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When “Private” Becomes Contested: Denials of Legal Protections for Intimate Partner Violence Survivors in the U.S. Immigration System
No full textIntimate partner violence has historically been dismissed as a private, domestic matter, excluded from the realm of state-recognized persecution and asylum and refugee law frameworks. The 2014 Board of Immigration Appeals decision Matter of A-R-C-G- marked a significant shift in U.S. asylum law, recognizing for the first time domestic violence as a basis for asylum.
However, in 2018, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions self-certified an intimate partner violence case, Matter of A-B-, and, invoking a rarely used power, overruled the precedent established in Matter of A-R-C-G-. Sessions declared that most claims based on “private violence” were no longer legally viable for asylum. Sessions’s personal intervention overturned decades of progress in bringing visibility to gender-based violence claims.
Thus, this thesis examines how language influences legal interpretation as legal decisions are not neutral and carry ideological implications. I employed a qualitative content analysis, conducting a close reading of the 31-page decision authored by Sessions. I manually coded for language that signaled distinctions between state-inflicted violence (i.e., government persecution) and violence committed by a “private” actor (i.e., an intimate partner) to demonstrate how Sessions pushed to re-privatize intimate partner violence by distancing it from state accountability
Impact of Paid Family Leave on Maternal Employment and Household Economic Security
No full textThis dissertation includes three papers that examine the role of paid family leave (PFL) policy in supporting maternal employment and improving household economic security.
Paper 1 examines mothers’ employment trajectories around childbirth and evaluates the extent to which state-level PFL promotes job continuity after childbirth. Paper 2 investigates the long-term effects of California’s PFL program on mothers’ employment and earnings up to 11 years after childbirth. Paper 3 assesses the effects of New York’s PFL policy on household poverty following childbirth, examining whether improvements in maternal employment serve as a key mechanism
Uncovering Metabolic Signatures using Lipidomics
No full textSince the first space probes to Mars, evidence of an active geophysical past and periods of a significantly more temperate environment, suggest an early Martian climate, much like Earth’s. The surface of Mars, now harshly bombarded with ionizing radiation and frigid temperatures, has not yet offered compelling evidence of organic life; however, the subsurface remains a protected environment in which signs of past or extant life may be found.
Future missions to Mars are becoming more enticing as our understanding of habitability is expanded and there becomes a compelling need to find diagnostic biosignatures. Prokaryotes are abundant in the subsurface on Earth, yet remain poorly understood due to their inaccessibility and vast microbiome that contains many unknown species. Compartmentalization using lipids is universal to life as we know it; facilitating complex chemical reaction networks essential to living systems. Lipids are durable, provide structure and protection, and their metabolism and lipophilic intermediates can provide insight into survival strategies of life in all environments.
In this doctoral thesis, I investigated protective isoprenoidal lipids to understand their importance in subsurface lava tubes. I profiled the lipidome of subsurface lava tube microbial samples to showcase their unique fingerprint shaped by their distinct environmental needs. Through the three distinct projects presented in this work, I discuss the validity of lipids as biosignature target molecules and showcase their diversity and detection strategies in Mars analogue lava tubes
Reframing Beginning Teacher Experiences: Pedagogical Agents Negotiating Contextual Elements
No full textWithin the field of education, many argue that the first year of teaching has lasting impacts on teachers’ practices and determines whether they remain in the profession. Teacher educators, policy makers, school leaders, and teachers themselves continue to discuss the attributes of successful preparation for teachers to enter into classrooms and the professional support, once they have begun independent practice, necessary for them to succeed and to continue in the profession. The increased concern around teacher retention has resulted in a greater emphasis on providing beginning teachers with support to be successful and effective during the induction period.
The nature of the support provided to beginning teachers varies widely in the number and kinds of activities and is unevenly valued within the field. Current approaches often appear to construe learning to teach in overly simple and linear ways: beginning teachers consume practices and strategies and become more equipped and effective educators. This misrepresents the complexity and dynamism of beginners’ contexts for learning (and the interactions within and across contexts), assumes too little about the beginners' thoughtfulness and positions them as if they have no agency. Hence, the purpose of this study was to better understand beginning teachers’ experiences and how they negotiate and construct their teaching practices as they enter the profession.
Using a post-intentional phenomenological research design, including data drawn from teacher reflections using reflection mapping, dialogues, observations, focus group interviews and a collection of artifacts, this research explored the experiences of two beginning high school History teachers in a “high needs area”, with a specific focus on how they negotiated their encounters and interactions within their school environment and how they made decisions in their pedagogical practice.
Ultimately, this study revealed the potential power in situating beginning teachers as agentive actors embedded within a system of ongoing, dynamic interactions that collectively influence their development as educators.
This dissertation concludes with implications for practice and research, suggesting a reframing of beginning teacher experiences where their unique perspectives are recognized as essential assets to their school communities and the broader educational landscape
Mortal Foresight: Learning to Live through Extinction
No full textThis dissertation presents a response to the paradoxical question confronting Homo sapiens in the early Anthropocene: how can we learn to live through extinction? To answer that question, I establish a psychoanalytic frame within which to consider the implications of the Anthropocene for our species’ survival.
From that perspective, I argue that the Anthropocene, conceived of as a function of human population overshoot, must become the central focus of education today. By this, I mean that the difficult affective-cognitive task of working through the empirical reality of the Anthropocene as an extinction-level threat to all life on Earth ought to be recognized as a most urgent form of transformative existential education.
I provide a phenomenological example of what this kind of learning looks like through an autoethnographic recounting of my own experience grappling with the Anthropocene, which led me to co-found the New York City chapter of Extinction Rebellion, the global decentralized nonviolent movement for climate and ecological justice.
Then, I bring that experience back in from the streets to formulate a developmental therapeutic ecopedagogy first for psychic breakdown through ecological mortification and, subsequently, for what I call mortal foresight, or the capacity to robustly imagine and wholly accept the possibility of near-term human extinction in the Anthropocene.
Since this capacity rests in significant part on affective knowledge, I also offer a learning theory for aesthetic education through narrative art that is additionally meant to test the reader’s own emotional learning. Ultimately, I conclude that the systematic educational cultivation of existential transformation to a postapocalyptic identity can serve the adaptive function of swerving our species away from the precipice of extinction
Using Brain Rhythms for Guiding Closed-Loop Non-invasive Neurostimulation in the Treatment of Depression
No full textMajor depressive disorder (MDD) remains a leading cause of disability worldwide, with many patients showing inadequate response to conventional repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved TMS in 2008 as a noninvasive neurostimulation therapy for depression, substantial efforts have focused on improving response rates, increasing durability, and reducing the number of sessions and stimulation dose required. However, the heterogeneity of brain organization and individual differences among patients continue to pose significant challenges. To date, the precise mechanisms underlying rTMS, the optimal combination of stimulation parameters, and reliable biomarkers of target engagement remain elusive. Therefore, personalizing stimulation protocols to account for neuroanatomical and neurophysiological variability is essential to improving treatment efficacy.
This thesis develops and validates a multimodal, closed-loop EEG-synchronized rTMS framework that integrates fMRI-informed spatial targeting with real-time phase estimation of prefrontal alpha oscillations to optimize stimulation timing. Using simultaneous fMRI-EEG-TMS (fET) recordings, we demonstrate that TMS delivery synchronized to individual alpha phase modulates activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and networks supporting cognitive control and emotion regulation.
In a randomized, double-blind, active comparator-controlled clinical trial, we show that personalized, phase-synchronized rTMS produces more predictable clinical outcomes in treatment-resistant depression compared to unsynchronized stimulation. We identify two EEG-derived neurophysiological biomarkers -- cortical excitability (Global Mean Field Power) and phase entrainment (weighted Inter-Trial Phase Coherence) -- that differentiate synchronized from unsynchronized stimulation and predict clinical improvement, with responders exhibiting progressive decreases in excitability and increases in entrainment over treatment. These biomarkers inform a personalized stimulation framework that would be used to adaptively optimizes parameters in real time.
Finally, in an accelerated protocol combining EEG-synchronized rTMS with cognitive behavioral therapy in patients with treatment-resistant depression and recent suicide attempts, all participants achieved clinical response and remission, sustained at one month. Biomarker tracking confirmed consistent trajectories toward increased entrainment and decreased excitability, and the preferred stimulation phase for the cognitive flexibility and emotion regulation networks closely aligned with that of the ACC, reinforcing the robustness of our targeting approach.
This work provides mechanistic and translational evidence that brain-state-informed, closed-loop rTMS can bridge superficial stimulation sites with deeper therapeutic targets, enabling precision neuromodulation for depression and potentially other neuropsychiatric disorders
GRID3 COD - Health Zones v7.0
No full textThe GRID3 COD - Health Zones v7.0 dataset consists of health zone boundaries with name, location, and other related attributes for twenty-two provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (COD).
Province group 1: Haut-Katanga, Kasaï, Kasaï-Oriental, Kinshasa, and Lomami
Province group 2: Haut-Lomami and Tanganyika
Province group 3: Ituri and Kwilu
Province group 4: Maniema
Province group 5: Kasaï-Central
Province group 6: Tshopo and Mongala
Province group 7: Sankuru
Province group 8: Kongo-Central
Province group 9: Lualaba, Mai-Ndombe, Sud-Ubangi, Tshuapa
Province group 10: Equateur, Nord-Ubangi, Sud-Kivu
This operational dataset has not been fully validated by government officials or ministries.
This current version supersedes the GRID3 COD - Health Zones v6.0 (https://doi.org/10.7916/k2zk-2j78). The following changes were made:
Added data for the provinces of Equateur, Nord-Ubangi, Sud-Kivu.
Keywords: Health Zone
GRID3 NGA - Travel Time Friction Surface v1.0
No full textThe dataset is a spatial data layer in tiff format, containing 2 layers:
Walking friction surface: Applies walking speeds across the entire surface, adjusted for slope and elevation.
Mixed-mode friction surface : Applies motorized speeds on roads and walking speeds in all other areas.
Keywords: Road
Towards Trustworthy AI: Detecting, Understanding, and Mitigating Information Disorder
No full textThe spread of misinformation, propaganda, and manipulative narratives -- collectively referred to as information disorder -- has emerged as a major threat to the trustworthiness of online discourse. This challenge is further intensified by the rise of large language models (LLMs), which, while offering powerful generative capabilities, also create new risks for abuse and misalignment. In this dissertation, I investigate how information disorder manifests itself and evolves across both human and AI-mediated communication channels, and explore key challenges and solutions at different stages of the landscape -- from detection and intent analysis to mitigation strategies -- through the lens of trustworthy AI.
This dissertation is structured around three core stages, each addressing a distinct facet of combating information disorder. First, I develop content-based detection frameworks that integrate textual, visual, and propagation-based features to identify untrustworthy and manipulative posts on social media. Second, I examine the anatomy of information disorder by developing models that (1) capture the intent and manipulation strategies of malicious actors -- such as propaganda techniques and emotional appeals, (2) analyze audience perception, including how user traits shape susceptibility to radicalizing content, and (3) explore the emergent threat of LLMs acting as malicious agents capable of generating deceptive or coercive communication. Third, I present system-level mitigation strategies that address these threats at scale: defending against LLM-driven social engineering, improving factual control in generative outputs, curating high-quality and novel training and retrieval content through document-level distinctiveness scoring, and designing steerable, human-in-the-loop research agents that support principled alignment and intervention.
Across these stages, this dissertation advances modular, interpretable, and context-aware systems that address the evolving threat landscape of information disorder. The findings lay the foundation for future research on LLM-based trust infrastructure, agent-level safety, and human-in-the-loop alignment in complex information ecosystems
Exploring the Lived Experiences of Black Queer Students: Guidance for School Leaders to Foster Equitable Spaces
No full textThis research investigated the nuances between race and Queerness and its effects on the lived experience of Queer Black students, notably how leaders can support these students. The complexity of multiple minoritized identities affects students’ beliefs and attitudes and adversely affects their social development. This study employed a qualitative interpretive phenomenological approach. Six participants who were Black Queer alumni of New York State K-12 public schools shared their lived experiences through one-on-one interviews and a focus group.
This study displayed that Black Queer students had feelings of isolation due to their dual minoritized identity. Students succumbed to many challenges and barriers. The study’s findings were organized into four key themes: navigating identity, challenges and obstacles, school climate and institutional efforts, and coping strategies/support systems, each highlighting the complex experiences of Black Queer students in public schools.
Using a conceptual framework that centered on Intersectionality as an understanding of identity and Culturally Responsive School Leadership as a means for inclusivity, the analysis explored participants’ struggles with racism, homophobia, transphobia, mental health, performative allyship, and lack of institutional support while also identifying resilience strategies and the need for genuine inclusion policies. It is evident through this study that schools must move beyond performative allyship by implementing anti-bullying policies such as DASA and GENDA with fidelity, prioritizing the safety of Black Queer students. To create genuinely equitable spaces, school leaders must address systemic disparities—including disproportionate discipline and academic barriers— through equity audits and professional development that center on Black and LGBTQ+ student needs and an overall shift towards inclusive policies and practice