22232 research outputs found
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Empowering Science with the World\u27s First High Accuracy and High Throughput Functional Assay
No full textUnderstanding the functional consequences of genetic mutations remains a central challenge in modern biology, with far-reaching implications for human health and disease. While early systematic methods like alanine scanning and phage display provided foundational insights into protein structure and function, the emergence of high-throughput approaches—such as Multiplexed Assays of Variant Effect (MAVEs)—and predictive tools powered by artificial intelligence have vastly expanded our ability to profile mutational landscapes. However, these methods are often constrained by trade-offs between accuracy, scalability, and biological relevance.This dissertation presents the development and application of the GigaAssay, the world’s first high-throughput functional assay capable of delivering both high accuracy and scalability. Built upon a modular, one-pot experimental framework, the GigaAssay enables the quantitative assessment of thousands of mutations simultaneously, while maintaining single-molecule resolution through the use of hundreds of unique molecular identifier (UMI) barcodes per variant. The technology\u27s generalizability and robustness are demonstrated by exploring the mutation space of two vastly different proteins, HIV-1 Tat and HER2. In addition to detailing the experimental and computational innovations that underpin the GigaAssay, this work highlights its transformative applications in virology and oncology, offering new avenues for functional genomics, drug development, and precision medicine. By enabling systematic and reproducible functional interrogation of genetic variation at unprecedented scale and accuracy, the GigaAssay empowers a new era of biological discovery
Integrated UAV Platform for Multi-Spectral, Thermal, and EOS Imaging in Wildfire Monitoring and Modeling
No full textThis thesis presents the design and development of a modular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system based on a quadcopter platform for flexible and efficient wildfire-related multimodal image acquisition. Addressing key limitations in ecological UAV monitoring such as sensor inflexibility, time-consuming reconfiguration, and imprecise image georeferencing, the system introduces a versatile payload integration framework supporting three distinct imaging sensors: MicaSense Altum-PT, FLIR Vue Pro R, and Sony Alpha 6000.All onboard components, including the flight controller, autopilot software, GNSS module, motors and ESCs, were selected to optimize stability and payload performance. A gimbal-free, downward-facing mount simplifies field deployment, while custom integration enables precise geotagging. Field tests were conducted over grassland environment using mission-based corridor scans. The resulting imagery was processed in PIX4Dmapper to generate dense point clouds, orthomosaics, digital surface models (DSMs), and vegetation indices. A comprehensive evaluation of flight performance and data quality was performed to validate the system’s effectiveness. The proposed platform enhances UAV-based ecological monitoring in pre- and post-wildfire scenarios by supporting rapid sensor swapping and robust data collection. It facilitates high-resolution analysis of vegetation, soil, and burn impact, contributing to improved wildfire assessment and post-fire ecosystem recovery monitoring. This research contributes to the National Science Foundation (NSF) EPSCoR project “Harnessing the Data Revolution for Fire Science (HDRFS)” through the Cyberinfrastructure Innovations (CII) component
Housewerk: How Drag Performers Engage in Emotional Labor While Navigating Community Care
No full textThis dissertation examines drag performance as a form of service labor shaped by emotional labor, community care, and identity-based inequality. Drawing on interviews with drag performers shows how drag labor blends artistic skill, emotional regulation, interpersonal care, and entrepreneurial labor. While these demands mirror service sector roles in other industries, drag remains underrecognized and undervalued, particularly for performers who do not conform to white, cisgender norms. The study introduces Housewerk—an adaptation of Marlon Bailey’s concept of housework (Bailey, 2013)—to describe the mix of paid and unpaid labor drag performers engage in. Housewerk captures how performers must balance self-preservation (branding, income, emotional health) with social obligation (activism, mentorship, visibility), often at a personal cost. Marginalized performers—including trans artists, drag kings, intersex performers, and performers of color—report heightened emotional burdens, tokenization, and exclusion from booking and leadership opportunities. These findings build on and extend the work of Bailey (2013), Román (2005), and Piepzna-Samarasinha (2016;2018), who conceptualize queer and trans labor through kinship, care, and community survival. By drawing on and expanding theories of emotional and affective labor (Hochschild, 1983; Wharton, 1993; Ahmed, 2004; Kang, 2003; Carastathis, 2015; Niall, 2022), this dissertation reframes drag as labor that is simultaneously artistic, political, and communal. It contributes to sociological understandings of work, identity, and inequality by demonstrating how emotional labor operates in informal, identity-based economies where care and performance are demanded but not protected
Investigating Information Extraction and Language Models in Medical Domain Text Processing
No full textThis dissertation demonstrates that carefully adapted language-model pipelines can transform unstructured clinical-trial and pharmacological prose into reliable, low-latency structured data. Four interconnected studies support this claim.Tri-AL platform. An open-source dashboard ingests all 440 k+ ClinicalTrials.gov records—including every historical revision—into a normalized schema and parses the 20 GB XML archive over 10x faster than a BeautifulSoup baseline, while exposing hooks for demographic analytics and supporting integration of user-defined modules. Clinical trial summarization. An encoder–decoder model is trained on 57k description–summary pairs to condense clinical trials into a few sentences. ROUGE evaluation shows a 20% improvement over the baseline, while graph-based evaluation indicates the model preserves 71% of critical biomedical entities, yielding concise yet informative summaries suitable for evidence scans. MoA classification. A collection of models—including traditional classifiers (decision trees, random forests, XGBoost) and contrastively fine-tuned masked-language-model variants—achieves a macro F1 of 97%, effectively handling class imbalance and drug-class sparsity while also providing interpretable insights. Scalable medical NER pipeline. A dynamic and scalable pipeline is introduced for training lightweight Named Entity Recognition (NER) models adaptable to different entity types. Knowledge distillation compresses the large teacher model into a 110M-parameter student that retains 70% of gold-label accuracy (F1=0.61) while running 1000x faster and consuming just 6% of the memory. Collectively, these contributions provide scalable tools and empirical evidence that domain-specific NLP methods can be integrated to accelerate trial discovery, enhance drug-development analytics, and support data-driven clinical decision-making
Examination of Factors Influencing Clinical Trial Completion Among a National Sample of Middle-Aged Adults Aging with Their Long-Term Physical Disability
No full textAdults aging into midlife (45-64) with their long-term physical disability (LTPD) face new secondary health conditions (SHCs) that increase psychosocial distress and reduce self-efficacy. Neighborhood disadvantage, measured using the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), may compound these challenges; however, little is known about how these factors influence clinical trial completion, including intervention completion, among this population. The present study examines whether: 1) self-efficacy and ADI predict clinical trial completion, and 2) self-efficacy, ADI, and average amount of clinical contact per intervention session predict intervention completion among middle-aged adults (n=507) with a LTPD enrolled in a national health behavior clinical trial. Hierarchical logistic regression showed that self-efficacy, but not ADI (in most circumstances), significantly predicted study completion. As a result, ADI was excluded from subsequent models. Logistic regression showed that self-efficacy—but not clinical contact—predicted intervention completion, though this was only found when all participants randomized to the intervention arm (EnhanceWellness-Disability; EW-D) were included. Participants who were randomized to the EW-D intervention but never initiated session 1 had lower median self-efficacy than those who initiated the intervention. Exploratory analyses (chi-square, Kruskal-Wallis, Fisher’s exact test, and between-subjects ANOVA) demonstrated that interventionist assignment related to study satisfaction and clinical contact, but not intervention completion. Giving participants the option to choose (no, yes) how intervention sessions were completed did not affect satisfaction. Results highlight the importance of emphasizing self-efficacy early in interventions to improve retention and that intervention implementation characteristics may be less critical in clinical trial outcomes than person-level factors. Future research should explore neighborhood factors in a larger sample of adults living with LTPD and identify strategies for increasing study and intervention completion among those lowest in self-efficacy
From Page to Perspective: Book Clubs & Book Reviews Enhance Learning in the College Classroom
No full textIncorporating book clubs and book reviews into my International Business Capstone course (UNLV BUS 498) offered a dynamic and fun learning experience that enhanced both academic development and personal growth. Following this assignment, students demonstrated strengthened skills in critical thinking, collaboration, and global awareness.https://oasis.library.unlv.edu/btp_expo/1208/thumbnail.jp
Assessing the Professional Development Needs of Traditionally and Alternatively Certified Career and Technical Education Teachers in Virginia
No full textThe Virginia Department of Education allows for various paths to teacher licensure. Teachers may graduate from an approved teacher preparation program or obtain a teaching license through alternative pathways. This study identified the professional development needs of traditionally and alternatively certified CTE teachers in Virginia by administering a statewide survey. The participants were divided into three groups: alternatively certified CTE teachers (Group 1), traditionally certified teachers in a non-CTE area and then received a CTE endorsement (Group 2), and traditionally certified teachers in CTE (Group 3). By comparing how teachers from each of these certification pathways reported their level of preparation for different aspects of teaching to the perceived importance of those aspects, conclusions can be drawn regarding the aspects of teaching that need more attention to help better prepare traditionally and alternatively certified teachers. The results demonstrate that while there are slight differences in how traditional and alternatively certified teachers report the data, there are many similarities in how these different groups of teachers feel about their teacher training. All teachers in all three groups ranked managing stress as the highest need. Other highly ranked items were balancing work and personal life, managing time, and motivating students. The Virginia Department of Education has identified Career and Technical Education (CTE) as a critical needs area for more qualified teachers due to a teacher shortage, as such it is important to understand how teachers feel about their preparation within these different licensure pathways, and resources to help teachers be better prepared can be improved
Navigating Leadership: The Impact of Intersectional Identities on Female Leaders in Postsecondary Education
No full textThis study aimed to explore the lived experiences of female leaders in postsecondary education, focusing on how intersecting identities influence their leadership and decision-making processes. Using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach and the theoretical framework of intersectionality, the research explored the relationships between gender, leadership, career decision-making, and other social identities. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and demographic surveys with 11 female leaders. The findings revealed seven key themes: Identity Influenced Experiences, Unintentional Navigation, Institutional Bias, Playing the Game, Institutional Champion, Supportive Mechanisms for Career Advancement, and Value Alignment. These themes illustrate how gender and intersecting identities shape career decisions and leadership experiences. The study highlights the impact of identity on career progression and offers insights into the strategies women employ to navigate leadership roles. It contributes to the intersectionality and leadership literature and provides practical implications for enhancing institutional support for female leaders in postsecondary education
Offering a Manufacturing Curriculum Online to Rural Schools: The case of the NIMM Project
No full textThis case study examined the extent to which the two implemented manufacturing pathways of the NIMM project successfully facilitated access and engaged high school students from rural regions in two manufacturing curricula. The program consisted of two tracks or career pathways for manufacturing technicians: Mechanical CADD technician and Electro-Mechanical technician. The Mechanical CADD program was delivered online, and the Electro-Mechanical program was delivered online and through a summer skills academy. Findings include, students showed less preference for CTE manufacturing courses in an online asynchronous format, CTE instructors need to be trained to teach online, proper IT infrastructure is needed for a successful online course in rural regions, teaching CTE online will be more effective when it is hybridized, students have opportunity for hands-on experience and manufacturing tours, and offering CTE online can be an alternative to produce career pathways in manufacturing for rural students
Worship Without Barriers
No full textIssue: Church accessibility and digital inclusion.
Controversy: Does livestreaming strengthen or weaken spiritual community
Viewpoint 1: Barna Group (2020) – Found that online church gives people more access, especially during and after the pandemic.
Viewpoint 2: Pew Research Center (2021) – Reports some worry that virtual worship reduces personal connection and long-term engagement.
Viewpoint 3: Campbell (2012) – Argues that digital religion is evolving and churches must balance tradition with technology.
My View (Graff & Birkenstein, 2021): Livestreaming is a ministry tool that helps include people who are sick, isolated, or unable to attend in person—it expands, not replaces, spiritual community.
Research Question: How do church in-person volunteer services contribute to accessibility, safety, and spiritual engagement within underserved communities?https://oasis.library.unlv.edu/educ_tss_303/1000/thumbnail.jp