This study applies the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) framework for eScience professionals to data service positions in academic libraries. Understanding the KSAs needed to provide data services is of crucial concern. The current study looks at KSAs of data professionals working in the United States academic libraries. An exploratory sequential mixed method design was adopted to discover the KSAs. The study was divided into two phases, a qualitative content analysis of 260 job advertisements for data professionals for Phase 1, and distribution of a self-administered online survey to data professionals working in academic libraries research data services (RDS) for Phase 2. The discovery of the KSAs from the content analysis of 260 job ads and the survey results from 167 data professionals were analyzed separately, and then Spearman rank order correlation was conducted in order to triangulate the data and compare results. The results from the study provide evidence on what hiring managers seek through job advertisements in terms of KSAs and which KSAs data professionals find to be important for working in RDS. The Spearman rank order correlation found strong agreement between job advertisement KSAs and data professionals perceptions of the KSAs.

CPU-memory bottleneck is a widely recognized problem. It is known that majority of high performance computing (HPC) database systems are configured with large memories and dedicated to process specific workloads like weather prediction, molecular dynamic simulations etc. My research on optimal address mapping improves the memory performance by increasing the channel and bank level parallelism. In an another research direction, I proposed and evaluated adaptive page migration techniques that obviates the need for offline analysis of an application to determine page migration strategies. Furthermore, I explored different migration strategies like reverse migration, sub page migration that I found to be beneficial depending on the application behavior. Ideally, page migration strategies redirect the demand memory traffic to faster memory to improve the memory performance. In my third contribution, I worked and evaluated a memory-side accelerator to assist the main computational core in locating the non-zero elements of a sparse matrix that are typically used in scientific, machine learning workloads on a low-power embedded system configuration. Thus my contributions narrow the speed-gap by improving the latency and/or bandwidth between CPU and memory.

Mother nature has laid out a beautiful blueprint to capture sunlight and convert to usable form of energy. Inspired by nature, donor-acceptor systems are predominantly studied for their light harvesting applications. This dissertation explores new donor-acceptor systems by studying their photochemical properties useful in building artificial photosynthetic systems. The systems studied are divided into phthalocyanine-porphyrin-fullerene-based, perylenediimide-based, and aluminum porphyrin-based donor-acceptor systems. Further effect of solvents in determining the energy or electron transfer was studied in chapter 6. Such complex photosynthetic analogues are designed and characterized using UV-vis, fluorescence spectroscopy, differential pulse voltammetry and cyclic voltammetry. Using ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy, the excited state properties are explored. The information obtained from the current study is critical in getting one step closer to building affordable and sustainable solar energy harvesting devices which could easily unravel the current energy demands.

The objective of this study was to locate and describe the learning affordances used within research studies on instructional design. Allowing an instructional designer to see what was used and how applicable it might be for future design would assist with better course creation. Current and past literature supported the importance of this concept after examination of how course creation has evolved within the field of instructional design. Further, the findings elucidated how to help the field evolve in the future by expanding knowledge about learning affordances and providing the broadest set of conceptual definitions by the academics working in the field to include them in their research and instructional designs.

‘Richte mich, Gott' exemplifies Jaakko Mäntyjärvi's pluralistic compositional approach through an interlaced organization of tonal and non-tonal pitch content. The development of ideas in the text of Psalm 43 and the concluding doxology is depicted across both layers of pitch organization and governed by specific structural pitch collections: (0145) and (0257). Moreover, the organic transformation of these structural pitch collections' intervallic content emerges as a fundamental means of progression throughout the work, in turn influencing the intervallic content of surrounding tonal material. This process of transformation and its relationship to the text is revealed through tonal and pitch-class analysis; a flexible approach to segmentation; and an exploration of two-way and three-way symmetry, and the disruption thereof, in pitch space and pitch-class space. An understanding of the interrelationship between pitch material from the tonal and non-tonal layers of pitch organization can aid singers, conductors, and analysts in the efficacy of their study, preparation, and performance of the psalm. The accompanying appendix of targeted choral warm-ups in this document offers choirs a practical method for studying, internalizing, and performing the non-tonal pitch content in the work.

This mixed methods study examined teacher attitudes towards technology and their relationship to the integration of technology in technology-rich learning environments.

Increasing ubiquity of computational resources has enabled simulation of complex electronic systems and modern materials. The PAOFLOW software package is a tool designed to construct and analyze tight binding Hamiltonians from the solutions of DFT calculations. PAOFLOW leverages localized basis sets to greatly reduce computational costs of post-processing QE simulation results, enabling efficient determination of properties such as electronic density, band structures in the presence of electric or magnetic fields, magnetic or spin circular dichroism, spin-texture, Fermi surfaces, spin or anomalous Hall conductivity (SHC or AHC), electronic transport, and more. PAOFLOW's broad functionality is detailed in this work, and several independent studies where PAOFLOW's capabilities directly enabled research on promising candidates for ferroelectric and spintronic based technologies are described. Today, Quantum computers are at the forefront of computational information science. Materials scientists and quantum chemists can use quantum computers to simulate interacting systems of fermions, without having to perform the iterative methods of classical computing. This dissertation also describes a study where the band structure for silicon is simulated for the first time on quantum hardware and broadens this concept for simulating band structures of generic crystalline structures on quantum machines.

The American Clarinet School includes approaches to clarinet playing from European immigrants who instilled their musical style and ideas in the first generation of American-born clarinetists. Some of the first influential pedagogues from Europe include Daniel Bonade (1896-1976), Gustave Langenus (1883-1957), Gaston Hamelin (1884-1951), and Simeon Bellison (1881-1953). Even though they inspired many ideas of the American approach to clarinet, they were known in their time as performers rather than teachers first. The aim of this dissertation is to provide further examination into the modern clarinet professorship in the United States by examining three of the first generation of American-born clarinet professors and their contributions to pedagogy: Keith Stein (1908-1980), William Stubbins (1911-1975), and Himie Voxman (1912-2011). Topics discussed include embouchure, hand position, articulation, technique, expression and phrasing, equipment, teaching beginners, and repertoire.

This research explores the relationship between narrative, empathy and anxiety in art museum education. The study begins from my personal experience with anxiety and is methodologically rooted in narrative inquiry and friendship as method. In this study, I propose a creative method of narrative postcard writing called (fe)mail – rooted in a feminist ethic of care that seeks to understand and empathize with the experience of others through correspondence. This research asks relevant questions about the future of art museum programming for mental illness and the act of writing (fe)mail as a reflective practice for academics and educators in the field of social science. In my narrative analysis of the program and the data, I also problematizes my role as researcher, educator and friend throughout the study by considering my own biases, expectations and personal educator agenda. The study is divided into two parts. The first comprises correspondence and analysis of (fe)mail between myself and my best friend/co-participant, Atleigh. In Part I, I conduct a narrative analysis of the (fe)mail data produced between us in order to answer the following questions: What qualities of (fe)mail will appear in the exchange? Can (fe)mail be used as a tool for self-care during …

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

As technologies for learning become increasingly available in K-12 schools, the role and responsibilities of campus principals continue to evolve. Incorporating technologies in schools requires shifts in practices, the development of new skills, and in some cases, changes in the mindset of stakeholders. Schools should be capable of absorbing the knowledge and creating the systemic structures required for the implementation ICTs. The purpose of this study was to research the principals' perspective to lead the implementation of ICTs for learning in public schools. As campus leaders, principals are increasingly required to support the utilization of ICTs for classroom instruction. It is of particular importance, therefore, to study and explore the needs school principals identify to lead the implementation of technologies for learning. More specifically, the goal was to gather relevant data to analyze topics that campus principals believe positively and negatively influence the implementation of ICTs in schools.

The goal of learning analytics is to optimize learning and the environments in which it occurs. Since 2011, when learning analytics was defined as a separate and distinct area of academic inquiry, the literature has identified a need for research that presents evidence of effective learning analytics, as well as, learning analytics research that is conducted in conjunction with learning theory. This study uses Efklides' metacognitive and affective model of self-regulated learning (MASRL) to define cognitive, metacognitive, and affective variables that can explain students' learning outcomes in hybrid/online sections of Calculus I in the 2020-21 academic year. Cognitive variables were measured according to the cognitive operational framework for analytics (COPA). Metacognitive variables were defined according to the ways in which students interacted with the course content in the learning management system (LMS) and supplemental instruction, and affective variables were measured by ways students gave evidence of their affective states, such as in discussion board posts. All variables were compared across the course learning design, activities, and outcomes. Binary logistic regression revealed five significant variables: two cognitive, one metacognitive, and two affective. Thus, this study provided a learning analytics, evidence-based link between self-regulated learning theory and learning design, activities, and outcomes. …

Significant sub-systems were created and others enhanced providing a platform for an order of magnitude precision increase of the small 4He interval - 23P1→23P2 laser spectroscopy measurement, as well as other helium transitions. These measurements serve as tests of helium theory and quantum electro-dynamics in general. Many improvements to the original experiment are discussed and characterized. In particular, counting speed increased 10x, the signal level was doubled, a novel Doppler shift minimization technique was implemented, a control node re-architecture was realized along with many useful features, and the development environment was updated. An initial 28% precision improvement was achieved also providing a foundation for additional gain via a created smaller and more heavily windowed vacuum cavity and picomotor controls.

This study was the first to examine the impact of immigrant-focused public policy on the educational outcomes of Latinx students in professional nursing. Between 2001-2020, 34 states adopted policies that either provided or prohibited in-state resident tuition (ISRT) and/or state financial aid (SFA) to undocumented students. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act (DACA) passed in 2012 gave a new group of largely Latinx, college-age immigrants unprecedented access to public higher education and employment. A rapid increase in the proportion of nursing degrees earned by all Latinx students, not just those who were undocumented, occurred concurrently with these federal and state-level policy changes. This study utilized fixed-effects panel analysis to estimate the relationship between DACA, ISRT, and SFA policies for undocumented students on the percent of nursing degrees earned by Latinx students between 2005-2020. None of the policies analyzed in this study were significant predictors of Latinx nursing degree completions. Broad cohesion among all models instead pointed toward the importance of gains in overall degree production among all Latinx college students, underscoring the important role of higher education in the creation of environments that support the success of students from this target population.

This dissertation research explores the factors that influence direct selling agents' sales performance and job satisfaction. In the direct selling channels, the agents not only sell the products to customers. They may concurrently perform a "distributor" role as a stand-alone entity composed of their own sales network. This dissertation research features two essays. The first essay investigates how direct selling agents' perceptions of control and sense of belonging relate to PO. This essay further explores how PO influences job performance and job satisfaction. Results suggest that perception of control and sense of belonging fuel PO. Furthermore, leader-member exchange mediates the relationship between PO and sales performance, as well as PO and job satisfaction in direct selling networks. The second essay introduces a new construct (relational incongruity) and discusses how complex sales environments and direct selling agents' organizational structures influence the relational incongruity in their organization and its ensuring effect on sales performance and job satisfaction. The results indicate that organizational complexity is positively related to relational incongruity. However, customer complexity has a negative impact on relational incongruity. Relational incongruity in direct selling agents' organizations has negative effects on job satisfaction but has no effects on sales performance. Epistemic curiosity undermines …

Cyber physical systems (CPS) are an integration of computational and physical processes, where the cyber components monitor and control physical processes. Cyber-attacks largely target the cyber components with the intention of disrupting the functionality of the components in the physical domain. This dissertation explores the role of semantic inference in understanding such attacks and building resilient CPS systems. To that end, we present SIMON, an ontological design and verification framework that captures the intricate relationship(s) between cyber and physical components in CPS by leveraging several standard ontologies and extending the NIST CPS framework for the purpose of eliciting trustworthy requirements, assigning responsibilities and roles to CPS functionalities, and validating that the trustworthy requirements are met by the designed system. We demonstrate the capabilities of SIMON using two case studies – a vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) safety application and an additive manufacturing (AM) printer. In addition, we also present a taxonomy to capture threat feeds specific to the AM domain.

Benzannulation to porphyrin 2,3 positions has previously been accomplished using various methodologies in the past century, yet there remain limited methodologies to both annulate to the porphyrin periphery and add functional moieties that can then be derivatized for diverse applications. This dissertation describes the development of synthetic routes and characterization of a variety of linearly-annulated, functionalized, β,β'-π-extended porphyrins. There are five chapters in this dissertation, the first of which introduces synthesis and properties of porphyrins and π-extended porphyrins. Chapter 2 describes synthesis of pentacenequinone-fused and pentacene-fused poprhyrins with distinct and new optical absorbance properties. In chapter 3, synthesis and characterization of benzimidazole-fused porphyrins displaying external metal binding capability is described. The synthetic method developed in chapter 3 is extended in chapter 4 to synthesis of bisbenzimidazole-fused porphyrin dimers that show split Soret character, likely due to excitonic coupling between porphyrins of the dimer. Chapter 5 summarizes this dissertation and describes future directions that this dissertation provides foundation for.

The findings of this study serve as an exploratory case-study examining the conditions of professional learning for in-service principals in one north Texas suburban district with changing student demographics. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a variety of data collected sought to reveal how professional development of principals increased a principal's contingent leadership skills to positively affect student achievement through school improvement efforts. Perceptions were examined from the sample of seven executive directors at the district level; six campus principals (two elementary, two middle, and two high school); and eight teachers selected from among four of the six campuses whose principal participated in a semi-structured interview. Additionally, responses from a principal survey were examined. Findings were organized around three themes that surfaced from the deductive and inductive analysis of data collected in response to the three research questions. The themes were: instructional leadership and other principal responsibilities, principal professional development and components of professional learning, and measuring the effectiveness of principal professional learning. Findings revealed that there are many offerings of professional development opportunities available to principals in Learning ISD. The components essential in effective principal professional learning opportunities in the studied district consisted of embedding social capital, professional capital, and …

This study encompasses my attempt to understand the lived experience of students in a higher education art appreciation course when a traditional textbook was replaced by a computer game. The methodology uses a mixture of phenomenological interviews and games as well as game machines to interpret these lived experiences. The process of allowing the research to dictate the direction I would take in my research is central to my research process. The initial research idea evolved into three research games and three versions of those games by using the data from student interviews as a generative data. The implications from this study focus upon creating new pedagogical interventions in the form of a studious labyrinthian pedagogy rather than a finite maze-like approach to art education. This dissertation examines how art education can benefit from more freedom and exploration for students to navigate their own learning.

Reptiles can often experience perturbations that greatly influence their metabolic status (e.g., temperature, exercise, digestion, and ontogeny). The most common cause of fluctuations in metabolic status in post-embryonic reptiles is arguably digestion and physical activity (which will be further referred to as exercise). The objective of this thesis is to determine the mechanisms involved in CO2 transport during digestion, determine the mechanisms that allow for the maintenance of acid-base homeostasis during digestion, and observing the effect of an understudied form of exercise in semi-aquatic reptiles on the regulation of metabolic acidosis and base deficit. This dissertation provided evidence for potentially novel and under investigated mechanisms for acid-base homeostasis (e.g., small intestine and tissue buffering capacity; Chapters 3 & 4), while also debunking a proposed hypothesis for the function of an anatomical feature that still remains a mystery to comparative physiologist (Chapter 2). This thesis is far from systematic and exhaustive in its approach, however, the work accomplished in this dissertation has become the foundation for multiple distinct paths for ecologically relevant investigations of the regulation of metabolic acidosis/alkalosis in reptiles.