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Subwavelength optical resonators for efficient modulation of two-dimensional semiconductor excitonic properties
Get PDFTwo-dimensional (2D) semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have attracted great interests owing to their novel excitonic properties, leading to potential applications in nanoemitters, photodetection, sensing, valleytronics, and polaritonic systems. However, for both practical and fundamental approaches, there remain intrinsic limitations in TMD materials. Coupling TMD with single optical resonators is a promising strategy to control its excitonic properties at the subwavelength scale with high efficiency. Both plasmonic resonances based on noble metals and Mie resonances from high-index dielectric materials can be engineered to facilitate the favorable far-field or near-field manipulations for TMD excitonic property modulation. This dissertation presents the systematic studies on the design of subwavelength optical resonators and their coupling with 2D TMDs. Specifically, (1) we introduce hydrogenated amorphous silicon nanospheres of different sizes to couple with monolayer TMDs for the demonstration of directional emission and excitation efficiency; (2) We apply plasmonic nanostructures with enhanced out-of-plane field enhancement to boost the decay of spin-forbidden dark excitons. The disturbance of the excitonic quantum dynamics successfully leads to the narrowing of bright exciton linewidth at room temperature (RT); (3) We target at the competition between the decays of excitons and trions (charged excitons) to control the coherent exciton linewidth at RT. A unique Mie resonator is designed to tailor the optical near field and provide a huge difference in Purcell effects on excitons and trions. A near-intrinsic linewidth down to the theoretical limit at 0 K is achieved at RT for the first time; (4) we develop a plasmonic nanosphere-on-mirror platform for the tunable couplings with both bright and dark excitons by employing the fruitful cavity modes in such configuration. The interaction between the bright- and dark-exciton-photon hybrids are studied under strong coupling (SC) at RT; (5) A broadband Mie resonator based on moderate-refractive-index materials is introduced to simultaneously couple with multiple excitonic states in different TMDs covering the full visible spectrum for the first time. The strong field confinement and enhancement at the monolayer plane ensures the SC with all the excitonic states at RT and the robust exciton-polariton emission from different states are systematically studied.Materials Science and Engineerin
The Five-Sided Business Card: An Oral History of the Arts Community in Lafayette, Louisiana
Get PDFThis thesis explores the development, structure, and significance of the arts community in Lafayette, Louisiana, through a short-term ethnographic and oral history study. Situated within broader theories of scene-making and cultural expression, the project examines why artists choose to remain in a mid-sized, culturally complex Southern city rather than migrate to larger urban art centers. Drawing from 30 interviews with local artists, musicians, community organizers, and arts administrators, as well as extensive participant observation, the research finds that Lafayette’s arts scene thrives through a unique culture of collective ownership, collaboration, and cultural stewardship. While Cajun heritage forms an important backdrop, the community’s strength lies not simply in cultural preservation, but in creating inclusive spaces for identity expression across generations, ethnicities, and disciplines. The study highlights the interplay between geography, history, and social networks, and how these forces foster a tight-knit, resilient, and creatively vibrant arts scene despite economic and institutional challenges. It also considers the tensions between artistic authenticity and market constraints, generational shifts in artistic practice, and the arts’ role as both a reflection of and a refuge from broader societal structures. Ultimately, Lafayette’s arts community demonstrates the vitality and importance of smaller, regional scenes in sustaining diverse and dynamic cultural landscapes across the American South.American Studie
A Scoping Review of Interventions to Help Practicing Physicians Address Nutrition in Ambulatory Care
Get PDFThe importance of effective nutrition counseling is underscored by the increasing prevalence of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases, which collectively affect millions of individuals globally and contribute to significant healthcare costs. Despite physicians’ unique positioning to integrate dietary guidance into patient care, barriers such as insufficient training, time constraints, and inadequate resources often hinder their ability to provide effective counseling. This thesis explores interventions designed to enhance practicing physicians’ capacity for nutrition counseling in ambulatory care settings. Through a scoping review of 46 studies, four main intervention modalities were identified: workshops, screening tools, practice-based tools (including clinic reminders, clinical support tools, and patient handouts), and multimodal strategies. These interventions demonstrated varied improvements in physicians’ knowledge, confidence, and counseling practices while positively influencing patient outcomes such as weight loss and improved biomarkers. However, challenges such as implementation barriers and limited long-term sustainability were noted. The findings emphasize the importance of integrating multimodal approaches tailored to clinical workflows to maximize impact. This review also highlights critical gaps in longitudinal research and scalability assessments, underscoring the need for future studies to focus on sustainable solutions that address systemic barriers for providers and patients in nutrition care delivery.Polymathic Scholar
Producing the Revive Youth Festival : navigating resistance within the Revive Youth Producer Program
Get PDFThe Revive Youth Producer Program (YPP) was a year-long, paid youth internship program and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project that employed Austin teens in live-event and festival production jobs through creative workshops, masterclasses, and experience proposing and producing their one-day festival for teens, Revive Youth Festival. While art programs for youth focus on training live performers, few intentionally hire youth as creative producers and leaders in the production process. In this thesis, the facilitator reflects on their experience working with a team of youth producers who participated in YPP through a lens of resistance within a reflexive practitioner qualitative study. This facilitator/researcher identifies perceived resistance from institutions, youth participants, and themself and recognizes how their own responses to resistance— through negotiation, pushback, and acceptance— serve as catalysts for transformational learning. Using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis methodology, the author analyzes data from intern interviews, work samples, and other artifacts. In doing so, they propose a new lens to comprehend how resistance can lead to transformational learning and create what Robin DG Kelley imagines as a "freedom space" for youth and their communities.Theatre and Danc
Steeping Memory: Perspectives on a Family’s Heirloom in the Context of Migration and Jewish Material Culture
Get PDFThe stories families tell about their heirlooms often become symbolic representations of heritage, identity, and migration. In my family, a silver samovar tea set was long believed to have traveled from Poland to Mexico with my great-grandmother Eva when she immigrated in 1928. This thesis examines the samovar’s significance across four generations and explores how material objects carry emotional and symbolic weight, embodying both personal and collective histories. Research for this thesis included a combination of oral history interviews, material analysis, and scholarship in Jewish material culture and migratory studies to trace the samovar’s evolving role in the family. Oral histories were conducted with members of the first, second, and third generations to gather personal memories and perspectives. A physical examination of the object revealed that the samovar was not brought from Poland, as the family believed, but was in fact manufactured in Mexico—suggesting that the object’s importance is a product of what it symbolizes rather than what it is actually is.
Findings show that the immigrant generation used the samovar to preserve a connection to their lost community and identity; the second generation largely rejected its importance as part of an effort to assimilate and as a response to trauma; and the third generation reclaimed the object as a site of memory and familial identity. This thesis concludes that the value of heirlooms lies not in their factual history, but in the stories they come to represent.Anthropolog
Analyzing Audiovisual Sources of Cold War Latin America
Get PDFThis activity will encourage students to interact with audiovisual sources through AVAnnotate, a platform that facilitates the analysis and presentation of audiovisual materials, and learn how primary and secondary sources can further their understanding of Latin America during the Cold War. They will take a close look at the countries and communities involved in the major historical and social events highlighted in the Latin American Press Review Radio Program. The program was made for American audiences and provided secondary source information, in the form of news reels, and primary source information, through interviews. Each program covers a diverse range of topics, such as armed forces & violence, arts & culture, economy & labor, the environment, immigration, and politics & international dynamics.LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections Digital Scholarship Office and Mellon Foundation's AVAnnotate grant projectLatin American Studie
Checklist and Images Documenting the Biodiversity of Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge (Updated)
No full textIncluded are five pdf files documenting biodiversity on Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific Ocean from June of 2019 through December of 2019 and again from December 2020 through May 2021. This is an update to a previous post, after Ryan Rash went back to Johnston Atoll for the last deployment of the Crazy Ant Strike Team and subsequent demobilization of the Johnston Atoll U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service camp there. Most of the photos were taken by Ryan, but some were provided to him by others there cohabitating the island at the time. He, and a crew of 4 others were employed to work on the island by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in an effort to control and document the spread/containment of invasive yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) and document their effects on native wildlife. The images here were taken by him during his off-time, as a side-project while working on the island. They were compiled and produced into the files provided here in the months after his deployment. The project aimed to record every species of animal and plant, preferably with a photograph sufficient for species determination, but in some cases, as indicated in the included checklist, species were noted without a photograph. In addition to the checklist, images were organized into a collection of four taxonomic presentations: (1) Fish; (2) Birds; (3) Plants; and (4) Herps, Inverts, and Mammals. Within each file, species are sorted alphabetically within their higher taxa, which are also sorted alphabetically for easy perusing.
Johnston has a lengthy military history beginning in the early 1930s. Nuclear radiation and harmful chemicals like agent orange were stored there and have leaked out into the environment. These have since been remediated, but sometime in the early 2000s after the military left in 2004, yellow crazy ants (YCA) infiltrated the island likely as incidental passengers on personal or military vessels moving between the Pacific remote islands. The crazy ants quickly took over the island, proving especially detrimental for the resident red-tailed tropicbirds (Phaethon rubricauda) that nest on the ground. The ants began swarming the nesting tropicbirds and their chicks, spraying them with formic acid expelled through their acidopores. Tropicbirds, after being sprayed repeatedly in the eyes, were blinded and eventually perished only to be consumed by the ants.
In 2010, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service researchers visited Johnston and discovered the infestation. They created a treatment plan later that year and sent out the first Crazy Ant Strike Team (CAST). Until May 2021, there was a constant crew of ~5 people on the island at all times (apart from hurricane evacuations). Thankfully, the pesticide treatment worked and yellow crazy ants haven’t been detected since December of 2017, but extensive monitoring has continued in order to be completely sure of their eradication. In December of 2020, two scent dogs (Guinness and Solo) surveyed over 80% of the infestation area and didn’t alert on the yellow crazy ant scent signature. The remainder of the infestation area was hand searched by the CAST 20 crew over their six months on the island and they also celebrated not finding any YCA.
Johnston Atoll, at the time of the infestation, was home to the largest red-tailed tropicbird colony in the world with over 5,000 active nests. The entire island was surveyed in spring of 2021 and found that the number has increased to over 13,000 active nests! It was important to save this atoll from the infestation, as it’s the only landmass for over 600,000 square miles of ocean and is one of the most isolated landmasses in the world, and a key nesting/stopover point for many bird species. The 11-year CAST project has come to an end and the eradication of yellow crazy ants from Johnston Atoll was declared a success!Integrative Biolog
Home Hydroponics as a Means of Improving Food Access and Reducing the Environmental Impact of Food Cultivation
Get PDFThis thesis examines the viability of in-home hydroponic systems as a decentralized approach to addressing food insecurity in urban food deserts. Two systems—the AeroGarden Harvest Elite and the Lettuce Grow Medium Outdoor System—were analyzed over a single growing cycle to monitor system yield, resource consumption, and user experience. The data obtained from this experimental phase was taken in conjunction with insights gleaned from reviews of each of the tested systems and YouTube videos on vloggers’ experiences with in-home hydroponics to come up with a set of engineering requirements to inform the design of hydroponic systems for the explicit purpose of improving food access within urban food deserts. Experimental limitations included incomplete control over environmental variables (e.g., ambient temperature, humidity, light intensity), issues setting up the systems, and a short trial duration. These constraints limited the precision of energy, water, cost, and yield comparisons. Furthermore, the study did not engage target communities, limiting its sociocultural applicability. Despite these factors, preliminary findings suggest that while hydroponics would not be a panacea for food insecurity in these communities, it has significant potential to improve issues associated with nutrient deficiencies and foster community resilience. Widespread adoption depends on system affordability, ease of use, seasonal performance, and adequate user training. Future work should involve multi-season testing, community-based participatory research, comparing full life-cycle assessments to quantify environmental trade-offs, and optimizing system designs for low-resource urban contexts.Mechanical Engineerin
The stringed Qur'an : post-Islamic reform and musical revival among Alevis in Turkey and Europe
Get PDFAlevis, followers of a messianic form of Sufism, comprise the largest non-Sunni Muslim religious group in Turkey and Turkey’s diaspora. In the 2010s, key Alevi groups responded to the efforts of Turkey’s conservative Islamist government to convert Alevis to majoritarian Islam by launching reform initiatives aimed at purifying Alevi rituals from Sunni and Shi‘i Islamic influences. These initiatives sought to reorient Alevis away from the scriptural doctrines, biblical oaths, and pious sensibilities of Islam as a revealed religion and toward an embodied ritual order focused on self-divinization through veneration of Ali (the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad) as a saint and divine being. Alevi reformists called upon their communities to use the Alevi long-necked lute, the saz or “stringed Qur’an,” as well as the “language of the path” (yol dili), an ambiguous linguistic register closely associated with Alevi poetry, to fashion themselves into divine subjects in the image of Ali. In doing so, they revived a ritual order with deep historical precedent in the messianic Sufi movements of early modern West, Central, and South Asia. This order is best understood as post-Islam, or Islam after the messianic suspension of its scriptural oaths and doctrines. This dissertation examines how Alevis establish and maintain a post-Islamic order through the routinization and circulation of linguistic, musical, and ritual forms. Specifically, it focuses on two prominent Alevi post-Islamic ritual reform initiatives. The first was a liturgical reform project spearheaded by a commission associated with the shrine of the thirteenth-century Alevi saint, Hacı Bektaş Veli, as part of the broader aim to bolster the shrine’s position in Alevi ritual life. The second is a transnational network called the School of Divine Wisdom (Mekteb-i İrfan), founded by Alevi religious leader, singer-poet, and UNESCO “Living Human Treasure” Dertli Divani in order to revive muhabbet (love/conversation) gatherings as a site of post-Islamic pedagogy among Alevi youth in Turkey and Europe. These movements do not only defend Alevis against the Turkish state’s Sunni encroachment, but also aim to recoup for Alevis a place in a universalist narrative that they are otherwise denied by majority-Muslim frameworks of belonging.Religious Studie
The Economics of Third Places: How Business-Led, Recurring Community Events Impact Customer Lifetime Value
Get PDFThis thesis examines the effect of recurring, business-led community events on customer lifetime value. Considering the public health and social benefits of community gathering spaces, there is a well-researched public incentive to prioritize the existence and prosperity of spaces such as parks, coffee shops, bars, churches, and gyms. Many of these community gathering spaces, otherwise known as third places, are businesses. There is a gap in research surrounding how to align the incentives of businesses with the public incentive for community gathering places. This thesis aims to bridge the gap in existing literature by focusing on the economic benefits to businesses of becoming a third place. Specifically, the following research investigates how recurring community events organized by businesses affect consumers' willingness to invest social, time, and financial resources in a business. The findings are expected to provide insights for businesses considering implementing community-building strategies, as well as contribute to the broader understanding of customer-brand relationships in the context of community events. The research has implications for relationship marketing, brand management, and the development of third places in communities.Marketin