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The Role of Immersive Nature Experiences in Improving Adolescents' Coping with Climate Change
No full text306 pagesGlobal climate change (CC) is widely acknowledged as one of the most pressing issues of our time. Children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to CC’s consequences, including not just physical harm, but also worse mental health. Many interventions designed to support youth in a changing climate solely attend to their knowledge acquisition. Some interventions aim to improve affective reactions to CC, but few interventions are based upon an understanding of how young people cope with CC. One form of constructive coping is meaning-focused coping, which includes strategies of greater trust in societal actors and positive reappraisal for increased hope, efficacy, and agency. Utilizing constructive CC coping strategies can improve affective responses to CC and encourage long-term engagement with pro-environmental behaviors. The physical environment has previously been overlooked in research on enhancing adaptation to and action against CC. However, the environment is central to the issue of CC, and natural environments could play an important role in the development of constructive CC coping among youth. This dissertation research was guided by interrelated, overarching questions about whether immersive nature experiences can improve adolescents’ coping with CC and how those experiences might contribute to constructive strategies. Seventy-six adolescents (13-18 years old) were recruited from a summer camp with a wilderness trip program. Participants completed surveys before and after immersive nature experiences of 9, 14, 25, or 45 days to measure CC coping and other relevant constructs, including open-ended questions about CC perceptions. A subset of participants (N = 51) completed daily and intermittent journal prompts during the excursion. The first study examined the survey data for changes in constructive coping and found a small, significant increase after the excursion, despite relatively accurate knowledge and more constructive coping indicators before. Aimed at understanding patterns in coping during the nature experience, the second study’s mixed-methods analysis of the journals revealed that daily constructive coping indicators were more likely to be present the day after an intermittent reflection. The third study analyzed the journal and survey data together by linking natural environment features to participant sensations that were positively associated with constructive coping outcomes or trajectories. Results reinforced the importance of both individual competencies and environmental features to the development of coping, and identified natural environment features that could support adolescents’ constructive coping. Research on adolescents’ natural environment interactions aids in the discovery and documentation of experiences that support constructive coping with CC among youth. These findings can inform the design of learning environments and programs that better support young people’s constructive coping to achieve positive developmental outcomes and increased pro-environmental behaviors. To provide context for that translation, the final paper in this dissertation developed a relational model for understanding the institutional tensions that can limit widespread, sustained change within the U.S. education system. This dissertation serves as a foundation for a research program centered on expanding opportunities for youth to develop constructive climate change coping strategies and long-term climate engagement through physical environment interventions
POETICS OF MONSTROSITY: QUEER-TENTACULAR PERSPECTIVES ON BODIES AND NATURE IN 20TH CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN’S WRITING
No full text292 pagesThis dissertation explores the literary figurations of monstrosity in the works of three mid-twentieth-century women authors from the Andean and Southern Cone regions—Armonía Somers (Uruguay), Emilia Ayarza de Herrera (Colombia), and María Virginia Estenssoro (Bolivia)—whose writings encountered varying degrees of controversy, censorship, or marginalization within their national literary histories. Through queer-feminist and eco-centric-tentacular lenses, this dissertation examines how their poetry and experimental prose contest heteropatriarchal, colonial, and anthropocentric epistemologies by troubling dominant representations of female and feminized bodies and their entanglements with more-than-human forces (the vegetal, the animal, the mineral).By conceiving monstrosity as a form of agency and a mode of language, each chapter analyzes how these texts dismantle binaries such as masculine/feminine, culture/nature, human/non-human, and mind/body while subverting the predominant literary forms within male-centered literary ecosystems. Rather than treating monstrosity solely as a metaphor for deviance, this study foregrounds its polyvalent, polyform, and polysemantic qualities, emphasizing its capacity to generate epistemic and material mutations that enact poetic and political resistance. The monstrous emerges as a speculative mode that disrupts rational and representative language, revealing the instability of meaning, embodiment, and identity in subjectivities that dwell at the thresholds of intelligibility. It also proposes speculative ontologies that challenge the presumed universality of the human—an ideal shaped by colonial, androcentric, cisheteronormative, and class-based logics embedded in twentieth-century Uruguayan, Bolivian, and Colombian symbolic orders. The works analyzed—La mujer desnuda (1950), a selection of Ayarza’s free verse poems (1947–1962), and El occiso (1937)—are the most representative of each author’s radical poetics and, in the case of Somers and Estenssoro, sparked social scandal upon publication. These texts, written during periods of political unrest and incipient modernization, give voice to those marginalized from hegemonic national narratives: feminized bodies—sexualized, racialized, impoverished, and exploited. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that while engaging with longstanding associations between “woman” and “nature” in Latin American imaginaries, these authors displace such tropes into monstrous terrains—an unruly, fertile, and politically charged matter that resists unification and domestication. They emerge as monstruas of their time—figures who unsettled collective anxieties around femininity and, in doing so, expanded the horizons of literary expression. With this work, I hope to contribute to Latin American literary studies by foregrounding queer genealogies and situated modes of reading, broadening conversations around gender dissidence, ecological imagination, and speculative writing within the Hispanic literary traditions
A GAN-BASED SURROGATE MODEL FOR INSTANTANEOUS MULTIDIMENSIONAL URBAN WIND FLOW PREDICTION
No full text35 pagesThis study proposes an improved GAN-based surrogate model for rapid urban wind environment prediction. By integrating multi-dimensional geometric and physical information—such as multi-height signed distance fields, building and airspace boundaries, and wind direction—into unified multi-channel .npz format tensors, the model simultaneously predicts multiple wind variables (Ux, Uy, Uz, p) and more accurately captures complex 3D features. Compared to previous models, the proposed method achieves lower mean squared error (MSE) and higher structural similarity index (SSIM) across both simple and complex geometries. Despite increased input and output dimensionality, the model maintains fast inference speeds, requiring only ~4 seconds per case, significantly outperforming traditional CFD simulations. All training data are generated in OpenFOAM, ensuring consistency and reproducibility. Moreover, the model infers spatial scaling implicitly through SDFs, enhancing generalizability across diverse urban morphologies. Overall, this work provides an efficient and scalable approach for real-time urban wind flow prediction.2026-06-1
Machine Learning Approaches for Drug Combination Discovery
No full text119 pagesDrugs used in combination therapy has superior treatment efficacy. Preclinical experimental screenings have fueled this progress by identifying and prioritizing new candidate combinations, but they lack predictive power over the transcriptomic data of individualized cancer samples in which exploration of the combination treatment space is intractable. There is an unmet need for computational modeling approaches that can accurately predict personalized synergistic drug combinations by integrating patient-specific molecular data. To overcome this limitation, we developed PAIRWISE, a novel DL framework to survey large preclinical screening dataset for drug combination modeling. Our method showed improved drug synergy prediction compared with benchmarked methods with superior sensitivity/specificity in the prediction of likely synergy. To further investigate safety of drug combination, we developed DDI-GPT, innovated with blending knowledge graph into a sentence as an input in large language model, achieves precision and accuracy in drug-drug interaction prediction.2026-06-1
THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE RISKS ON U.S. CHAPTER 12 FARM BANKRUPTCIES AND AGRICULTURAL BANKS' PROFITABILITY
No full text48 pagesThis study investigates the relationship between climate risks—including emissions and extreme weather events—and financial instability in the agricultural sector. The results show that both excessive wet conditions and extreme dry conditions significantly contribute to higher farm bankruptcy rates, thereby undermining the financial performance of agricultural banks. Moreover, carbon emissions further intensify these vulnerabilities, driven in part by regulatory pressures and farmers' overinvestment, which raise operational costs. These climate-related risks pose systemic challenges to the agriculture-related loan market, threatening both farm viability and the financial stability of agricultural lenders
Asylum Archipelago: Migration in the Borders of Empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean
No full text306 pagesAsylum Archipelago examines refugee and asylum policy in the U.S. empire from 1975 to 2003. Moving archipelagically from Puerto Rico in the Caribbean through the Panama Canal to the Northern Mariana Islands, it analyzes how U.S. federal officials, with both cooperation and contestation from territorial policymakers and foreign governments, employed extraterritorial and intraterritorial legal regimes to construct the U.S. refugee migration apparatus. This apparatus operated within and between unincorporated territories, U.S. military facilities, freely associated states, and ostensibly sovereign countries which became borderlands, transit points, detention sites, and places of resettlement depending on domestic and foreign policy concerns. Asylum Archipelago studies how this apparatus evolved by attending to the experiences of Vietnamese, Korean, Haitian, Cuban, Kurdish, Iraqi Arab, Chinese, and Chin migrants. While the externalization of U.S. migration policy infringed upon migrant, territorial, and Indigenous rights, it also provided opportunities for places within the U.S. empire to renegotiate their legal, political, and economic relationship with the United States. The right to control migration especially emerged as a central pillar in formal territorial status adjustment processes and decolonization movements. By studying these relationships, Asylum Archipelago repositions the United States as an empire of migrants rather than as a “nation of immigrants.” The history of refugee migration in the U.S. empire ultimately reveals the history of the United States’ body politic, as the U.S. federal government routed (un)desirable migrants to and from places wherein occupied peoples strove for self-determination and decolonization.2027-06-1
Accelerator Programming with Decoupled Data Placement for Heterogeneous Architectures
No full text151 pagesAs modern applications grow increasingly data-intensive and computationally demanding, dataflow accelerators, such as FPGAs and AMD Versal AI-Engine (AIE), are emerging as promising solutions because they enable parallel execution of compute units and allow direct data transfer between units through fast on-chip memory. By avoiding frequent reads and writes of intermediate results to off-chip memory as seen in processors with Von Neumann architectures like CPUs, dataflow accelerators deliver enhanced performance and energy efficiency, making them ideal for applications that require low-latency, real-time processing, and efficient resource utilization. However, achieving high performance with dataflow accelerators is challenging, as it relies heavily on efficient user programming to fully leverage their capabilities.One critical aspect of this programming effort is optimizing data placement, which involves orchestrating data within the hardware's memory hierarchy to ensure the right data is delivered to the compute units at the right time and in a sufficient rate, thereby maximizing memory bandwidth utilization and preventing compute units from stalling for data, keeping them fully occupied. In this dissertation, we first present HeteroFlow, a programming framework that decouples data placement from algorithm specification for FPGAs. HeteroFlow enables developers to customize placement of data across various hardware hierarchies, including host-accelerator, inter-kernel, and intra-kernel levels in a declarative manner. This enables programmers to efficiently manage data across various design levels without restructuring the original algorithm. Next, we present ARIES, a programming framework for heterogeneous dataflow architectures, where different dataflow accelerators, such as FPGAs and AIEs, work together to enhance system performance. ARIES introduces a unified MLIR-based abstraction to capture both AIE and FPGA, allowing the compiler to optimize the system holistically and derive an efficient scheme for inter-accelerator data placement. ARIES also presents a novel tile-based programming model that enables users to easily decompose a kernel into processing elements (PEs) and schedule their execution on actual hardware, which significantly simplifies intra-kernel data placement between PEs. Finally, we introduce FlexFlow, a novel dataflow programming model to capture input-dependent data placement in dataflow architectures. FlexFlow enables users to declaratively define complex input-dependent data placement, such as packet routing or switching, separately from the computational logic defined in the kernels. This approach eliminates the need for programmers to write imperative code to manage low-level implementation details such as I/O arbitration. Instead, FlexFlow generates communication structures tailored for FPGA and AIEs based on user-defined input-dependent data placement schemes
Sophistic Floralities: Flowers in Imperial Prose
No full text188 pagesSophistic Floralities: Flowers in Imperial Prose investigates floral language asmetaliterary discourse from its origins in Sappho and the Greek anthologists of the Hellenistic period to the prose literature, oratory, and philosophy of the “Second Sophistic” and its ensuing genres, such as the ancient Greek novels. My dissertation argues that flowers rarely serve as aesthetic ornamentation alone, and instead create intermedial spaces for analyzing the relationships between textuality and humanity within the nature-culture divide. The project introduces and defines the term “florality” as a conceptual network connecting the real- world ecologies of flowers to the socially constructed systems of literary culture. Though the term “florality” has no direct equivalent in the ancient world, the dissertation shows that it has comparative value in defining intertextually related discourses that reveal trends in ancient conceptions of the human and non-human worlds. The dissertation methodologically differentiates each author’s individual florality based on their respective concerns for anthropocentrism, literary excess (that is, being “florid”), and plant agency. In applying the lens of material eco-criticism to “Second Sophistic” literature, the dissertation offers a new perspective on a literary culture so enmeshed in archaism and sophisticated engagements with the literary tradition that floral discourse, in its complexity, ephemerality, and beauty, becomes a primary mode for metaliterary self-definition. The first chapter of the dissertation organically defines “florality” and “anthomorphism” in a series of case studies tracking the development of the floral metaphor in poetry, especially in Sappho and the anthologies of Meleager and Philip. The second chapter demonstrates how florality in the ancient novels can shape and define the aesthetic experience of the reader and build realistic worlds in the novels of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, and Heliodorus. The third chapter demonstrates the discursive and cosmological agency of flowers in the novels of Longus and Achilles Tatius as they develop erotic philosophies and world orders in manners parallel to modern eco-critical theories. The fourth chapter analyzes the metaliterary valence of flowers in constructing “educated” modalities of interaction with the literary tradition and culture in Philostratus, Lucian, and Plutarch
Modular Abstractions for Efficient Hardware Design
No full text273 pagesHardware design is primarily concerned with efficiency: the need to implement the fastest circuit using the least amount of resources and power. Coupled with the staggering amounts of resources poured into designing, manufacturing, and deploying hardware, optimization decisions dominate the design of tools for hardware design. Modularity, or the separation of concerns, allows for design of reusable components and has been a primary driver of the software revolution. However, in hardware design, it has taken a backseat; modular design obfuscates key properties of circuits which may lead to inefficient implementation. In the specialization era, where performance gains are driven by designing hardware for specific computations, the need for modular and efficient abstractions for hardware design is dire. This thesis identifies explicit reasoning about time as a key ingredient for the design of such abstractions and embodies them in three systems. First, Dahlia, an imperative language that compiles to hardware and uses time-sensitive reasoning to ensure that surface programs compile to efficient hardware. Second, Calyx, a compiler and an intermediate language for transforming Dahlia-like languages into hardware descriptions. Calyx bridges the gap between computational descriptions and circuit implementations using a novel intermediate language that mixes software-like control flow and hardware-like structural constructs. Calyx further resolves the tension between precise modeling of cycle-level time and scalable compiler optimizations by exploiting the observation that time-sensitive execution schedules are a refinement of time-insensitive ones. Finally, Filament, a new hardware description language that directly models cycle-level constraints in the interfaces of modules and ensures, at compile-time, that designs do not have any structural hazards. Together, these systems explore the importance of reasoning about time in the context of hardware design and beckon towards a future where modular abstractions do not need to compromise on efficiency
Environmental Analysis of Expanding New York and New England Beef Cattle Production
No full text46 pagesThe beef industry in the Northeast United States (NEUS) is at a critical juncture, facing both challenges and opportunities. This report delves into the complexities of beef production systems in the NE US, particularly emphasizing Grass-Finished Beef operations. The backdrop for this study is the evolving landscape of consumer preferences, which increasingly favors environmentally sustainable and locally produced food options. Central to this analysis is exploring the carbon footprint associated with traditional beef production methods and the potential benefits of transitioning to grass-finished systems. The traditional cow-calf system significantly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, primarily through enteric fermentation in cattle and the management of manure. The urgency to address these environmental concerns is heightened by recent data, which reveals a substantial cattle population in the United States, with specific figures for the NE US suggesting a notable contribution to this national statistic. The report aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of the region's current state of beef production, evaluating both the economic and environmental impacts of existing practices. It explores the potential for grass-finished beef production to serve as a sustainable alternative, aligning with consumer trends and ecological goals. To achieve this, the study uses computational models to analyze various aspects of beef production, including economic costs and greenhouse gas emissions. The findings of this report are poised to offer valuable insights into the feasibility and benefits of shifting towards more sustainable beef production practices. It highlights the potential for grass-finished beef to create a niche market that aligns with growing consumer awareness and demand for environmentally responsible food sources. The recommendations aim to guide producers, policymakers, and stakeholders in the beef production sector toward strategies that balance economic viability with environmental stewardship