materials. Their low thermal conductivity and relatively high Seebeck coefficients make them promising candidates for soft thermoelectric devices. However, pristine conjugated polymers possess low electrical conductivity due to their wide bandgaps and limited free carrier density at room temperature. Improving their performance therefore requires strategies that increase carrier density while supporting efficient charge delocalization.This dissertation investigates chemical doping as a route to enhance the electrical and thermoelectric properties of semiconducting polymer films, with a focus on understanding how the dielectric environment, environmental stability, dopant identity, doping method, and pristine microstructure shape charge transport. A combination of four-point probe conductivity, Seebeck coefficient,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jr7v2np Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Garcia Vidales, Diego https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2q59g5qf The objective of this work is to develop a versatile nondestructive evaluation (NDE) tool for the design, analysis, and data generation of inspection processes for both metallic and composite pipes. The tool utilizes the waveguide finite element (WFE) method to obtain wave characteristics, including dispersion curves and global functions. The WFE solution is then used in a developed Global-Local (GL) method to model wave propagation in a coupled source-scattering problem. Commercial finite element software is used to obtain the mass and stiffness matrices, as well as to define the geometry of the waveguide and the defect. This feature provides the flexibility to study a variety of defects and multiple material systems. The hybrid WFE/GL solver is validated through benchmark problems, energy-balance calculations, comparisons with Abaqus solutions, and experimental results for both pristine and symmetrically defected cases. This tool allows wave propagation in pipes to be... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2q59g5qf Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Alsaffar, Fadhel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wk1m4qm Trauma exposure is prevalent among children and adolescents and is associated with broad and lasting consequences for mental health, development, and functioning. Despite the critical importance of early identification and treatment, many trauma-exposed youth do not receive timely or appropriate care. This dissertation examined the pathways through which trauma-exposed youth move from documentation and assessment to engagement in trauma-focused treatment, with particular attention to the provider factors that shape access and equity across the care continuum. Study 1 used medical record data from a large healthcare system to examine how provider characteristics were associated with mental health documentation, screening, and referrals among trauma-exposed youth. Administration of the Patient Health Questionnaire was associated with greater odds of documenting trauma exposure and psychosocial adversity but was not associated with the documentation of a formal trauma- and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wk1m4qm Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Aguilar Silvan, Yesenia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4072m646 Building a fault-tolerant quantum computer requires more than improving physical hardware in isolation. Hardware-level design choices must be guided by the architecture of the full quantum computer and by the bottlenecks that ultimately limit its performance. The 133Ba+ ion is well suited for this kind of architecture-driven optimization. Its simple nuclear spin structure, with I = 1/2, enables fast, high-fidelity state preparation and measurement (SPAM). We leverage this advantage to demonstrate record SPAM fidelity, along with a state-preparation time more than three orders of magnitude faster than previous record-level SPAM demonstrations. This makes 133Ba+ especially promising as a reusable ancilla qubit for quantum error correction.The long-lived D5/2 state, with τ = 30 s, also makes 133Ba+ uniquely positioned to take advantage of the optical-metastable-ground (OMG) qubit protocol, which enables same-species sympathetic cooling. Within this protocol, we demonstrate a magic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4072m646 Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wall, Zachary James https://escholarship.org/uc/item/035478fm This thesis asks a different question than most cortisol-sensing work. It asks not whether cortisol can be detected, but whether the field-effect transistors (FETs) used for detection remain electrically stable over anticipated monitoring periods. Previous work has demonstrated cortisol detection using aptamer-functionalized indium oxide field-effect transistors, but stability over prolonged intervals remains underexplored. Importantly, the surface-preparation steps required before aptamer attachment affect FET electrical stability, and it remains unclear whether this stability is preserved through these steps.This thesis addresses these questions in three stages. The first stage involved a pilot experiment in which bare, untreated In₂O₃ thin-film FETs were exposed to phosphate-buffered saline (PBS), a simple surrogate body fluid. The devices exhibited distinct electrical failure patterns, including increased gate leakage, loss of output saturation, and progressive threshold shifts.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/035478fm Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tillu, Anica https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bc0g3bh Sub-Neptune exoplanets are often modeled as rocky interiors surrounded by hydrogen-rich envelopes, but at the pressures and temperatures expected inside these planets, the boundary between rock and atmosphere may not remain sharp. Hydrogen can dissolve into silicate liquids and form supercritical silicate–hydrogen mixtures whose equations of state, conductivities, and phase behavior differ from those of pure end-member materials. This thesis uses first-principles molecular dynamics simulations to quantify the properties of hydrogen-bearing silicate liquids under conditions relevant to sub-Neptune interiors. I first develop a thermodynamically consistent equation of state for supercritical MgSiO3–H2 mixtures and use it to evaluate how these fluids affect planetary density structure and thermal profiles. I then calculate the electrical and thermal conductivities of these mixtures to assess whether hydrogen-bearing silicate liquids could influence magnetic field generation. Finally,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8bc0g3bh Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Marcum, Sarah https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8144f8cx This thesis examines Kahuku Training Area on Oʻahu and Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauaʻi and the ways in which they are rendered invisible or hypervisible by the tourist destinations in close proximity to or within the bases. Utilizing archival research, mapping technologies like Google and Apple Maps, and YouTube videos, this thesis exposes the messy and hidden entanglements between the U.S. military, state government, and private actors that maintain the settler occupation in Hawaiʻi and imperialist efforts in the Pacific. Grounded by the scholarship of Kanaka ʻŌiwi scholars, this thesis highlights the ongoing resistance towards U.S. military occupation and suggests other methods of opposition through the operationalization of the glitch. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8144f8cx Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yuen, Paige Jessica https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5nb9r7mc Deep generative models for tabular data — GANs, variational autoencoders, diffusion models, and LLM-based generators — exhibit highly non-uniform behavior across datasets: the best-performing family depends on distributional stressors such as long-tailed marginals, high-cardinality categoricals, Zipfian imbalance, and small-sample regimes. While automated machine learning resolved the analogous selection problem for supervised learning a decade ago, tabular synthesis still lacks an “Auto-Synthesizer”: its libraries standardize and benchmark generators but leave the question of which model to use to the practitioner, for whom evaluating every candidate — training, sampling, and scoring each under competing objectives of fidelity, privacy, and utility — is prohibitively expensive. This thesis studies intent-conditioned tabular synthesis selection and answers it with a two-system framework. Table-Synthesizers, the generation and measurement substrate, unifies 19 published generators... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5nb9r7mc Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Son, Hochan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48g37605 Early-life adversity (ELA) is hypothesized to shape adult phenotypes and fitness outcomes through developmental effects on physiological and behavioral systems, yet evidence from wild, long-lived primates remains limited. This dissertation investigates the relationships among ELA, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis regulation, behavioral phenotypes, and life-history outcomes in white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus imitator) at Lomas Barbudal Biological Reserve in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, using over three decades of longitudinal data from the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project.Chapter 1 examines ELA effects on female mortality and reproductive trajectories across three developmental windows. Prenatal exposure to alpha male replacement increased mortality risk by 75%, while psychosocial adversity (alpha male replacements, maternal loss) accelerated reproductive timing among females who survived to the core reproductive period. Chapter 2 evaluates whether boldness and aggression... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48g37605 Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mensing, Ashley Nicole https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32q712sq From Love is Blind to every iteration of Love Island, Finding Love reality television is a ubiquitous and ever-expanding genre of televisual entertainment in a post-2020 world. None is more polarizing and captivating than the hit reality show Love Island USA. Love Island USA presents a veneer of a color-blind multiculturalist paradise that promises to be a free market for love, uninhabited by the social order of the world which it mimics. However, the presence of dark-skinned Black women presents a foil to this ruse. Audiences witness how dark-skinned Black women—who are seeking partnership and/or notoriety on these shows—face sanctioned and stylized embarrassment, degradation, or harassment. This maltreatment is then utilized as entertainment, thus increasing the show’s popularity and profitability. This project analyzes seasons 6 and 7 of Love Island USA to question how misogynoir and anti-blackness influence how production constructs narratives about these dark-skinned Black... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32q712sq Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Waititu, Njeri https://escholarship.org/uc/item/27t0j2nj Early-life adversity (ELA) can shape survival, reproduction, and fitness long after development, yet wild animals typically encounter multiple ecological, social, and parental challenges whose cumulative consequences remain difficult to quantify. This dissertation develops and applies a cumulative adversity framework to determine how the total burden of ELA affects fitness and life-history outcomes in free-living female yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer). Using more than six decades of longitudinal data, I constructed cumulative adversity indices (CAIs) spanning ecological, demographic, and maternal exposures before sexual maturity and evaluated their relationships with survival, lifetime reproductive success, annual breeding probability, and reproductive onset decisions. Cumulative adversity predicted lower pup survival and shorter adult lifespan, whereas indices that allowed favorable conditions to offset adverse experiences performed poorly. Greater adversity was... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/27t0j2nj Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ortiz Ross, Xochitl https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1773f9k7 Microtremor-based horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratios (mHVSR) are derived from Fourier Amplitude Spectra of ambient ground motions and can reveal site features such as resonances or lack thereof. Despite this promise, mHVSR curves have not previously found significant engineering application, likely because: (1) mHVSR data have not been available in sufficient quantities to support ground motion model development and (2) difficulties linking mHVSR parameters to site response. This research addresses both needs by enhancing mHVSR data availability and developing mHVSR-conditioned site response models for California sites. I extended and improved the available mHVSR data by temporarily deploying seismometers at sites of interest (often locations of permanent accelerometers) and downloading data from permanent broadband seismometers. At California vertical array sites, mHVSR curves were measured in expanding concentric circles and used to characterize spatial heterogeneity. In... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1773f9k7 Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ornelas, Francisco Javier Gonzalez https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gb1s79k Coherent transition radiation (CTR) provides a powerful link between the spatiotemporal structure of charged-particle beams and the emitted electromagnetic fields, underpinning a wide range of beam diagnostics and radiation sources. Despite their long-standing theoretical foundations, existing CTR frameworks have historically been restricted to simplified beam and boundary geometries. We introduce a unified, first-principles CTR framework applicable to arbitrary three-dimensional electron bunches. Beginning with the classical Ginzburg-Frank formulation, we develop a systematic and instructional description of coherent emission in terms of the bunch form factor, establishing it as the central quantity governing spectral and angular radiation characteristics. We further present a general numerical pipeline that enables the computation of CTR spectra from arbitrarily structured electron beams beyond the conventional Gaussian form factor, and provide examples of hollow Gaussian and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gb1s79k Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Azcoitia, Gia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xh1v35m Southern California is home to native macroalgae in the Sargassaceae family (order Fucales); several function as canopy-forming species in lower intertidal and subtidal ecosystems and act as foundational species by providing food and habitat for an array of organisms. The two genera found in this family are Stephanocystis and Sargassum. Among these, two endemics are the focus of my studies, Stephanocystis dioica and Sargassum agardhianum, which are warm-temperate species whose natural range begins south of Point Conception. As ocean temperatures continue to warm in Southern California, such warm-temperate canopy-forming species may play an increasingly important ecological role as community structure shifts. Despite this, foundational knowledge, including their reproductive biology, remains poorly understood.For S. dioica, I documented the reproductive phenology, identified the morphology of both sexes, and performed a series of experiments to culture embryos and juveniles. A... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xh1v35m Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Alley, Katelyn https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6g47p27q Earth's magnetic field has persisted for at least 3.4 billion years, yet the present-day core dynamo - driven by latent heat and compositional buoyancy from inner-core solidification - cannot have operated for most of that time, as the inner core is likely less than 1 billion years old. An alternative mechanism is required. A leading candidate is a basal magma ocean (BMO): a layer of iron-enriched silicate liquid that may have persisted at the base of the mantle for billions of years following Earth's magma-ocean stage. Whether this silicate dynamo operated, and whether analogous mechanisms generate fields in larger rocky exoplanets, depends on material properties that are poorly constrained or inaccessible to laboratory experiment. This dissertation examines the material properties governing magnetic field generation and BMO stability in rocky planets, from Earth to super-Earths, through first-principles calculations using density functional theory and ab initio molecular... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6g47p27q Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dragulet, Francis https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5485r3zz This dissertation develops and analyzes methods for interpretable and fair machine learning that account for stratified data. We investigate two settings in which data may exhibit meaningful differences across groups or sources. First, we propose and analyze Stratified Non-Negative Tensor Factorization, a tensor factorization method that incorporates stratum-level information while learning globally shared topics and stratum-dependent shifts. We develop an efficient multiplicative-update algorithm, incorporate total-variation regularization for image denoising, and demonstrate its effectiveness on synthetic and real-world datasets. Second, we investigate fairness in matrix completion via nuclear norm minimization. We show empirically that minority or structurally distinct groups can experience disproportionately higher reconstruction error under a globally shared low-rank model. We formalize statistical parity and equal opportunity for matrix completion and evaluate fairness-metric... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5485r3zz Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vural, Zerrin Miyase https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5471f6f0 This dissertation brings together four studies. The first two address practical representation, drawing on programming-language semantics and motor representation. The latter two are collaborative studies that develop and test methods for evaluating psychological depth in large language models. The first study examines Carlotta Pavese’s account of practical modes of presentation, in which operational semantic values serve as practical Fregean senses and algorithms as their referents. I show that the account does not establish how distinct operational semantic values can be more fine-grained than an algorithm while sharing it as their referent. I argue that algorithms cannot occupy the intermediate level of granularity between operational semantic values and the functions they compute. The second study develops a positive account of practical representation as a distinctive representational kind. I frame the central dispute as one between a mode of presentation view, in which a... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5471f6f0 Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yildiz, Zeynep Senahan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sm711xr Hydrological prediction depends on both accurate models of system dynamics and observations that constrain hydrologic model predictions. This dissertation investigates how advances in hydrologic modeling and satellite remote sensing can improve forecasting and support water-management decisions across data-rich and data-limited regions. First, I evaluate short-range flood forecasting using the Noah-MP land-surface model (which is the hydrologic core of the U.S. National Water Model) in three California watersheds spanning contrasting hydroclimatic conditions from north to south. Model calibration is well known to be essential for accurate flood forecasts, and I confirmed that careful calibration substantially improved retrospective forecasts (reforecasts) of flood hydrographs and peak flows. In addition, correction of precipitation forecast biases and adjustment of antecedent soil moisture through discharge-informed data assimilation further improved reforecast skill, particularly... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sm711xr Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ma, Xiaoyu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b37f8m6 Taking Lin Yi-han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise (2017) as an ethical and literary antecedent, this thesis examines Li Bo-jian’s novella The Nine Righteous Ones (2019) and its screen adaptation, Faithful (2023). Although Chinese and Taiwanese educational and institutional contexts differ, both associate teaching with moral exemplarity. I ask how teacher-perpetrators exploit that authority to disguise sexual violence as romance and how literary narratives prompt readers and viewers to reconsider the interpretations that sustain it. My comparative close readings show that these works do not present victims as incapable of voicing their traumatic experiences and passively waiting for outside listeners’ rescue and redress, as envisioned in the post-modernist branches of trauma studies. In First Love, Si-chi rereads and annotates her own diary, undertaking an act of self-witnessing that rebuts the language of romance the teacher has used to disguise the assault. Si-chi’s friends... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b37f8m6 Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Jingyan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3fg0n7mx This dissertation is a collection of work on several aspects of quantum field theory, including the worldsheet dynamics of vortex strings, non-invertible symmetries and their holographic realizations, and quantum field theory in non-integer spacetime dimensions.In Chapter 2, we study string excitations and the effective worldsheet action of Abrikosov–Nielsen–Olesen vortex strings in the four-dimensional Abelian Higgs model. We analyze fluctuations around the vortex and determine the worldsheet spectrum. Interestingly, we find a light dilaton in the type-I regime and a light axion in the type-II regime. By integrating out the massive modes, we compute the O(K4 ) Wilson coefficients of the effective string action and compare the resulting theory with flux-tube S-matrix bootstrap constraints and Yang–Mills confining strings. We also discuss the implications of this comparison for the dual superconductor picture of confinement.In Chapter 3, we study non-invertible defects in two-dimensional... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3fg0n7mx Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Li, Yanyan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xq5p1b7 This dissertation explores the various methods tech workers employ to shape the industry according to their visions of justice and equality. While it is generally agreed upon in tech activist circles that their industry is sexist, racist, and exploitative, there is less consensus on how these inequalities are deployed, and even less consensus on how to solve them. But through the social justice movements of the 2020s, including Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and anti-fascism and anti-military movements, tech workers across the spectrum have called into question the romanticized notions of Silicon Valley as a diverse and benevolent high-tech industry that solved—not created—societal problems. Using ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews and participant-observation, I investigated a wide umbrella of progressive and left-leaning activism in the tech industry. I identified three main themes of their activism: 1) addressing workplace racial and gender... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xq5p1b7 Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kim, Kelsey Cristina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2dn2s4wd This dissertation examines verbal number agreement with disjunctive subjects. Whereas disjunctions, like indefinites, are known to freely take existential scope above other sentential operators — even out of environments from which scope-taking is typically blocked — I show that scope readings are more limited in sentences where disjoined singular subjects control plural agreement. In particular, I argue that sg-sg disjunctions must take existential scope within a polar question or beneath a downward-entailing or quantificational operator. I call this pattern Ivlieva’s Generalization based on Ivlieva (2012, 2013). While Ivlieva’s findings conflict with other existing accounts of disjunctive agreement, I present data — primarily from English, but also from Spanish, German, and Romanian — that strengthen the case that plural agreement with disjunctive subjects is semantically restricted. The cross-linguistic convergence of evidence indicates that the restricted distribution of plural... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2dn2s4wd Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mateos, Arthur Chang https://escholarship.org/uc/item/230565gp In California, college readiness is an ongoing concern as the state pushes to increase college completion rates. Dual enrollment has expanded rapidly as a strategy for increasing college access and preparing students for postsecondary education. This qualitative study examined how former participants in California’s College and Career Access Pathways (CCAP) dual enrollment program perceived the influence of their dual enrollment experiences on their college readiness and transition to higher education. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 19 former CCAP students who participated in dual enrollment on their high school campuses between 2022 and 2025 and completed at least six units of college coursework after graduation. The results indicated that both first-generation and continuing-generation students perceived CCAP dual enrollment as beneficial for college readiness by providing early exposure to college expectations, independent learning, time management,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/230565gp Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zia, Ayesha https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1n29k483 “Meridional Triangulations and Peripheral Resistances” is a comparative study of three culturally significant magazines active before and during the Second World War: Jean Ballard’s Les Cahiers du Sud (1914–1966), Roger Caillois’s Lettres françaises (1941–1945, 1947), and Victoria Ocampo’s Sur (1931–1981.) Each sought to articulate, metabolize, preserve, and resist the social, historical, and cultural upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe and Latin America. The concept “meridional” points to currents of movement that cross borders of all kinds, countering the still-common assumption that Europe occupies a cultural center to which the rest of the world merely reacts.“Meridional Triangulations” also serves as a method: reading the three magazines’ shared contributors and international ethos as a source of connection rather than division, a unity located not in territorial claims but in the meteorological, oceanographic movement the “meridional” describes. The dissertation asks... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1n29k483 Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Araujo, Jason https://escholarship.org/uc/item/18c771m5 Adaptive cognition requires both persistence and flexibility: internal representations must remain stable enough to guide ongoing behavior, yet open enough to be revised when new evidence warrants it. This dissertation examines how this balance is achieved, advancing the view that the exchange between internal representations and external evidence is iterative rather than sequential. Internal states shape how incoming information is interpreted, and incoming information in turn prompts renewed processing — and revision — of the internal states themselves, in cycles that operate across timescales and levels of cognition and that are regulated by metacognitive signals of reliability. Three studies examine this iterative interplay in distinct settings. Study 1, using human intracranial recordings, shows that perception of a brief input unfolds through a temporally extended comparison with recently formed memory, which repeatedly informs the developing perceptual decision rather than... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/18c771m5 Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 LEE, RAIHYUNG https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10g3f6km The first chapter of this thesis evaluates the preservation and geochemical fidelity of eight Late Cretaceous fossil eggshell samples from Mongolia and Alberta using polarized-light petrography, electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), cathodoluminescence, Raman spectroscopy, conventional stable isotopes, carbonate clumped isotopes (Δ47), and triple oxygen isotopes (Δ′¹⁷O). Most specimens retain recognizable microstructure, yet petrographic preservation is not consistently coupled to isotopic fidelity. The two Alberta samples yield elevated apparent Δ47 temperatures (48.5–61.5 °C), consistent with burial-related resetting. Several Mongolian samples yield lower apparent temperatures (21.2–31.5 °C) and the strongest convergence among preservation screens; these values are treated as candidate biomineralization temperatures. Carbon-isotope values are comparatively reproducible within specimens, whereas oxygen-isotope and Δ¹⁷O results indicate variable fluid interaction. These results... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10g3f6km Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Knighton, Jade L https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0p25z0gt We study cases and variants of the following problem: Given a collection of subspaces of a finite-dimensional Euclidean space and a unit vector, iteratively project that vector onto the subspaces in an order determined by a subspace-selection rule. After many iterates, how far away can the final point be from the subspaces? The answer depends on the subspace selection rule. In this dissertation, we study the cyclic rule, in which one cycles over the subspaces, and the greedy rule, in which one always selects a subspace in the collection maximally far from the current position, and some variants. In the cyclic case, we show that if we cycle through ? subspaces ? times each, then the average squared distance from the final iterate to the subspaces in the collection is at most ?(? 2/?) by proving a new result of independent interest: For each positive integer ? , a characterization of which points in the complex plane can lie in the numerical range of the product of ? (real or complex)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0p25z0gt Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kong, Mark Hay-Yat https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8w04j5pq Over the past decade, a significant number of higher education institutions across the US have sought to expand education access by establishing tuition waivers for Native American students. A tuition waiver commonly provides free or reduced tuition for Native American students who can meet the eligibility criteria set by an institution. As support for Native students through the form of tuition waivers continues to expand, there is a critical need for institutions to understand both the positive and negative impacts of tuition waivers beyond the benefits of financial assistance. In this thesis, I explore the impact of Native American tuition waivers by focusing on the University of California’s Native American Opportunity Plan (NAOP) and Native student experiences with the NAOP at UCLA. Through interviews with Native students from diverse tribal community connections and racial identities, this study highlights the importance of recognizing the complexity of contemporary Native... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8w04j5pq Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wyatt, Avory https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8hx9k0nz Future wireless applications continue the trend of increasingly demanding bandwidth, data rates, and connectivity, forcing systems to operate at higher frequencies to exploit the abundant bandwidth and with more antennas to exploit array gain and beamforming capabilities. However, the increasing array aperture and bandwidth start to challenge the established channel and array response assumptions, and these changing assumptions require both new array architectures and new algorithms suited to the changing channel characteristics. First, the frequency dependency of the array can no longer be ignored, requiring true-time-delay (TTD)-based array architectures to enable low-cost frequency-dependent control. Furthermore, as the array aperture grows, more users fall into the near-field region, complicating the beamforming design, since the user channel now depends on both angle and distance. This also complicates localization and beam training, as the search must now be performed over... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8hx9k0nz Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pehlivan, Ibrahim https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53s9p3mq The purpose of this study was to explore how faculty working in a First Year Experience (FYE) program at a California community college perceived their role as an educator, as well as how participation in FYE affected pedagogical approaches and the creation and sustainment of communities of teaching and communities of practice. This study used Mezirow’s (1991) theory of transformative learning as its overarching theoretical framework, supplemented by Habermas’ (1981) theory of communicative action and learner-centered approaches (Baxter & Gray, 2002; Warmer, 2001), to guide its examination of faculty approaches to instructional strategies, serving as channels for them to become institutional change agents and contribute to pedagogical change at the departmental, institutional, and disciplinary levels. This qualitative single-site case study consisted of interviews and classroom observations with 15 faculty housed within the FYE program at Bay College, in addition to document... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/53s9p3mq Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Choe, Catherine https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4bk4510z A meditation on solace, gentle steps and the space between moments, For the Quiet Star is framed by a simple structure: from nothing, into something, and back to nothing. To capture this, the pitched percussion and string sections are approached sonically, and presented with timbral pairings.Vibraphones are bowed throughout, in unison with high strings, creating a hybrid color. To match this sound, the strings play without vibrato throughout the piece, producing a glassy, transparent texture that merges with the sustain of the bowed vibraphones. This combination forms a core sound world for the work.By contrast, when marimbas are dominating the texture, short string sounds are used as the colorizing element, creating a kind of blended, string-timbred marimba.The vibraphones also anchor the pitch content with simultaneous low and high pedal points, one at each extreme of the instrument's range. Within that large interval, an incantatory string melody pushes toward moments of arrival.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4bk4510z Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ridley, Stephen https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38j8p7z3 Fast charging of Ni-rich layered oxide cathodes is limited by slow Li⁺ transport and large structural changes at high states of charge. This thesis investigated nanostructuring and multi-element doping as a combined strategy for developing cobalt-free Ni-rich cathodes. NM-MgNbMo, NM-MgAlMo, and NM-MgTiNbMo were synthesized using a polymer-assisted micelle-templated sol–gel method and compared with bulk and less porous NMC-811. X-ray diffraction confirmed the layered α-NaFeO₂-type structure and distinct interlayer spacings; NM-MgNbMo had the least apparent cation mixing and largest spacing, supporting easier Li⁺ transport and faster kinetics, while partial disorder may provide a stabilizing pillaring effect. NM-MgNbMo exhibited the best high-rate performance among the doped samples, maintaining approximately 36 mAh/g at 32C when the capacity of bulk NMC-811 approached zero. CV and GITT measurements were also consistent with comparatively low apparent polarization for NM-MgNbMo.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38j8p7z3 Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shao, Yikun https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05s79065 Metal-halide perovskite solar cells have attracted tremendous interest because of their compatibility with low-temperature processing, strong optical absorption, defect tolerance, and tunable electronic structures. Despite rapid improvements in power conversion efficiency, their practical deployment remains limited by insufficient operational stability. Interfaces are particularly important because they simultaneously govern charge extraction, non-radiative recombination, ionic redistribution, chemical reactions, and, at buried interfaces, the formation of the perovskite absorber itself. This dissertation investigates how molecularly engineered polymeric interfaces can regulate these coupled electronic, ionic, and structural processes to improve both the efficiency and long-term stability of perovskite solar cells.Chapter One introduces the fundamental properties and stability challenges of metal-halide perovskites, with particular emphasis on the multifunctional roles of interfaces.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05s79065 Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yang, Wenxin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bd0c7v1 Trapped atomic ions are among the most capable platforms for quantum computation, yet leading architectures using laser-based gates suffer photon-scattering errors, demanding cooling requirements, and optical delivery challenges that grow more burdensome at scale. Electric-field-gradient gates (EGGS) bypass these obstacles by driving qubit transitions with radio-frequency fields applied directly to easily scalable trap electrodes - the transitions addressed render photon scattering negligible and tolerate thermal motion. The low-lying, electric-dipole transitions necessary for EGGS are found only in molecules, and this dissertation details the pursuit of EGGS-based quantum-logic spectroscopy of the lambda-doublet qubit in H35Cl+ with a co-trapped 40Ca+ ion in a cryogenic system built to that end. This pursuit required wideband calibration of the EGGS field gradients across the 10 MHz to 1000 MHz band of the molecular transitions - for which no suitably wideband interaction existed.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bd0c7v1 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Ho, Clayton Ze Chi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93g3m45g Modern speaker verification systems achieve strong performance on adult speech, but their performance often degrades when applied to children’s speech. This degradation arises from three challenges: children’s speech differs substantially from adult speech, children’s voices continue to change as they grow, and the lack of large child speech databases. Developmental changes affect acoustic and articulatory properties of speech and create age-related variability that can obscure speaker identity. This dissertation addresses the problem of robust speaker verification for children by studying developmental variability in child speech and developing adaptation methods that improve child speaker verification while preserving performance on adult speech. The first contribution of this dissertation is a longitudinal analysis of acoustic and articulatory development in children. By analyzing vowel formants, subglottal resonances, and ultrasound-based tongue-shape measures from children... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/93g3m45g Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shetty, Vishwas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7jw9z989 Epilepsy affects approximately 50 million people worldwide, and roughly one-third of patients are drug-resistant. For these patients, closed-loop neurostimulation offers an alternative to surgical resection, but current devices close the loop on detection rather than on outcome: stimulation parameters are set at periodic clinic visits and are not informed by what the brain is currently doing or about to do. Progress depends on two open problems: how to track brain state in real time from EEG, and how seizure activity evolves through thalamocortical networks. This dissertation studies both problems and connects them through a learned model of seizure dynamics for closed-loop intervention planning. The first thread develops scalable self-supervised methods for EEG representation learning, progressing from a pretrained transformer-CNN for seizure detection from wearable behind-the-ear EEG, to Mentality, a Mamba-based foundation model that learns from reconstruction, to Laya,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7jw9z989 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Panchavati, Saarang https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72w0k4n7 Superconductivity is a powerful phase in which materials conduct electricity with little to no resistance. Most studied superconducting materials show transition from the normal state under cryogenic temperatures. Computational approaches to studying superconducting candidate materials bridge theory and experiment, especially in the search for high temperature superconductors for applications in energy and transportation. Implementation of the superconducting functions in finite differences is the first step in efficient computational study of known and candidate materials with Superconducting Density Functional Theory. A one-dimensional prototype of a solver of the Bogoliubov de Gennes equations in real-space is presented for implementation with current density functional theory packages, such as the Matlab-Simulation Package for Ab-initio Real-space Calculations. The implemented numerical methods accelerate convergence of superconducting properties to a self-consistency residual... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72w0k4n7 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dhiraj, Maanasi Harini https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xn3s74f Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic relapsing disorder that disrupts neuronal communication and brain function. Emerging evidence suggests that astrocytes contribute to these neuroadaptations through the release of exosomes, which are nanovesicles that mediate intercellular communication by transferring proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. However, the lack of an in vivo astrocyte-specific reporter model has limited investigation of astrocyte-derived exosomes in the brain.The objective of this study was to develop and validate an in vivo reporter model for selectively labeling astrocyte-derived exosomes. The Transgenic Inducible GFP Extracellular-vesicle Reporter (TIGER) mouse line was crossed with the tamoxifen-inducible Aldh1l1-Cre/ERT2 mouse line to enable astrocyte-specific expression of CD9-GFP. PCR genotyping, immunofluorescence, and confocal microscopy were used to validate reporter activation and visualize GFP-labeled exosomes. GFP puncta was observed in association... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xn3s74f Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pulido, Bryanna Alexia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rs5z9qh This thesis examines fake news detection as a supervised text classification problem and compares several machine learning techniques using the WELFake dataset. The analysis includes both classical machine learning models and recurrent neural network models in order to evaluate their relative strengths for distinguishing fake news from real news using article text. The models considered in this study are Logistic Regression, Linear SVM, vanilla RNN, LSTM, GRU, and BiLSTM. After preprocessing, all models were trained and evaluated using the same training, validation, and test split to ensure a fair comparison. Performance was assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and training time. The results show that BiLSTM achieved the strongest overall performance, while GRU and Linear SVM also performed very well. At the same time, the classical baseline models remained highly competitive while requiring substantially less training time. These findings highlight the tradeoff... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rs5z9qh Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Shih, Cindy https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66j0p5cp “Battered and Beloved” analyzes how the Law inflicts, facilitates, and justifies legal violence towards international, interracial Chinese American adoptees through its categorization of adoptees as sources of labor, commodities, and possessions. To better understand how the Law inflicts legal violence against international, interracial Chinese American adoptees, “Battered and Beloved” traces the origins and progression of adoption laws, interrogates the underlying logics of modern adoption laws, and explores the lived experiences of international, interracial Chinese American adoptee women through oral histories. Through these methodologies, it is revealed that the United States settler colonial project imagines international, interracial Chinese American adoptees as an evergreen and replaceable labor force that can fulfil the myth of the nuclear family, carry out the logics of the settler colonial state, offer extractable labor for the settler colonial state, and produce the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66j0p5cp Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Hemler, Alyssa Maureen Yukang https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t34p771 Molecular J-aggregates are assemblies of chromophores with narrow bandwidths, redshifted emission, and high quantum yields as compared to their monomer chromophore. The hydrophobic effect drives the self-assembly of these aggregates when the monomers are exposed to water, and strong coupling of the transition dipole moments is responsible for their amplified emissive properties. These include high quantum yields and radiative rates, fast lifetimes and superradiance. Less emissive assemblies known as H- and I-aggregates can be formed as well, and the mesophase is typically selected for by the water/solvent ratio. The differences in photophysical properties between H-, I- and J-aggregates is directly related to the monomer packing geometry. In chapter 1, we discuss prior research into how the monomer structure and packing geometries affect the resulting aggregate photophysics, demonstrating that J-aggregates are arranged in a head-to-tail arrangement. We present the various... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t34p771 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Williams, Jillian Williams Ann https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5mf9v6mk This study examines mentoring relationships between faculty of color and graduate students of color at a public research-1 university in Southern California. Using Community Cultural Wealth as the guiding theoretical framework, this study explores how doctoral students of color characterize the advantages and disadvantages of having faculty mentors of color, how faculty members’ lived experiences and cultural backgrounds inform their mentoring approaches, and how faculty of color understand their mentorship as contributing to the diversification of the professoriate. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with thirteen doctoral students of color and nine faculty of color across Social Science and STEM fields, the findings reveal that mentoring relationships are not only academic, but also emotional, cultural, material, relational, and intergenerational.Graduate student participants described faculty mentors of color as critical sources of validation, advocacy, and holistic care... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5mf9v6mk Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Her, Xiong https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f99s8m5 High speed and high resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) are highly sought after for modern communication systems. To maintain high speed performance and high resolution accuracy, calibration is used to correct for mismatches. However, conventional schemes interact with the DAC core and signal path, reducing high speed performance. We propose a calibration structure using charge-trap transistors (CTTs) to isolate calibration circuitry from the DAC signal path. To minimize calibration hardware area and complexity, a method of calculating the minimum number of CTTs needed is presented as well. A DAC with the proposed calibration has been designed and simulated with a Nyquist-rate SFDR of 67.3dB and a Nyquist-rate IM3 of 73.4dB. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f99s8m5 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lee, Jun Sang https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5b5923nw Air pollution can pose adverse health effects at any stage of life but can be especially detrimental at periods of heightened vulnerability — fetal growth in the womb and old age. Air pollution health impacts have been studied extensively but research on particulate matter ≤2.5μm (PM2.5) constituents and volatile organic compounds are still lacking. We investigated the effect of a variety of air pollutants on adverse birth outcomes in California and in a smaller cohort explored the role of the placenta in explaining such associations. We also explored effects on cardiometabolic health outcomes in a particularly vulnerable population of older Mexican Americans.First, for Aim 1 of the dissertation, we analyzed California birth records from 1990 to 2021 to understand the trends in associations of gestational exposure to criteria air pollutants (PM2.5, NO2, O3) and traffic and industry-related air toxics (benzene, 1,3-butadiene, chromium, lead, nickel, zinc) with preterm birth (PTB)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5b5923nw Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mitra, Sanjali https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51k8d8gw Driven by escalating living costs in the United States, this thesis investigates the key determinants of monthly apartment rental prices and evaluates predictive machine learning models using a national apartment listing dataset from the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository. Exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing revealed that spatial geography is overwhelmingly the most powerful driver of rental variation, with coastal states like Hawaii, New York, and California having significantly higher prices. Structural layout attributes, specifically the number of bathrooms and bedrooms, also heavily influenced valuations, outperforming listing-level administrative variables like upfront fees and pet policies in predictive power. Preprocessing involved scaling, one-hot encoding, and utilizing the Interquartile range method to eliminate extreme price anomalies. Of all trials, the best predictive models targeted price per square foot, and a Random Forest regressor yielded the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51k8d8gw Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wakamoto, Linda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jp3v502 Coral reefs worldwide are shifting from coral to macroalgal dominance, expanding the substrate available to toxic benthic dinoflagellates whose biotoxins accumulate in reef food webs. Key knowledge gaps include which macroalgal hosts support the heaviest dinoflagellate loads, which species those loads consist of, and whether the dinoflagellates themselves reach fishes by the grazing pathway conventionally assumed. Field surveys resolve these dinoflagellates only to genus, though species within a genus can differ in toxicity by orders of magnitude. Monitoring these reefs also depends on tools that can inventory their communities quickly. I therefore pursued two aims in French Polynesia: to establish what environmental DNA can recover of reef fish biodiversity, and to resolve the toxic dinoflagellates on macroalgae and in the fishes that feed there. Overall, my dissertation shows that environmental DNA can characterize reef fish communities rapidly, and that the dinoflagellate genus... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jp3v502 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zerecero Marin, Erick Ricardo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jb3p4sd Reliable robot navigation today depends on preparation, which in the crop rows means satellite base stations and a recorded route, and indoors a surveyed map and a fixed list of object categories. Humans need none of it, combining the scene in view with prior knowledge of spatial structure and object semantics. This dissertation builds navigation systems on the same basis, each modeling a site while working in it, within a robot's onboard compute budget.A row-crop field is planted to a fixed pattern of straight, parallel, evenly spaced rows, known before the robot arrives. We build that geometry into AgroNav, which composes semantic segmentation with semantic line detection to recover the two lines bounding an aisle and the centerline between them from one RGB frame. Trained on a few hundred annotated images and released with AgroScapes, it drives an AgileX Scout 2 through twenty-five orchard rows and 1398 meters at 93.3% mean per row autonomy, from the camera alone.The detector... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jb3p4sd Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Panda, Shivam Kumar https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4503m8vj Cognitive flexibility, the capacity to update behavior when the relevance of environmental cues changes, depends on the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)1234. However, how prefrontal populations represent stimulus information according to behavioral relevance, and how distinct neuronal classes contribute, are not yet fully understood. This dissertation examines how the mPFC represents rule-related information during an attentional set-shifting task, whether that representation reorganizes across rule switches, and whether somatostatin-expressing (SST) interneurons contribute differently from the non-SST population. Head-fixed, water-restricted mice performed a two-alternative forced-choice task with multiple un-cued rule shifts within single sessions, while two-photon calcium imaging captured mPFC population activity with SST neuron identity recorded. Using dimensionality reduction and linear support vector machine decoding, we reveal three primary findings. First, the mPFC... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4503m8vj Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vormstein-Schneider, Douglas https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40x9v181 Background: Research on empathy in autism has historically emphasized deficits in social cognition and relied on male-dominant samples (Lemos et al., 2026; Loomes et al., 2017; Song et al., 2019). Consequently, less is known about how autistic women experience empathy, particularly in relation to masking, gendered social expectations, and communication differences. Objective: This exploratory qualitative study examined how autistic women describe and make sense of their lived experiences of empathy, investigated contextual factors that shape how empathy is experienced and expressed, and explored what can be learned from autistic women to advance the understanding of empathy. Methods: A participatory co-design (PCD) approach was used to center autistic perspectives throughout the study (Gomez, Kyza, & Mancevice, 2018). Three autistic women collaborated with the researcher to co-design semi-structured interview questions (Cooper, Kumarendran, & Barona, 2024;... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40x9v181 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Straus, Jolie Alison https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rp7t72p In blockchain systems, light nodes are vulnerable to data availability (DA) attacks, in which a malicious block producer withholds block data from the network. To protect against DA attacks, block data is encoded with an erasure code, and each light node performs data availability sampling (DAS), in which a node randomly samples a small set of coded symbols to test whether data is available to the network. Two-dimensional Reed-Solomon (2D-RS) codes are a leading choice for use in DAS systems.Standard DAS analysis treats the erasure code and sampling strategy separately. The undecodable erasure patterns of a 2D-RS code have structured geometry that can be exploited using joint code-sampler design. We measure each sampler design by a light node’s probability of failure to detect a DA attack. Holding the code fixed, we design a biregular sampler which spreads sample queries evenly across rows and columns. In the regime where light nodes take few samples, we prove that the biregular... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rp7t72p Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Madisetti, Sonali https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3588n02j Dissolved Oxygen (DO) is an important indicator of stream health, and modeling dissolved oxygen (DO) dynamics can provide insight into the processes governing oxygen availability in urban waterways. The Streeter-Phelps model (SPM) provides a foundational framework for representing DO dynamics, but its simplified formulation may not fully represent heterogeneous urban river systems. This study evaluates a finite-difference implementation of the SPM using field measurements from the UCLA Botanical Garden stream and characterizes preliminary hydraulic and water quality conditions in the Los Angeles River to inform future model application. Sensitivity analysis of the Botanical Garden model revealed that DO predictions were most sensitive to reaeration, highlighting the importance of hydraulic conditions in governing modeled DO dynamics. The final model reproduced observed DO values with an RMSE of 0.3364, however, achieving this fit required a high initial BOD value of 50 mg/L, which... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3588n02j Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 ABATCHA, HANIFAH https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1ss3p8zx Deep sequence prediction models always achieve high prediction accuracy by using Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) data to conduct forecasting on glucose. However, the top accurate models always make serious ranking mistakes on causal relationships. When a counterfactual insulin or carbohydrate dose is applied, they always produce false rankings as the result. Thus, these models cannot be used as support for insulin dosing decisions. This paper studies how to acquire a prediction model that is both accurate and ensures causal validity. Thus, we built a multi-agent searching system by porting the AI Co-Scientist architecture of Gottweis et al. (2026) to glucose forecasting. Different from predicting glucose directly by using language models, these multi-agents propose, discuss, evolve, and evaluate stacking strategies on a fixed pool of pre-trained foundation models. Each strategy's "fitness" is its real held-out error, computed by fitting on a training split, selecting on... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1ss3p8zx Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Deyi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kg5z3rp Traditional crime measures, such as crime counts and rates, effectively describe the overall volume of crime. However, they provide limited information about the composition of crime within local areas. This thesis examines whether a Crime Diversity Index (CDI) can add useful information about local crime patterns beyond conventional measures of crime volume. The analysis is based on 875,087 crime incidents reported by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) between January 2020 and December 2023. These incidents are grouped into eight broad crime categories, and crime diversity is measured using a normalized Shannon Diversity Index. The main spatial unit used in the study is the LAPD Reporting District.The study examines crime diversity from spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal perspectives. Spatial variation is evaluated using Reporting District-level comparisons, choropleth maps, and Global Moran's $I$. Temporal patterns are examined across months and seasons using descriptive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kg5z3rp Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yang, Wanrun https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02x260vq This dissertation examines how clinical uncertainty is managed within reproductive psychiatry, a nascent specialty at the intersection of reproductive health, and pharmaceutical medicine. I draw on over four years of ethnographic fieldwork at a reproductive psychiatric clinic within a Los Angeles teaching hospital, including observations of resident training, case conferences, and clinical appointments, alongside approximately 40 interviews with patients, residents, attendings, and therapists. I trace how toxicity operates as an organizing concept across three empirical sites: the professional socialization of resident psychiatrists, the cultural and biomedical frameworks that patients bring to clinical encounters, and the interactional tactics through which medical authority is maintained by clinicians. I argue that toxicity functions in this clinic as a boundary object—flexible enough to hold together what is biological and social, while retaining a sense of clinical urgency... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02x260vq Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Abel, Charlotte Magalie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9qs1v5rk We study the problem of finite time singularities in the isentropic compressible Euler equations in with radial symmetry. We focus on implosions, where a flow directed towards the origin experiences finite time blowup in density. Smooth and self-similar imploding solutions to the isentropic, compressible Euler equations with radial symmetry, inspired by the work of Guderley, have garnered recent mathematical interest. However, these smooth imploding solutions are shown to be numerically unstable and difficult to compute in practice. On the other hand, the imploding solution of Kidder has a closed form solution and is numerically computable. But, it is unbounded in the far field. We consider the Kidder implosion with a continuous constant density cutoff, referred to as the cutoff implosion solution, in this work.From studying the characteristics, we predict an expanding wave to emerge from the cutoff position. The expanding wave has its boundary described by the characteristics,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9qs1v5rk Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Luong, Jack Quoc-Viet https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nm1x0dj Predation requires animals to balance immediate safety against the need to resume foraging, yet most studies emphasize alarm calls rather than the full transition from danger to safety. This dissertation examines how risk-related information is organized within Amazonian mixed-species bird flocks, from the vocal behavior of a sentinel species to community-level communication and its sensitivity to forest management. Standardized presentations of trained Bicolored Hawks Accipiter bicolor were combined with hand annotation, sequence analysis, hidden Markov models, functional-trait comparisons, and cross-site tests. Chapter 1 analyzed 3,739 vocalizations of the Dusky-throated Antshrike, Thamnomanes ardesiacus, before and after hawk exposure. Repertoire composition shifted most strongly during the first post-exposure minute, with Jensen–Shannon divergence declining from 0.365 to 0.038 by 540–600 s. No interval from 300 s onward was displaced more than pre-exposure variation. Early... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nm1x0dj Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Parra, Eliseo Rafael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98m050rb Robots in human environments face a physical gap between their embodiments and human-oriented spaces, and a knowledge gap between task descriptions and the information needed for execution. This dissertation examines these gaps through four complementary studies, with emphasis on human--robot co-activity rearrangement and Semantically Unified Programs (SUN).The physical gap is approached by adapting robot motion to an existing environment or rearranging the environment itself. The Virtual Kinematic Chain (VKC) study includes the author's sampling-based extension for coupled robot--object motion planning. Co-activity rearrangement treats human spatial organization and robot accessibility as joint design objectives. It combines semantic knowledge and learned spatial relations with robot-specific traversability, reachability, and interaction regions to optimize furniture layouts while retaining functional groups. Layouts account for robot footprint, reach, and intended activities.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98m050rb Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Weiqi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z4746dr Structural brain connectivity research integrates imaging data across modalities and spatial scales to relate microscopic cellular circuitry to macroscopic connectivity facilitated by white matter pathways. Dataset sizes and heterogeneity impose a need for automated and scalable processing tools. This dissertation develops computational tools for brain mapping with an emphasis on structural connectivity, addressing three gaps in existing pipelines: (1) large-scale image registration in the presence of missing or damaged tissue, (2) quantitative comparison of tissue orientation between diffusion MRI (dMRI) and histology, and (3) digital reconstruction of single-neuron morphology from microscopy.The first contribution, presented in chapter 2, is a brain-to-atlas mapping framework applicable across imaging modalities and resolutions. It maps images into a common reference space using a generative diffeomorphic mapping algorithm with expectation-maximization based contrast matching,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z4746dr Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gray, Bryson https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8hr2908m Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have become a cornerstone of modern communication and storage systems for their near-capacity performance and low-complexity decoding. They are used in flash memory and adopted in standards such as CCSDS, 5G NR, Wi-Fi, and DVB-S2/T2. However, LDPC-coded systems often operate under time-varying channel conditions, which can substantially degrade performance. To address this, LDPC codes supporting multiple rates are needed to adapt to varying channel conditions, along with feedback from the receiver to inform the transmitter about the channel. This dissertation introduces a family of low-rate LDPC codes that overcome the high-error floor limitations of existing low-rate CCSDS turbo codes in such conditions. To mitigate feedback delay in free-space optical channels, we propose a channel prediction scheme that forecasts channel variations so that the appropriate LDPC code rate can be selected, thereby improving throughput and reducing packet errors.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8hr2908m Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Galijasevic, Semira https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wt100zs The deep interiors of giant planets and super-Earths host some of the most extreme states of matter encountered in planetary science, yet their pressures and temperatures lie beyond the simultaneous reach of static and dynamic compression experiments, limiting what laboratory work alone can establish about the materials in those interiors. Density functional theory (DFT), implemented through ab initio molecular dynamics, complements experiment by predicting structural, elastic, thermodynamic, and electronic properties from first principles at conditions that experiments cannot yet access. In this dissertation I use DFT to address three connected problems in deep planetary physics, each centered on the material consequences of the solid phase for the thermal, tidal, and structural evolution of giant planets.I first extend the growing frozen-core framework, originally developed for Uranus, to Neptune, and show that it can simultaneously account for Neptune’s internal luminosity... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7wt100zs Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 James, David Abraham https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7h49f9fx Four vanadium niobate compounds were selected as candidates for lithium-ion battery anode materials: VNb9O25, V4Nb18O55, VNbO4, and V7Nb6O29. Each compound possesses a different V to Nb ratio, oxidation state of V, and structures which were first experimentally synthesized and verified. Electrochemical testing, structural probing, and electrical modeling enable for the analysis of the dynamic behavior of (de)lithiation and the ultimate identification of V4Nb18O55 as the optimal vanadium niobate among the four compositions. This compound possesses a maximum reversible capacity of 257 mAh g-1 at C/10, well over its theoretical capacity of 214 mAh g-1, assuming one-electron redox. Its uncompromising performance at higher rates further indicates promise in further studying the vanadium niobium oxide system. Although the other three compounds fall short of their theoretical performances, they still serve as useful systems for understanding the tunable redox activities of the two similar... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7h49f9fx Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pierrat, Alan Louis https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7g40329n The primary body axis organizes animal development, and signals based on the secreted proteins Wnt encode positional information in cells according to their distance from signaling centers at the poles of the body column ensuring they differentiate and form appropriate structures. The Wnt gene family and the component genes of the canonical Wnt signaling pathway such as GSK-3β are conserved across animals, and likely defined the body axis of the last common ancestor of animals. The cnidarian moon jellyfish Aurelia coerulea alternates between a sexually reproducing nektonic medusa and asexually reproducing, epifaunal polyp. Thus, A. coerulea defines its primary body axis multiple times throughout its lifecycle. Hyperactivating canonical Wnt signaling with the GSK-3β inhibitor 1-Azakenpaullone in A. coerulea polyps results in the conversion of the aboral pole to a functioning oral pole with no change at the oral pole. Under similar treatment, other cnidarian polyps maintain their... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7g40329n Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Speck, Hayden Patrick https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6v11b20q While there is extensive research on Black student experiences in predominantly white institutions, most Black students attend schools where they are surrounded by other students of color but remain the racial minority. Anti-Blackness and white supremacy culture are not limited to white spaces; they are also embedded within communities of color. In Los Angeles, many schools are majority Latiné, and both historical and contemporary research demonstrate that anti-Blackness is present in these contexts. At the same time, educational research and practice often group “Black and Brown” students together, with “Brown” serving as a proxy for Latiné. This framing erases Afro-Latiné identities and overlooks the distinct histories, cultures, and internal diversity of both Black and Latiné communities. Despite the importance of early schooling, there is limited research on students’ racialized experiences in elementary school, even though belonging at this stage has long-term implications.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6v11b20q Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rotwein, Abigail https://escholarship.org/uc/item/68w7g1gn This dissertation investigates residential architecture as it appeared in and was formed by United States property law and town planning, beginning with the Homestead Act of 1862 and ending with the Housing Act of 1934. It shows that, in the “Land of the Free,” houses and homes have never been mere places to live: Rather, they have alternately served as the settler’s claim to land and the government’s unofficial military base, the citizen’s investment in the nation and the government’s primary disciplinary institution. By examining houses and homes on once-rural, later-urbanized homesteads on opposite coasts of the country, this dissertation complicates historical binaries of the agrarian West and the industrial East to understand the American frontier as not only a space of political and ideological expansion but also a space of economic and social enclosure. This dissertation argues that residential architecture embodied the United States’ processes and policies of economic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/68w7g1gn Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Gammell, Carrie Ann https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jm0x01j Childhood cancer is the leading disease-related cause of death among children in the United States, yet the etiology of most childhood cancers remains poorly understood. Because many childhood cancers originate during fetal development, prenatal environmental exposures may play an important role in disease initiation. traffic-related air pollution and childhood cancer risk and explores biological pathways linking prenatal pesticide exposure to retinoblastoma using neonatal dried blood spot metabolomics.The first study evaluated prenatal residential exposure to agricultural pesticides and neuroblastoma risk in a population-based case-control study of California children born 1998-2016 (199 cases, 202,796 controls). Prenatal pesticide exposure was estimated using California's Pesticide Use Reporting system linked with GIS-based land-use models. Hierarchical logistic regression identified elevated risks associated with prenatal exposure to flonicamid (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]: 1.33;... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jm0x01j Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Van Deventer, Darcy Meade https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5hv0c68m Queer archives, as products of queer lives, tend to resist conventional standards of archival processing and description. They are queer in content, representing the lives of people and communities who live in opposition to social standards of sexuality and gender, and queer in form, representing alternative approaches to order and structure. They often consist of materials that deviate from normative standards of documentary evidence, challenging long-standing and more mainstream conceptions of the archival record. The papers of queer performance artist Ron Athey at the Getty Research Institute exemplify this. Using archival autoethnography and drawing upon critical archival theory, this thesis documents and reflects on my work processing the Athey papers and asks if and how archivists should be engaging with relevant cultural and critical theoretical frameworks when processing and describing queer archives. I take the position that in order to honor these materials, their creators,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5hv0c68m Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Cain, Jordan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4db6z5wd Systemic adeno-associated virus (AAV) gene therapy has demonstrated substantial therapeutic potential for monogenic disorders but can provoke variable immune responses that reduce efficacy and contribute to serious adverse events. The mechanisms regulating these responses remain incompletely understood, and clinically useful predictors of toxicity are limited. This dissertation investigates immune regulation and early predictors of adverse responses to systemic AAV therapy through complementary preclinical and clinical studies.The first study examined how the classical complement component C1q shapes immune responses to repeated systemic AAV administration. C1q-deficient and wild-type mice were evaluated following single or repeated AAV dosing, with and without corticosteroid immunosuppression. C1q deficiency altered the inflammatory response to repeat administration, including an enhanced monocyte-associated chemokine signature shortly after the second dose and changes in adaptive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4db6z5wd Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Jimenez, Robert Joseph https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4c84073j Background: Hispanic women experience disproportionately high rates of insulin resistance (IR), metabolic syndrome (MetS), and related cardiometabolic complications, yet they remain underrepresented in early screening and prevention initiatives. Central adiposity and obesity-related risks are disproportionately high, with a (91%) increase in all-cause mortality risk in Hispanic and Latino adults, especially among women. This disparity underscores the urgency of identifying more sensitive, economical, and tailored educational resources in Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), where health inequities are most pronounced. Traditional primary care screening relies heavily on body mass index (BMI) and serum markers; however, BMI does not adequately capture central adiposity and fails to identify metabolically at-risk individuals. Emerging evidence suggests that the waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) is a sensitive and practical anthropometric indicator of cardiometabolic risk. Central... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4c84073j Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mexicano, Elvia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sf5f9ds The developing mammalian brain experiences extended periods of spontaneous neural activity. Blocking or altering this activity in isolated regions leads to defects in connectivity. However, the complexity of the mammalian system has checked progress on identifying the mechanisms that drive this brainwide phenomenon and, ultimately, how spontaneous activity contributes to neurotypical function and behavior. The Akin lab identified comparable spontaneous activity in the developing Drosophila brain. This activity, termed Patterned Stimulus Independent Activity (PSINA), is rhythmic and highly stereotyped, and it engages the entire brain during the 2-day period of neuronal maturation and synapse formation. Following this discovery, the lab showed that PSINA is coordinated by a small population of some 2,000 neurons which express the cation channel Trpγ. My thesis focused on finding additional neuronal populations which regulate PSINA, as well as on identifying smaller groups of neurons... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sf5f9ds Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Suarez, Sassan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3p6359mv Trans archives actively contribute to the reproduction of trans life and the enduring processes of gender transition. In this thesis, I argue that trans archives should be understood as critical components of the social reproduction of trans life. I do so by analyzing the communal social effects of archival repositories including the Digital Transgender Archive, the NYC Trans Oral History Project, and the artist Tourmaline’s archival work to preserve the legacy of the iconic political organizer and sex worker Marsha P. Johnson. My analysis employs a transgender Marxist framework and draws heavily on existing scholarship in the fields of archival studies, trans and queer history, transgender studies, and trans political theory, while weaving writing on my personal experiences throughout in order to drive home some of the ways that these issues can manifest concretely in the lives of trans people. At the same time as I build a case for the socially reproductive function of trans... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3p6359mv Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Easterbrooks, Lorel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3h99t2js Community colleges serve as critical gateways to higher education, especially for racially minoritized, first-generation, and low-income students seeking to transfer to 4-year universities. Yet transfer remains uneven and difficult to navigate, with Black and Latinx students continuing to experience inequitable outcomes. While existing research has examined student experiences, transfer policy, advising, and institutional barriers, less attention has been paid to articulation officers (AOs), the professionals who maintain course agreements, interpret transfer requirements, and help determine how community college coursework applies across institutions. This qualitative, focused ethnographic study examines how 14 California community college AOs made sense of transfer, equity, and policy implementation within the California Community Colleges system. Guided by Ching’s (2023) equity sensemaking framework and Felix and Nienhusser’s (2023) equity-centered implementation framework,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3h99t2js Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Garcia, Fernando https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sj7s5kn In this dissertation, I build a novel collection of income thresholds used by all states to determine Medicaid eligibility for non-elderly, non-disabled adults, for all years between 1996 and 2010. I use this collection of income thresholds to explore same-year impacts of access to Medicaid, using a simulated instrumental variables approach. First, I explore effects of Medicaid access on opioid use, finding heterogeneous effects. For small states, opioid sales and opioid use disorder treatment episodes increased. However, for larger states, and for the country on average, effects on these outcomes are muted. I find no evidence that opioid overdose deaths increased, and I interpret this heterogeneity as evidence that prescription regulations in larger states were effective in preventing increasing access to Medicaid from leading to increased use of opioids. I also explore effects of Medicaid access on substance-use disorder (SUD) treatments. I find that while SUD treatment episodes... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sj7s5kn Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Smith, Benjamin Nathaniel Shumway https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2k45q52f Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a prevalent and debilitating condition that has substantial social, psychological, and medical consequences. Despite its significant public health impact, only three medications are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of AUD, and no new medications have been approved in over two decades. Thus, there is a critical need to improve the processes for developing and evaluating novel pharmacotherapies. The current dissertation comprises two complementary lines of research. The first line of research examines methodological considerations in AUD pharmacotherapy clinical trials, including the selection of efficacy endpoints (Chapter 1), the influence of trial length on observed medication effects (Chapter 2), and the use of cigarettes and cannabis during an AUD clinical trial (Chapter 3). Together, these studies inform key design considerations for future AUD pharmacotherapy trials. The second line of research examines... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2k45q52f Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Belnap, Malia Alexandra https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gh4z4m3 In the past two decades, there has been a rise in community college baccalaureate (CCB) programs, and they fundamentally shift the role and function of community colleges. My multi-method project utilizes quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore the implications of CCB adoption on educational access, success, and equity. Leveraging an administrative, longitudinal dataset of CCB-matriculated students from 2017-18 through 2023-24 in Washington state (n = 13,074), I conduct descriptive and inferential analysis to examine the extent of CCB completion differentials in total annual earnings, hourly wage rates, and employment rates in three, four, and five years after initial CCB matriculation. I generate estimates on the CCB completion differentials in a pooled analysis, as well as a stratified analysis by fields of study (CIP2), gender, race/ethnicity, and age group. I leverage a suite of analytic tools, from various forms of regression, stabilized inverse probability weighting,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gh4z4m3 Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Vo, Davis https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1pr6v0q0 This thesis examines how Pan Jingshu 潘靜淑 (1892–1939) became visible as a painter, collector, and participant in antiquarian textual culture. She was born into the Suzhou Pan family, a lineage distinguished in the late Qing for its collections of rare books, epigraphic materials, and ancient bronzes. The study centers on three works she created with her husband Wu Hufan 吳湖帆 (1894–1968) in 1936–37, Tianzhong xiaojing 天中小景 (Small Scene for the Tianzhong Festival), Suichao tu 歲朝圖 (Painting of the New Year’s Morning), and Qihou hu bu yulan tu 齊侯壺補玉蘭圖 (Painting of the Hu Vessel of the Marquis of Qi Supplemented with Magnolia), in which her flower painting is brought into the genre of bogu qinggong 博古清供 (antiquities and pure offerings), where blossoms appear among ancient vessels, rubbings, seals, and colophons. Through close analysis of these paintings and their inscriptions, the thesis argues that Pan’s authorship took shape through three interlocking practices. Her citation of the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1pr6v0q0 Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Sally https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0h7508kh This dissertation centers on Ivan Turgenev, the pioneering Russian novelist whose works first captured significant attention among the American literary public in the mid-nineteenth century. While Dostoevsky and Tolstoy later overshadowed Turgenev in terms of popularity, this study argues that his early impact fundamentally shaped the American discovery of Russian literature, laying the groundwork for subsequent literary and cultural interactions. By tracing the timeline from the initial rise of interest during the American Civil War, through the peak of popularity in the 1870s, and the eventual transition to later Russian authors, the dissertation reconstructs the evolving landscape of American literary taste and the forces that drove it.One of the components of the analysis is the role of translators — Eugene Schuyler, Leo Wiener, and Elizabeth Hapgood — whose interpretive choices and biographical backgrounds shaped the accessibility and perception of Turgenev’s work in the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0h7508kh Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Makarova, Elena https://escholarship.org/uc/item/95m98627 In this thesis, I examine how diasporic Salvadoran artist Beatriz Cortez engages with archival records and pre-Columbian history to situate the trauma of war and migration in conversation with centuries of Indigenous neglect and erasure in Central America. Through the use of archival materials, contemporary artists can access buried histories, propose alternative interpretations, and recover what has been suppressed. Throughout her artistic career and her collaborations with the Kaqchikel art collective Kaqjay Moloj, Beatriz Cortez has developed a different relationship with archives and objects that moves away from notions of the past as dead and inaccessible towards the active transmission of knowledge, according to Indigenous epistemologies. I examine the works Armor for Rufina Amaya (2014) and El Altar de Kaqjay (2021) and identify how they function to disrupt and counter official histories that perpetuate singular, disconnected narratives and communicate the shared experiences... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/95m98627 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Arriola, Adela Elizabeth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zb6w8n4 The Semiconductor industry is a multi-billion dollar industry and Semiconductor Yield is a fundamental factor driving device cost. Development cost, time-to-market & yield are the most important factors of interest to the industry. Two major components are associated with Semiconductor Yield: 1. Defect Limited Yield 2. Parametric-Shift limited Yield. Parametric Yield is influenced by process variations for a given design and process node.Several models from literature which predict Defect-Limited yield based on primarily two parameters: Defect Density and Area of the Die. A “yield calculator” is developed that incorporates all Defect-limited models and allows the user to compare yield estimates among multiple models, or inversely estimate Defect Density, and calculate model parameters based on Foundry-provided Defect Density values and Wafer Sort (WS) test yield data. The methodology also includes a Bayesian formulation for aggregating yield estimates from various models in... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zb6w8n4 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Karthik Sankaran, FNU https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66c7k825 Actions and decisions in physical environments often depend on detecting patterns of interest, known as complex events. In distributed sensing systems, complex event detection may require combining unstructured sensor data with structured measurements and inferences produced by sensing and recognition models. Complex events may unfold from seconds to weeks and across spatial scales ranging from a single room to an entire city.Existing systems commonly assume that relevant operations, output representations, and execution plans have been selected in advance. However, observations may support competing explanations, sensor streams may expose more information than an application requires, and needed evidence and computation may change as an event progresses. This dissertation argues that distributed sensing systems should use the event and its application context to revise which events remain plausible, determine what information may be disclosed, and adapt sensing and computation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66c7k825 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Brian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jr3x2jb BackgroundImmigrant women in the United States experience persistent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) disparities due to barriers, including immigration-related policies, insurance exclusions, and limited access to language and cultural concordant healthcare. Women navigate these barriers through transnational healthcare, obtaining care in their countries of origin while residing in the United States. Existing research has focused on general healthcare among Latino populations. Little is known about transnational SRH care among Asian immigrant women, including healthcare decisions across borders, patterns of transnational SRH utilization, services obtained, and reasons for transnational care-seeking.AimsThis dissertation examined transnational SRH care among Asian immigrant women in the United States by exploring: (1) decision-making processes surrounding transnational SRH care, (2) patterns and correlates of transnational SRH utilization, and (3) the types of services obtained,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jr3x2jb Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Khando, Tenzin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5hf589tr Clinically defined neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders such as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are behaviorally and etiologically heterogeneous, limiting the ability of diagnosis-first approaches to identify their underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Copy number variants (CNVs) at the 22q11.2 locus offer a genetics-first model for identifying convergent and divergent neurobiological pathways contributing to risk. Reciprocal deletions (22qDel) and duplications (22qDup) of the same 22q11.2 genomic segment provide a genetics-first model of gene-dosage effects, with 22qDel conferring markedly elevated schizophrenia risk, while 22qDup is associated with substantially lower risk, potentially protective relative to the general population. Both CNVs, however, converge in conferring elevated risk for ASD and intellectual disability. Although cortical and subcortical systems have been relatively well studied in 22q11.2 CNVs, the cerebellum, long regarded... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5hf589tr Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fung, Hoki https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58j8j04k Predicting energy for graphics processing units before a large language model workload is deployed requires both its active duration and the activity generated while it runs. This work develops an interpretable energy model for inference on NVIDIA A100 graphics processing units. It separates static energy, which is proportional to active time, from dynamic energy, whose compute term scales with issued floating-point operations and whose memory terms scale with bytes transferred at shared memory, the level-two cache, and high-bandwidth memory. A memory-level count denotes bytes crossing that level's interface with the level beneath it; loads and stores therefore use the same per-byte coefficient. Published microbenchmarks of graphics processors supply compute, memory, latency, bandwidth, and event-energy parameters, limiting local profiling to idle static power and one fixed timing overhead rather than fitting workload-specific energy curves. For inference distributed across... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58j8j04k Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yao, Emily https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jn042wv This dissertation examines how colonial Korean literature imagined transregional affiliations through China during the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than approaching China as a unified national entity or simply as the counterpart of colonial Korea, it argues that Korean writers mobilized Shanghai and Northeast China as literary spaces through which they rethought the nation, empire, and the regional future of East Asia. By shifting attention from nation-based comparison to transregional encounters, the dissertation demonstrates how colonial Korean literature challenged the assumption of discrete, homogeneous national cultures and imagined alternative forms of political and social community.Opposing the scholarly assumption that colonial Korean literature emerged solely from the relationship with Japan—its colonizer and a significant mediator of Western modernity—this dissertation foregrounds how colonial Korean writers engaged with China as their literary background and as a site for... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jn042wv Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kim, Minseung https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1jz8r94z This thesis studies the relationship between return prediction and portfolio optimization for illiquid assets. Traditional predict-then-optimize models first predict asset returns and then use those predictions as inputs to a portfolio optimizer. However, a model with lower prediction error does not always lead to better portfolio decisions. Due to the noisy signals, limited data, and liquidity-related frictions, this issue is especially serious for illiquid assets, where small prediction errors may lead to different allocation decisions.To address this problem, this thesis develops a Decision-Focused Fine-Tuning (DFF) framework based on a pretrained return prediction model. In this framework, a correction layer is inserted between the prediction model and the portfolio optimizer. This layer makes controlled adjustments to the original return predictions, and the adjustment size is controlled by the parameter ε, which bounds the maximum relative adjustment applied to the original... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1jz8r94z Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 WU, YUE https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gw131g3 During development, the brain becomes electrically active even before it is ready to receive sensory stimuli. Such intrinsic developmental activity has been studied for 3 decades in vertebrate model systems and is known to be critical for the proper wiring of neural circuits. However, the complexity of the vertebrate brain and the technical limitations of studying its development have challenged progress towards identifying the precise mechanisms that initiate activity, whether and how it occurs throughout the brain, and its relevance to adult behavior and health. The recent discovery of patterned, stimulus-independent, neural activity (PSINA “see-nah”) in Drosophila has made it feasible to begin addressing these open questions. PSINA begins at the onset of synapse formation and engages the entire brain in highly coordinated and structured cycles of activity throughout the last half of metamorphosis. The global activity patterns are further textured with cell-type specific dynamics... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gw131g3 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Reichl, Jun https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0f21z1r3 Quantitative imaging in CT promises objective descriptors of disease from medical images, but clinical translation is limited by sensitivity to CT acquisition and reconstruction protocol. The same object imaged under different scanner models, reconstruction kernels, or dose levels can yield substantially different measurements, and for the texture features that carry much of radiomics' discriminative value, this protocol-induced variation can rival or exceed the biological differences of interest. The same dependence undermines deep learning models, whose performance often falls on data acquired outside the training distribution. Existing responses largely seek to reduce a biomarker's sensitivity to protocol, through harmonization, standardization, or stability-based feature selection. This dissertation takes a complementary approach: rather than reduce protocol sensitivity, it characterizes and predicts it in terms of physical, quantitative image quality metrics. To enable... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0f21z1r3 Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Daly, Morgan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rr1w7t7 Global sea levels may rise up to five meters by 2150, elevating coastal groundwater and intensifying cascading hazards. Little attention has been given to how changing groundwater interacts with earthquake-induced soil liquefaction. Coastal California's 25 million residents and critical infrastructure sit on loose, liquefiable soils. Because liquefaction occurs primarily in saturated, sand-like soils, groundwater elevation strongly governs the hazard. Yet the standard of practice assumes a fixed groundwater depth observed during a site investigation, an assumption that may not hold where sea level rise (SLR) and tides dynamically control the water table. The term liquefaction was first used by Hazen in 1919, and earthquake-induced liquefaction became a major focus of geotechnical research after the 1964 Niigata and Alaska earthquakes. Although probabilistic seismic hazard analysis is standard in earthquake engineering, an equivalent treatment has not been widely adopted... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8rr1w7t7 Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Kota, Meera Lakshmi https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kg7x7h7 The long-term carbon cycle on million-year timescales is shaped by planetary interior evolution, which governs CO2 outgassing, volatile recycling, topography, and ocean-floor bathymetry. Because marine sediments and lithified carbonates represent the largest hydrosphere-accessible carbon sink through much of Earth history, changes in bathymetry, continental flooding, and ocean basin geometry may strongly influence ocean-atmosphere chemistry. This dissertation investigates how solid-Earth evolution controls bathymetry, ocean basins, and the long-term carbon cycle across Earth history and rocky ocean-world analogs.First, I reconstruct bathymetry over the last 80 Myr and evaluate its carbon-cycle consequences using an Earth system model of intermediate-complexity (EMIC). These results show that evolving seafloor geometry significantly affects ocean chemistry and carbon partitioning. Faster tectonics produces shallower pelagic oceans and greater continental flooding, reducing deep-ocean... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kg7x7h7 Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bogumil, Matthew Walter https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62d996sp Statistical literacy is increasingly essential for informed citizenship, yet little is known about how its problem solving skills, Formulate Questions (FQ), Collect Data (CD), Analyze Data (AD), and Interpret Results (IR), develop over time or vary geographically among secondary students. This thesis uses ten years of data (2015-2025) from the LOCUS assessment to examine performance across these four categories among 5,819 AP Statistics students in 11 states and 19 counties, applying fixed-effects regression, hierarchical linear models, random forests, and MANOVA. Results show a robust within-year improvement from first to second semester (10 to 16 percentage points, largest for IR), no consistent linear trend across years after accounting for semester and county, and a COVID-19 disruption reflected mainly in missing second-semester test administrations rather than uniform score declines. County-level clustering explained between 3.2% (FQ) and 14.6% (overall) of variance, with... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/62d996sp Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Aguirre, Hannah Grace https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0j5957pf Actin networks are dynamic components of the cytoskeleton, present in all eukaryotic cells and responsible for many important cellular processes, including cell motility and cell division. Improper regulation of actin can lead to detrimental effects in embryology and development. In Drosophila egg development, an actin mesh is assembled by the collaboration of two actin nucleators, Spire (Spir) and Cappuccino (Capu). The persistence of this mesh during mid-oogenesis contributes to slow cytoplasmic streaming, and its subsequent disappearance during late-oogenesis leads to fast streaming. This transition from slow to fast streaming is critical for establishing polarity and future embryo patterning. Besides Spir and Capu, the molecular machinery and mechanisms governing the regulation of the actin mesh remain unknown. To gain deeper insight into the regulation of the mesh as well as Spir and Capu, we used TurboID-based proximity labeling and co-immunoprecipitation combined with quantitative... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0j5957pf Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wu, Carolyn https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02t8m7vv Motion is a fundamental component of active vision, and visual motion is continuously generated during natural behaviors of an observer traversing through the visual environment. Motion arose from the independently moving objects, the observer’s self-locomotion, and eye- and body-movements can all generate retinal motion signals. Although primate extrastriate area MT is well known for its sensitivity to motion directions and speeds, less is understood about how MT represents dynamic motion signals, incorporates information related to self-movement, and contributes to motion-dependent spatial perception. This dissertation examines ecologically relevant visual motion processing through four complementary studies involving macaque, marmoset and human subjects. First, large-scale neurophysiological recordings from macaque MT showed that MT carries information of motion acceleration in a representation that can be decoded quickly and directly from population activity. These findings... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02t8m7vv Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 CHEN, SHUYI