Lecture recital presented at Amati Hall, Seoul, South Korea in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

Lecture presented at the UNT College of Music Recital Hall in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

Recital presented in Shenzhen, China in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

Lecture presented through Zoom in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

Lecture presented at the UNT College of Music M321 in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

Recital presented at the Hoogland Center for the Arts in Springfield, Illinois in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

Lecture presented at the UNT College of Music M321 in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

This dissertation presents in-depth description and analysis the Zophei sound system within the context of the closely-related Maraic languages. Zophei (or Zyphe, ISO 639-3 ZYP), a previously undocumented member of the Maraic branch of Kuki-Chin (or South-Central Tibeto-Burman) spoken in Southern Thantlang Township, Chin State, Burma/Myanmar and by thousands of speakers in Indianapolis, Indiana. Using primary data elicited during three years of fieldwork, the sound systems of Lawngtlang, Tlawngrang, and Nuitah Zophei are investigated in detail. Special attention is paid to the segmental, syllable structure, and tonal inventories. A long history of language contact in the Maraic-speaking world has brought on radical innovations in syllable structure, vowel systems, and tone that have, as of yet, seen little linguistic analysis. Outside of the present research program, no previous linguistic work on Zophei exists. As such, this thesis endeavors to describe and analyze the sound systems of Zophei varieties.

School cultures, curriculum, and instruction are too often created through a monocultural lens, which excludes Black and Latino/a/x students both socially and academically, and perpetuates the false notion that these students are inherently less capable of achieving academic success when compared to their White counterparts. This is visible across all content areas, but especially in secondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classes, which means that our Black and Latino/a/x students are continually denied preparation for the critical, high demand careers in the STEM field. Just as critical, with the dominance of White teachers in the classroom, out Black and Latino/a/x students often do not have access to teachers who share their lived experiences or who understand the nuances of their home cultures. However, teachers and school instructional leaders can change course by focusing their efforts to develop a rich cultural consciousness, and by focusing on the utilization of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) and related instructional strategies with great intentionality in the classroom. This mixed method, single site, exploratory case study was conducted to examine Black and Latino/a/x students' perceptions of their culturally responsive STEM teachers' cultural consciousness, and culturally responsive STEM teachers' perceptions of culturally responsive practices and their …

Multicomponent high-entropy and amorphous alloys represent relatively new classes of structural materials with complex atomic configurations and exceptional mechanical properties. However, there are several knowledge gaps in the relationships between their atomic structure and mechanical properties. Understanding these critical relationships will enable novel alloy design and tailoring of their mechanical properties for desired engineering applications. In this dissertation, first-principles calculations and molecular dynamics simulations are applied to investigate the local atomic configurations and ordering in high-entropy and amorphous alloys. Our findings suggest that fluctuations in local atomic configurations for high- entropy alloys result in significant changes in stacking fault energy, twin energy, dislocation behavior, dislocation-twin interactions, and critical shear stress. For amorphous alloys or metallic glasses, the short-range order (SRO) and medium-range order (MRO) were found to play decisive roles in determination of their mechanical properties. Structural relaxation was found to lead to shear localization, which was attributed to free volume change and evolution of SRO and MRO to more brittle nature. In contrast, rejuvenated metallic glasses had relatively large and uniform free volume distribution giving rise to homogeneous flow and increased plasticity.

There are 184 active charter school districts in Texas, which use public tax dollars like traditional school districts, providing educational opportunities to over 350,000 Texas students. Charter schools accept state and federal funds and often operate with less oversight than their neighboring local public schools, yet they have the autonomy to accomplish the mission(s) set forth by the charter school operator. Although there have been numerous studies looking at the effectiveness of charter schools in terms of student achievement, very little research has been on the programs that charter schools implement to address the needs of their English learner populations. This study examined charter school leaders' perceptions in the selection of the EL instructional programs that are offered to their English Learners. Interviews of district bilingual/ESL directors of Texas charter schools, or their equivalents, were conducted. Using a constructivist grounded theory design, this study explored the factors and decisions of instructional leaders in implementing a particular second language program, with special attention to the ideologies informing these decisions. Themes emerged from the data and were be explored. The findings of this study are vital in helping other charter school operators better understand the challenges and potential pitfalls faced by current …

By organically fusing the methods of convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN), this dissertation focuses on the application of optical character recognition and image classification processing. The first part of this dissertation presents an end-to-end novel receipt recognition system for capturing effective information from receipts (CEIR). The main contributions of this research part are divided into three parts. First, this research develops a preprocessing method for receipt images. Second, the modified connectionist text proposal network is introduced to execute text detection. Third, the CEIR combines the convolutional recurrent neural network with the connectionist temporal classification with maximum entropy regularization as a loss function to update the weights in networks and extract the characters from receipt. The CEIR system is validated with the scanned receipts optical character recognition and information extraction (SROIE) database. Furthermore, the CEIR system has strong robustness and can be extended to a variety of different scenarios beyond receipts. For the convolutional recurrent structure application of land use image classification, this dissertation comes up with a novel deep learning model for land use classification, the convolutional recurrent land use classifier (CRLUC), which further improves the accuracy in classifying remote sensing land use images. Besides, the …

This dissertation tested the hypothesis that energy transferred from a plasma or plume can be used to optimize the structure, chemistry, topography, optical and electrical properties of pulsed laser deposited and sputtered thin-films of ZnO, a-BOxNy, and few layer 2H-WS2 for transparent electronics devices fabricated without substrate heating or with low substrate heating. Thus, the approach would be compatible with low-temperature, flexible/bendable substrates. Proof of this concept was demonstrated by first optimizing the processing-structure-properties correlations then showing switching from accumulation to inversion in ITO/a-BOxNy/ZnO and ITO/a-BOxNy/2H-WS2 transparent MIS capacitors fabricated using the stated processes. The growth processes involved the optimization of the individual materials followed by growing the multilayer stacks to form MIS structures. ZnO was selected because of its wide bandgap that is transparent over the visible range, WS2 was selected because in few-layer form it is transparent, and a-BOxNy was used as the gate insulator because of its reported atomic smoothness and low dangling bond concentration. The measured semiconductor-insulator interfacial trap properties fall in the range reported in the literature for SiO2/Si MOS structures. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Hall, photoluminescence, UV-Vis absorption, and X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements investigated the low-temperature synthesis of ZnO. All films are nanocrystalline with …

Molecular dynamics simulations and QM/MM calculations can provide insights into the structure and function of enzymes as well as changes due to mutations of the protein sequence.

The purpose of this exploratory qualitative case study is to describe the formation of a graduate enrollment evaluation system (GEES) to capture and explore the perceptions of key stakeholders to critically examine the barriers and benefits of a PhD nursing program at a large, public designated high research institution. As the research suggest, there is a current need for increased enrollment for nurses into nursing doctorate programs to further meet the patient's expanding demand, to expand the science of the nursing profession, and to increase the pipeline of qualified nursing faculty. Without a pipeline of qualified nursing faculty, fewer new nurses can be trained for the nursing workforce that already experiences a critical deficiency in staffing.

The dissertation investigates the form of network governance in the context of U.S. homeless service networks (namely continuum of care programs; CoCs). This research examines CoC homeless service networks by applying the institutional collective action (ICA) perspectives to understand the forms of network governance as a reflection of network context. The ICA perspective has been applied to understand the rational behavior of network members for the network governance form to mitigate the collective action problems. The ICA perspective helps understand why network members accept specific governance structures with their expectation to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs and uncertainty in their process of collaboration. This dissertation uses the data of CoC networks and point in time data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2019 and Census. The data developed for this study offers the homeless incidences, geographical characteristics, and governance structure based on the contact information. For an in-depth understanding, interview by CoC leaders was integrated. This dissertation consists of four essays about 1) Literature review on network governance and the theoretical argument in the ICA framework, 2) Background and network governance of the U.S. homeless service networks, 3) Factors affecting the choice of network …

Do federal policies influence program offerings for career and technical education(CTE)? Often the implication of compliance and the expectation of connecting compliance to funding is considered a tactic to leverage expectations on a large scale. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if the CTE programs located in a singular region of Texas were compliant with federal expectations by way of evaluating the alignment of programs offered and local labor markets prior to the implementation of Perkins V. The evaluation of a variety of archival data and subsequent findings of the correlation of alignment of programs within the region along with the amount of federal Perkins's dollars spent on CTE was a confirmed as an effective policy reform measure. Additional evaluations included the combination of federal and state spending in correlation to the number of programs offered in career and technical education along with the actual CTE student enrollment of a given district. Major findings showed that through a moderation analysis for some districts the number of programs offered could be influenced by program funding and size. In addition, this study confirmed that many programs are indeed compliant, however compliance does not guarantee program opportunities when resources and …

This work demonstrates how local, randomized tailoring of bond stiffness can affect the activation energy of diffusion in model alloys using density functional theory-based computations. This work is organized into two parts. The first part deals with the vacancy diffusion mechanism, and it compares the in–plane (IP) vs out-of-plane (OOP) diffusion paths in prototypical binary Mg-X (Ca, Y, and Gd) and ternary Mg-X (Ca, Y, and Gd)-Zn alloys. We examine how vacancy formation, migration, and solute vacancy binding energies in binary Mg-X alloys influence diffusion activation and correlated them with conventional diffusion model based solely on the solute sizes. Next, we explore how Zn addition to binary Mg-X (Ca, Y, and Gd) alloys influences the OOP activation energy barrier is discussed in terms of detailed energetic computations and bond characterization in the present work. Our results indicate that Zn addition further enhances the OOP activation energy barrier compared to corresponding activation energies in Mg binaries. This work concludes that engineering stiffer directional bonds via micro-alloying additions in Mg is a promising route to dramatically improve their high temperature creep response. The second part of my work investigates the effects of Si, P, and S solutes on H interstitial diffusion mechanism …

The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study is to identify and describe the perceptions and experiences of lower elementary public-school teachers in the United States teaching with educational technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a demographic survey and semi-structured interviews, teachers shared their experiences regarding the barriers they encountered teaching and learning with educational technologies in face-to-face, remote, and hybrid classrooms. The multi-phase coding process used emic and etic codes to analyze the data. This study identifies and describes the existing barriers teachers face with learning technologies in the classroom before COVID-19 and the new obstacles they have encountered due to the pandemic. The results of this study are discussed, and recommendations are provided to help researchers identify the essential supports educators need for future emergencies.

NAND flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) have been widely adopted in data centers and high performance computing (HPC) systems due to their better performance compared with hard disk drives. However, little is known about the reliability characteristics of SSDs in production systems. Existing works that study the statistical distributions of SSD failures in the field lack insights into distinct characteristics of SSDs. In this dissertation, I explore the SSD-specific SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) attributes and conduct in-depth analysis of SSD reliability in a production environment with a focus on the unique error types and health dynamics. QLC SSD delivers better performance in a cost-effective way. I study QLC SSDs in terms of their architecture and performance. In addition, I apply thermal stress tests to QLC SSDs and quantify their performance degradation processes. Various types of big data and machine learning workloads have been executed on SSDs under varying temperatures. The SSD throughput and application performance are analyzed and characterized.

English learners (ELs) are the fastest growing student group in U.S. public schools. The purpose of this mixed method study was to gain an understanding of the relationship between principal actions and the academic achievement of ELs to determine which practices had the greatest impact on student achievement using archival achievement data. A mixed methods research study was conducted in an urban school district in North Texas to explore differences between principals of schools with high and non-high performance of ELs as it related to the implementation of leadership practices and social justice principles. The principals in the PK-5 grade level band who participated in an online survey, reported statistically significant differences regarding the implementation of leadership practices in the areas of leading student culture and data-driven instruction. Statistically significant differences were also found in the competency of driving for results within the social justice principles. Further data analysis of interview findings revealed the distinction between the high-performing and non-high-performing group to be centered on principal actions as inputs for effective teaching as it related to the implementation of schoolwide systems and processes. Further research is recommended to continue the identification of best practices that support the academic success of …

In this phenomenological investigation, a qualitative approach to research methodology is utilized to explore the resiliency experiences of Black, Indigenous, people of color counselors in training (N = 12) at historically or predominantly White institutions. The participants represent multiple regions of the United States, spanning from the northeastern United States to the Pacific Northwest. Five themes were uncovered as a result of the interviews: (1) strategies for resiliency; (2) experiences with discrimination and oppression; (3) experiences of allyship and affirmation; (4) awareness of intersections and identity; and (5) call to action. I offer suggestions for ways to increase BIPOC student resiliency as well as increase student retention within counselor education programs and recommendations for creating nurturing and equitable classrooms to provide safety for marginalized students within counselor education programs.

Preadolescence is a transitional stage between childhood and adolescence characterized by rapid and erratic change. Preadolescent girls are particularly vulnerable to negative impacts to self-concept and adaptability and may benefit from support to strengthen these key aspects of their development. School-based expressive arts groups provide a developmentally appropriate opportunity for preadolescent girls to process their thoughts, feelings, and experiences that can influence their self-concept and adaptability. Additionally, providing expressive arts groups from a career perspective provides participants a three-fold developmental intervention that includes components of the personal/social, academic, and career domains. Lindo and Ceballos combined the Career Construction Interview (CCI) with expressive arts school-based group counseling to create a developmentally appropriate intervention called the Child and Adolescent Career Construction Interview (CACCI). This study examined preadolescent girls' perceptions of participated in a CACCI group. Analysis of data yielded four major themes: (a) experiencing, (b) connecting, (c) expressing, and (d) becoming. Finding of this study have the potential to inform developmentally appropriate career counseling for preadolescents.

The main research objective of this dissertation is to understand the sensing and communication challenges to achieving cooperative perception among autonomous vehicles, and then, using the insights gained, guide the design of the suitable format of data to be exchanged, reliable and efficient data fusion algorithms on vehicles. By understanding what and how data are exchanged among autonomous vehicles, from a machine learning perspective, it is possible to realize precise cooperative perception on autonomous vehicles, enabling massive amounts of sensor information to be shared amongst vehicles. I first discuss the trustworthy perception information sharing on connected and autonomous vehicles. Then how to achieve effective cooperative perception on autonomous vehicles via exchanging feature maps among vehicles is discussed in the following. In the last methodology part, I propose a set of mechanisms to improve the solution proposed before, i.e., reducing the amount of data transmitted in the network to achieve an efficient cooperative perception. The effectiveness and efficiency of our mechanism is analyzed and discussed.