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Capstone Poster for "Support in Schools: Implementing an In-School Resource Program for Family and Student Basic Needs"
No full textMaster of Social Work (MSW)Basic human needs include food, water, shelter, clothing, and more. When one lacks these needs, significant consequences, risks of physical and mental health issues are increased. For young students, these challenges often manifest as poor academic performance and attendance as well. In Tacoma, Washington, a large number of students face unmet basic needs, which impact their educational experiences. Through interviews with key stakeholders, including individuals with lived experiences and professionals working directly with McKinney-Vento students and families in Tacoma, interventions are necessary to address these needs, particularly within the school environment. An in-school resource program is critical to supporting students and families in meeting their basic needs, enhancing their overall well-being and academic success. This capstone poster offers an overview of a proposed program that would involve the integration of school social workers, which there is currently a lack of in the Tacoma Public School district and designated site coordinators. The program would include a resource pantry stocked with essential items such as food, clothing, hygiene products, gently used furniture, and technology. Site coordinators and school social workers would engage and connect with students and families on a weekly basis to assess and address their specific needs. To support thriving future generations, we must support these students as they are youth and adolescents. This program will not only tackle the barriers caused by unmet basic needs but also contribute to a more positive school experience for students, improving their sense of well-being and engagement with education
Leveraging Machine Learning to Uncover Integrated Impacts of Urban Environment Features on Human Health
No full textThesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2025While human health is significant to sustainable development as cities keep increasing and are estimated to contain 70% of the population by 2050, the quantitative relationship of how the urban environments influence human health remains so poorly understudied due to the convoluted connection and co-effect among numerous urban factors, as well as the large-scale data integration difficulty. Previous researchers studying urban health mainly focus on finding specific urban environment feature’s influence or try to analyze the mechanisms of features co-effect on a coarse scale larger than census tract level or just with qualitative approach. Thus, this research set and reached the objectives to quantify the essential, specific and integrated relationship between urban environment and human health, and specify urban indicators’ co-effect at census tract level mainly from the urban environment’s perspective. With the development of data science, various statistical methods including Machine Learning (ML), SHAP analysis, and Pearson correlation analysis offer promising opportunities for analyzing such complex relationships, facilitated by the increasing availability of urban data by modern tools and the advancements in computational efficiency. By utilizing these methods, this research analyzes 6044 census tracts in 10 US metropolitans (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Jacksonville, San Francisco Area, Seattle Area, Washington DC Area, Boston Area) with data from 2015 to 2024, builds a framework for census tract level urban health index developed from literature review and WHO urban health indicators framework (2014), quantifies 27 urban environment features’ influence on human health indicators especially on life expectancy, and builds a high performance urban health prediction model for future intervention suggestion for policy makers, making significant meaning towards the urban planning practice
Estimation of carbon stock in tea plants (Camellia sinensis) based on age variation at Tambi plantation unit
Get PDFBackground: As an effort to reduce current climate change, conservation measures such as carbon stock measurements are needed. Tea plants are a suitable commodity for transforming towards low carbon production because perennial plants such as can absorb and store more carbon than seasonal agricultural crops. Methods: Sampling was carried out using a random sampling method that was taken randomly to represent a population for each block number. Data collection for the study was carried out by taking 3 soil and plant samples at each age of the tea plant with an age of 10 years, 30 years, 40 years, and 100 years. The plant samples taken were leaves, stems, roots, and litter. The soil samples taken were soil with a depth of 0-10 cm, 10-20 cm, and 20-30 cm with disturbed and undisturbed soil sampling. Findings: The total carbon stock value of tea plants stored in the Pemandangan Block UP Tambi is 63.17 tons/ha in 10-year-old tea plants; 67.26 tons/ha in 30-year-old tea plants; 67.87 tons/ha in 40-year-old tea plants; and 69.40 tons/ha in 100-year-old tea plants. After analyzing the relationship between physical and chemical properties of soil with biomass carbon reserves, C-Organic, soil texture, and soil volume weight are the parameters that most influence carbon reserve content. Conclusion: Plant age due to replanting and pruning, making them unsuitable for soil carbon stock estimation. Novelty/Originality of this article: This study offers novelty by integrating field-based carbon stock measurements of tea plants with variations in plant age and Sentinel-2A remote sensing analysis, providing a unique contribution to understanding the relationship between soil properties, biomass, and carbon storage capacity in tea plantations, which has not been extensively explored in previous research
Private Choices in Public Health: A Framework for Economic Epidemiological Modeling of Infectious Disease
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025This dissertation investigates the role of risk compensation in infectious disease dynamics by examining how individuals adjust private preventive behaviors in response to perceived mortality risk, and how these behavioral shifts shape and are shaped by epidemic trajectories. While conventional epidemiological models assume fixed or policy-driven contact rates, real-world transmission depends critically on how individuals perceive and respond to evolving risk. Public health policies, in turn, interact with these private behaviors—amplifying or dampening their effects. The first part of this dissertation provides empirical evidence of risk compensation behavior by analyzing high-frequency mobility data across U.S. counties during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using lagged local mortality as a proxy for perceived risk, the study finds that individuals significantly reduced their mobility in response to rising deaths—particularly in high-contact, discretionary domains. These responses evolved over time and were shaped by public health interventions such as shelter-in-place orders and mask mandates, which often amplified rather than displaced private behavioral changes. The second part develops a dynamic economic-epidemiological model that endogenizes contact rates through mortality-responsive behavioral feedback. Critically, the magnitude of behavioral responsiveness estimated in the empirical analysis is used to calibrate the strength of the feedback loop—bridging observed behavior with modeled transmission. This endogenous co-evolution of behavior and epidemic severity creates a self-regulating system in which private action dynamically responds to real-time risk signals, suppressing transmission as perceived threat intensifies. The model, grounded in a delayed SEIRDS framework, demonstrates how such feedback can flatten epidemic curves, delay transmission peaks, and produce multiple waves. Introducing pandemic fatigue—modeled as declining responsiveness to risk—erodes this adaptive loop, weakening the self-limiting dynamic and enabling persistent spread. Simulations highlight the importance of accounting for behavioral adaptation in forecasting and policy design. Together, these studies offer a unified framework for understanding how private choices interact with public policy and disease dynamics through the lens of risk perception and behavioral adaptation
Insights from a changing ocean: Evolving biogeochemistry and its impacts on marine ecosystems and climate
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025Marine biogeochemistry integrates chemical, biological, geological, and physical processes that are fundamental to Earth's climate and ecosystems. As elements cycle through the ocean, atmosphere, and biosphere, they leave behind biogeochemical fingerprints that serve as proxies to track environmental change. Over the industrial era, anthropogenic CO2 emissions and other human activities have caused the oceans to change rapidly, perturbing this biogeochemical landscape. Characterizing biogeochemical shifts is critical to advance our understanding of climate-driven impacts, assess marine ecosystem health, and evaluate climate solutions. Recent advancements in biogeochemical tools and technologies have deepened our insights into oceanic change. The development of high-precision paleoproxies has extended records of ocean conditions into the pre-industrial era, while the Argo float array has enabled four-dimensional monitoring of biogeochemistry globally. High-resolution numerical modeling has also improved our ability to capture complex interactions at fine spatial and temporal scales, offering a holistic framework to understand anthropogenic impacts from past to future. Together, these technologies provide a comprehensive toolkit to characterize shifts in ocean biogeochemistry in unprecedented detail and advance our understanding of global environmental change.
This thesis weaves together applications of novel biogeochemical tools to examine the drivers, impacts, and mitigation strategies of a rapidly changing ocean. Each chapter leverages diverse datasets and multiple tools to provide new insights on ocean change based on marine biogeochemistry. In Chapter 2, I combine boron-isotope measurements from cold-water corals with a biogeochemical model to reconstruct and investigate subsurface acidification trends over the industrial era in the California Current System. In Chapter 3, I combine Argo-based biogeochemical data products, archival tagging records, and machine learning methods to develop a four-dimensional species distribution model for an economically important fishery species, revealing biogeochemical constraints on its migration. In Chapter 4, I employ a high-resolution biogeochemical model of the Salish Sea to evaluate the detectability of ocean alkalinity enhancement, a marine carbon dioxide removal strategy for climate mitigation. These studies provide new frameworks and tools to investigate, monitor, and respond to a changing ocean
The Fractional Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect in Twisted MoTe2
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025Emergent quantum phenomena in two-dimensional moire superlattices, particularly twisted bilayerMoTe2 (tMoTe2), reveals a rich interplay between electronic correlations and band topology. Leveraging
device fabrication, optical spectroscopy, local imaging techniques, and low-temperature electrical
transport measurements, we have experimentally demonstrated robust integer and fractional
quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) states without external magnetic fields. Fractionally quantized
Hall conductance plateaus at fillings such as ν = −2/3 and −3/5, accompanied by vanishing longitudinal
resistance, provide definitive evidence for fractional Chern insulating (FCI) phases driven
purely by electron-electron interactions. Additionally, local visualization of fractional edge states
through microwave impedance microscopy has directly confirmed bulk-edge correspondence. Further
exploration into higher Chern bands and dissipationless transport has expanded understanding
of correlation-driven phenomena, uncovering potential pathways to non-Abelian fractional states
relevant for quantum computing. These results collectively establish twisted MoTe2 as an exceptional
platform for exploring novel quantum states and highlight their potential for future topological
quantum technologies
Assessing Gene-Environment Interaction in the Association Between Smoking and Leukocyte Telomere Length
No full textThesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2025Telomere length is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors, including smoking behavior. While smoking is associated with shorter telomeres, this association may vary by genotype. In a subset of the UK Biobank cohort (N = 360,909) with genetically inferred European ancestry, we analyzed 581,069 common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and average relative telomere length estimates derived from quantitative PCR (qPCR) to test whether the association between ever/never smoking status and telomere length differs by genotype. One SNP, rs4418881, reached genome-wide significance (P = 4.49e-8) in the 2 degrees of freedom gene-environment interaction joint test but did not reach significance in the overall genome-wide association study (P = 4.19e-7). Stratified analyses revealed that rs4418881 was genome-wide significant in ever smokers (P = 1.06e-8) but not in never smokers (P = 0.35), suggesting that this SNP may modify the effect of smoking on telomere length
The Urban Environment and Active Living: The Case of Bogotá, Colombia
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025The built environment fundamentally shapes health opportunities, including those for active living. While research from the Global North has identified the types of built environments that support choice-based physical activity, less is known about their distribution and active-living promoting potential in Global South cities, where activity is often necessity-driven and socioeconomic inequalities and segregation are pronounced. This dissertation addressed this gap by using a neighborhood typology approach to examine how socioeconomic residential segregation and neighborhood built environments relate to shape active living patterns in Bogotá, Colombia. Findings showed that more segregated neighborhoods were less likely to be characterized as active living-supporting built environments, but were not directly associated with physical activity levels, likely due to misalignment between researcher-defined and perceived access to neighborhood characteristics. Despite limitations, including cross-sectional data, temporal mismatches, and reliance on proximity-based measures, this work highlights important areas for future place-based epidemiologic research in Global South cities. When leveraged intentionally, the built environment has the potential to foster cities that are fundamentally just, promoting equitable opportunities, mobility, and health for all residents
Breaking the Silence: Unveiling Microaggressions and Cultivating Support for Women’s Stigmatized Health Care
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025Stigma surrounding sexual and reproductive health often silences women, limiting their access to essential care. Fear of social judgment deters many from seeking treatment for conditions like sexually transmitted infections, or even non-sexually transmitted conditions such as cervical cancer, as discussing these topics remains taboo. In South Korea, despite government efforts to promote sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care and shifts in sociocultural beliefs to decouple female sexuality from marriage, cultural norms continue to discourage unmarried women from seeking SRH care. This has resulted in significantly higher cervical cancer rates among Korean women compared to other populations and put them at high risk for severe health complications, including pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancies, and infertility. Through my dissertation research, I aimed to empower and protect women seeking support on these culturally taboo topics while raising community awareness and building strategies to prevent the inadvertent perpetuation of harmful microaggressions. Ultimately, I sought to foster resilience and safety within these communities. In alignment with this goal, my research makes four contributions. First, I uncovered microaggressions as a primary barrier to accessing SRH care for unmarried Korean women, a contributor to health disparities that has received little attention in prior research. I identified how these microaggressions occur, who perpetrates them, and how emotional proximity shapes their harm. To explain these dynamics, I developed a framework illustrating how even well-meaning allies can become covert agents of stigma, reframing how microaggressions are understood in stigmatized healthcare contexts. Second, I introduced culturally sensitive strategies to counteract microaggressions, co-developed with unmarried Korean women. These strategies emphasized reflection, empathy, and education over punishment, aligning with cultural values such as emotional restraint and not burdening others, and offering a constructive alternative to punitive approaches. Third, I designed an anonymous online space using the Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) method that fostered mutual support and deep reflection among unmarried Korean women. This space enabled participants to safely discuss stigmatized health topics and reflect on in-group microaggressions, which are rarely addressed in existing research. Based on this study, I offer design insights for creating culturally sensitive and emotionally safe online spaces, emphasizing the importance of rapport-building, sequenced activities, and expanded evaluation criteria. These design choices supported meaningful engagement and led to real-world changes, including increased care-seeking and more open conversations. This work extends ARC beyond data collection to inform the design of empowering digital spaces for stigmatized communities. Finally, I examined the limitations and unintended harms of generative artificial intelligence in producing counterspeech for culturally stigmatized health contexts. Current AI-generated responses often fail to recognize cultural nuance, validate the experiences of those targeted, or challenge the structural context of stigma. In response, I proposed a culturally sensitive framework for improving counterspeech generation that embeds cultural sensitivity, affirms users’ perspectives, and accounts for social and structural factors shaping stigma. Together, these contributions offer new directions for designing inclusive technologies and support systems that reduce stigma, challenge harmful norms, and promote culturally sensitive care. By reimagining how communities and technologies can respond to microaggressions, this work helps create a future where individuals navigating stigmatized health concerns feel seen, supported, and empowered to seek the care they deserve
Shaping Civil Society: Media, Donors and Public Trust in Southeast Asian NGOs
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025This dissertation examines how perceptions of civil society are shaped by social media, organizational attributes, and elite media narratives. Empirically, I focus on perceptions of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) in Southeast Asia. Combining a cross-national survey, a conjoint experiment, and machine learning analysis, this three-paper dissertation investigates the following questions: (1) How does social media usage influence trust in NGOs compared to governmental institutions in hybrid and authoritarian regimes? (2) What organizational traits drive donor support for ENGOs? (3) How do elite media portrayals of ENGOs differ based on their service or advocacy orientations? Chapter 1 utilizes the Asian Barometer Data to explore if social media enhances trust in NGOs by creating civic spaces for political expression, while eroding confidence in governmental institutions due to public scrutiny of the state on these platforms. I determine that social media usage is associated with reduced trust in governmental institutions but enhances trust in NGOs. Chapter 2 uses a conjoint experiment in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore to examine donor preferences for ENGOs. I find that individual donors favor organizations that prioritize regional issues, partner with regional organizations and promote gender inclusive leadership. Chapter 3 analyzes English-language media coverage of Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) using machine learning techniques. I find systematic biases against advocacy orientated organizations. Service-oriented ENGOs like WWF received positive, trust-laden portrayals while groups like Greenpeace are framed as disruptive and face negative sentiment. This dissertation advances debates on civil society's role under restrictive regimes and the potential future of environmental organizations in emerging donor markets. The findings highlight the importance of a locally rooted civil society, one that is funded and supported by domestic actors, as a foundation for greater legitimacy