Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2015, Apparel, Textiles, and Merchandising (Education)

This ethnography examines the motivations behind the dress habits of Chinese university students studying at a Midwestern university in the United States. Symbolic consumption and self-discrepancy were implemented in the research design. Seven participants completed a demographics questionnaire and in-depth interviews designed to shed light on the relationship between identity, norms, and masculinity in the construction of the dress and behavior habits of university males. Differences in the construction of identity, masculinity, and the symbolism of dress-related goods were examined through the participants' contributions. An index was also be administered which measured participants' conformity to (western) masculine norms. The results of the study indicated that the majority of the participants reported altering their dress in order to conform to masculinity norms. The majority of participants associated muscularity, casualness of dress, and athletic clothing as accepted masculine norms at Ohio University.

MS, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Engineering : Computer Engineering

Automated design of analog circuits involves circuit sizing, a process of assigning numerical values to unknown parameters of a fixed circuit topology. With the advent of exemplary concepts based on determinant decision diagrams (DDDs), symbolic analysis techniques have begun to play a pivotal role in analog synthesis. Their strength lies in the ability to incorporate circuit parasitics. In this thesis, a new symbolic pole extraction algorithm based on graph theory has been proposed. Techniques aimed at developing time domain symbolic behavioral and performance models in order to expedite circuit synthesis are described. The CAD tool STDA incorporates symbolic models that analyze the time domain behavior of different classes of analog circuits. The symbolic approach to optimization-based circuit synthesis has been suggested as an alternative to the traditional numerical approach. STDA is tested extensively on a set of benchmark circuits to assess its capability, accuracy and efficiency as a CAD tool.

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2009, Human Development and Family Science

The present study uses secondary telephone conversational data to explore how the abuse (power and control) used by an incarcerated perpetrator of intimate partner violence (IPV) influence(s) his victim's self concept. The study is a journey of Alex's influence on Allegra's self concept, most evidently as a means to an end (drop legal charges) in the unique context of impending legal charges. Using thematic analysis and the theoretical framework of Symbolic Interactionism (SI), Allegra's self concept is understood as an amalgam of three interrelated themes of context, roles and identities, and accounts. Alex influences Allegra's self concept through her salient identity of a romantic partner, and eventually forges a family identity. By virtue of being salient and relational (the identities include Alex), these identities are more susceptible to Alex's power and control. He heightens role taking to appeal to her salient identities and creates apologies and accounts that are ultimately successful in influencing her self concept to drop the legal charges. Of note is Allegra's identity of a worker which is resilient to the abuse tactics, highlighting the positive aspect of a self concept exposed to routine abuse. Amidst the juxtaposition of love and violence, Allegra works harder to diffuse contradiction and align her self concept with the salient identities. The study has implications for women in legally involved IPV cases and future research geared towards understanding the decisions women take in response to their abusive partner, including their decision to prosecute and/or to return to the relationship.

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1964, Graduate School

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1948, Graduate School

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1970, Graduate School

Master of Science, Miami University, 2024, Computer Science and Software Engineering

Drawing inspiration from lateral thinking, synergetics, psychology, creativity, and business, this research project employs an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the research process which drives innovation in the field of artificial intelligence. This research project explores methods for harnessing the synergy present in the latest, neuro-symbolic paradigm of artificial intelligence, while noting similarities between the first two waves of AI and dual process theory. It attempts to integrate unconventional, yet potentially promising interdisciplinary ideas into a proof of concept, including creative tools and techniques like the Six Thinking Hats, methods of psychotherapy, including cognitive behavioral therapy and internal family systems, as well as principles related to conflict resolution and ``tensegrity". The proof of concept is a hybrid semantic search system for research papers in computer science, constructed using a process of rapid prototyping and iteration, with special consideration for evaluating how more modular, interpretable, and human-centric approaches to system design can help narrow the gap between cutting-edge AI research and ethical, practical application in business. This research is conducted with the hope of opening the research field to greater creative possibility, as well as deliberate action towards creating more sustainable and human-centric artificial intelligence systems.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Experimental Psychology (Arts and Sciences)

LGBTQ individuals have increased in number in the United States, but do heterosexual individuals feel threatened by these changes? I examined whether demographic increases of a group traditionally associated with symbolic threat (the LGBTQ community) increased realistic threat, symbolic threat, and/or prejudice. I demonstrated in a Pilot Study that demographic increases of LGBTQ individuals elicited symbolic threat and realistic threat, which in turn predicted anti-LGBTQ prejudice. Study 1 (preregistered) replicated the symbolic threat effect, but the realistic threat effect did not emerge. Study 2 demonstrated that growth of LGBT individuals (and not just LGBTQ individuals being mentioned) elicits this threat. Study 3 found no differences between current increases in the LGBTQ community and hypothetical future increases in the LGBTQ community eliciting threat. Finally, Studies 4a-4b tested brief interventions designed to assuage threat from these demographic changes, but found no significant differences on threat, prejudice, or support for anti-LGBTQ legislation. However, Christian Nationalism and heteronormativity beliefs moderated the condition-prejudice relationship across Studies 3-4b. Theoretical implications about demographic shift research and practical implications for designing demographics-based interventions are discussed.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Sociology

Feminist identity has mainly been studied as an aspect of the self that may or may not be linked with identifying as part of the larger social movement. This study examines how individuals explain their decisions to deploy the identity label “feminist” in their interactions. Given the widespread recognition of the term “feminist” and its various meanings and associations, it could be considered a cultural signifier. Cultural signifiers are frequently used to perform symbolic boundary work, the process of making conceptual distinctions. Using data from twenty-seven semi-structured interviews with college-aged (18-24) women and non-binary people living in the Midwest, this study finds that respondents used the term strategically to make distinctions about what it means to be a feminist, who is a feminist, and with whom it was safe to discuss gender politics, often drawing from cultural ideas. Feminism was largely viewed as something that is to be expected of everyone but was not to be specifically named and using the feminist label was viewed as carrying certain risks, both social and material. Those who did use the feminist label did so strategically, often to make a point or to take a political stance. These findings provide valuable insight into how this generation is engaging with gender politics and contributes a perspective on how identity functions in interactions that has been missing from previous studies on feminist identification.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2023, Leadership and Change

There is a paucity of theorizing concerning leadership enactments performed by African American women. The performances have been marginalized and obscured within the Western leadership canon as they fall outside its epistemological boundaries; they have also been sidelined within Critical Leadership Studies. This study employed Afrocentricity as a decolonizing paradigm and Africology as the research methodology to describe and define a leadership phenomenon enacted by African American women. Setting aside Western conceptions of leadership, focus groups of African American women examined video excerpts of Africana women's oral performances through an Africological lens. Participants' Afrocentric-oriented perceptions sparked collective storytelling and Meaning-Making regarding their lived experiences of African American women who mobilize and energize others employing spiritually-anchored, embodied, affective approaches to engagement. Centering the African American women's culturally distinct ways of being, knowing, and doing, the participants' collective narratives were used to identify the four elements of the leadership phenomenon which included: spirituality, knowing, orality, and embodiment. A framework emerged from the data reflecting the interconnected, interrelated, interdependent, Afro-circular dynamism of the enactment's elements and their characteristics; it served as the foundational architecture upon which to construct a theory of Empowered Presence, a culturally-distinct, spiritually-anchored, holistically-embodied performance of galvanizing, mobilizing, and engaging others within the collective. This study not only expands Western leadership theorizing but provides the groundwork for Afrocentric researchers to enhance decolonizing approaches to investigate African American women's leadership within a Africological methodological framework. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu/) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https:/ (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2023, Geography

Despite high poverty levels, and limited manufacturing and production activities, the morphology of the Sub-Saharan African cities is modernizing through the development of infrastructure including interchanges. The theoretical interpretations of the modernization of African cities have been couched within the frameworks of frontier urbanization and speculative urbanism. Using Accra-Tema City-Region (ATCR), Ghana as a case study, the primary purpose of the thesis is to map the geography of interchanges, examine the processes or reasons for the production of interchanges, and what they might mean for the urban development process of ATCR. I used Google Earth Satellite Imagery and Open Street Map (2000-2022) to locate the interchanges. I also employed archival research sources to obtain data on the sources of capital and builders for the interchanges. Open-ended interviews were conducted with the Department of Urban Roads and residents to ascertain the reasons for the development of interchanges and the implications for urban development. The findings show that ATCR has witnessed a concentration of 25 simple to tier-four complex interchanges under globalization. The production of interchanges has occurred because local forces have provided enabling circumstances for foreign direct investment. I provide three recommendations for the urban development process of ATCR.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1950, Mathematics

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2022, Computer Science (Engineering and Technology)

Music theoretic constructs such as tonality, harmony, and voice leading are often expressed ambiguously in music, yet the vast majority of datasets and music information retrieval systems attempt to create analyses that completely cover all musical input. Furthermore, most datasets encode a single analysis, even though the perception of the corresponding musical constructs may differ significantly among listeners, depending on individual differences such as musical sophistication and listening histories. In this thesis, an approach to key segmentation is introduced that handles music's inherent ambiguity and listener subjectivity in a feasible way through rule-based partial analyses and multiple annotations, each mapping to a different, prototypical reference listener. These partial analyses are implemented using the chord and key label outputs of an existing state-of-the- art key segmentation model. Experimental evaluations show that partial analyses that are associated with unambiguous, clear key definitions lead to higher accuracy. Additionally, evaluating on partial analyses that this model predicts with high confidence leads to higher precision without a decrease in recall. The proposed approach to musical ambiguity and listener subjectivity is expected to be applicable to other music analysis tasks, with potential improvements in the performance of music information retrieval pipelines.

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2022, Nursing

Cardiovascular disease is a significant cause of death, disability, and financial expenditures. Research supports plant-based diets as an effective, practical, and cost-effective means to prevent and manage cardiovascular disease. Despite the evidence in favor of plant-based diets to prevent and manage heart disease, there is limited research that informs the social process of transitioning to a plant-based diet. The purpose of this study was to explore the social process that people with cardiovascular disease undergo to successfully transition to and maintain a plant-based diet. This constructivist grounded theory study was informed by symbolic interactionism, which served as an abstract framework to provide a way of knowing about the process and meaning of dietary change among individuals who made the transition to plant-based eating. Using a semi-structured interview guide, intensive interviews were conducted with 7 adults with cardiovascular disease who had transitioned to and maintained a plant-based diet for at least 1 year. The Plant-Based Diet Transition Model emerged from the data and centers on Being changed. The process begins with Having your eyes opened, then continues with the inter-related categories of Becoming self-informed, Finding what works, Seeing positive affirmations, Building conviction, and Leading by example. Experiencing cultural conflict encompasses the process. Within Experiencing cultural conflict, participants described a lack of information and support from health-care providers which led them to seek information and support from other sources, ultimately relying heavily on self-guided research and learning, along with trial and error. This demonstrates the importance of nurses and other healthcare providers becoming informed about plant-based diets and learning about how best to support people in this transition to promote positive cardiovascular health outcomes. Because evidence supports plant-based diets as an effective means to (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2021, Civil Engineering

Adequate rebar-concrete bonding is crucial to ensure the reliable performance of reinforced concrete (RC) structures. Many factors (such as the concrete properties, concrete cover depth, transverse reinforcement, and the presence of corrosion) affect the bond behavior, and consequently the structural performance. This bond behavior is typically described by a bond stress-slip relationship, where there are two critical quantities: bond strength the maximum shear stress that bond can withstand, and peak slip the slippage at the interface when the bond strength is reached. It is understood that the bond deteriorates when corrosion is present and behaves differently under two distinct bond failure modes (i.e., splitting and pull-out). While many prior studies have focused on the influence of the aforementioned factors on the bond strength, the impact of the failure mode coupled with corrosion on the bond stress-slip relationship and structural performance have not been thoroughly investigated. This study is aimed to address this issue. In this study, first a probabilistic bond failure mode prediction model that considers various influencing factors including loading type and corrosion is developed in this study. This study uses the bond testing results of 132 beam-end specimens subjected to monotonic and cyclic loading and adopts classification methods to develop the prediction model, which is then used to evaluate the impact of bond behavior on the reliability of a RC beam with a lap splice. Then, multivariate nonlinear regression with all-possible subset model selection and symbolic multi-gene regression are adopted for probabilistic model development for bond strength and peak slip under the two bond failure modes considering corrosion. In particular, a comprehensive bond dataset collected from bond tests on the beam and beam-end specimens in the literature and from the experimental testing conducted in this study, and a criterion to specify the bond failure (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Wright State University, 2021, Computer Science and Engineering PhD

Vulnerable web applications fundamentally undermine website security as they often expose critical infrastructures and sensitive information behind them to potential risks and threats. Web applications with unrestricted file upload vulnerabilities allow attackers to upload a file with malicious code, which can be later executed on the server by attackers to enable various attacks such as information exfiltration, spamming, phishing, and spreading malware. This dissertation presents our research in building two novel frameworks to detect server-side applications vulnerable to unrestricted file uploading attacks. We design the innovative model that holistically characterizes both data and control flows using a graphbased data structure. Such a model makes effortless critical program analysis mechanisms, such as static analysis and constraint modeling. We build the interpreter to model a web program by symbolically interpreting its abstract syntax tree (AST). Our research has led to three complementary systems that can effectively detect unrestricted file uploading vulnerabilities. The first system, namely UChecker, leverages satisfiability modulo theory to perform detection, whereas the second system, namely UFuzzer, detects such vulnerability by intelligently synthesizing code snippets and performing fuzzing. We also proposed the third system to mitigate the challenge of path explosion that the previous two systems suffered and enable a computationally efficient model generation process for large programs. We have deployed all of our systems, namely UGraph, to scan many server-side applications. They have identified 49 vulnerable PHP-based web applications that are previously unknown, including 11 CVEs.

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2021, Psychology, General

The thesis examined associations regarding COVID-19 realistic threats (i.e., concerns about physical health and material well-being) and symbolic threat (i.e., sociocultural concerns) with the likelihood of voting for Joe Biden or Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election. Political ideology and attitudes about racism, sexism, and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) were considered as well. It was hypothesized that realistic threat concerns would be positively associated with the likelihood of voting for Biden, but this association would be modified by political ideology, with more liberal ideologies strengthening the association between realistic threat and the likelihood of voting for Biden. It was also hypothesized that symbolic threat would be positively associated with the likelihood of voting for Trump, but that this association would be qualified by a significant interaction between political ideology and symbolic threat, showing that more conservative ideologies strengthen the predicted association. Both hypotheses controlled for racism, hostile and benevolent sexism, and RWA. The study was a cross-sectional, correlational design and the hypotheses were tested in two separate regressions, one examining the likelihood of voting for Biden and the other examining the likelihood of voting for Trump. Broadly, the hypotheses were not supported; it was found that political ideology and symbolic racism accounted for most of the variance within the sample. Exploratory regression analyses examined the unique contributions of threat, sex differences, and tested interactions between threat perceptions and sex. In these models, the likelihood of voting for Biden was positively associated with realistic threat and the likelihood of voting for Trump was positively associated with symbolic threat. Results showed that sex did not moderate realistic threat but did moderated the association between symbolic threat and the likelihood of voting for each candidate. Speci (open full item for complete abstract)

Bachelor of Arts, Walsh University, 2021, Honors

Culture and society in the ancient world were shaped by the mythological beliefs of individual civilizations. The Watchers tradition, an Ancient Near Eastern myth present in the Hebrew Bible as well as in non-canonical books such as The Book of the Watchers, contains some of the least understood elements within the mythology of the Jewish people. These sources reveal myths to be dynamic reflections of changing cultural values. Between the first references to the Watchers in Hebrew mythology and their elaboration during the Hellenistic period six centuries later, the Watchers tradition developed from a reference in passing in the Book of Genesis to an in-depth exploration of Good and Evil in The Book of the Watchers. This development warrants discussion, as do its cultural and historic contexts. If the transformation of the Watchers myth was influenced by Jewish experience of Hellenistic rule, that invites further reflection on how the idea of supernatural evil entered into Judaism and would influence the later idea of fallen angels in Western civilization.

PHD, Kent State University, 2021, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

It is well documented that mathematics achievement is an important predictor of many positive life outcomes like college graduation, career opportunities, salary, and even citizenship. As such, it is important for researchers and educators to help students succeed in mathematics. Although there are undoubtedly many factors that contribute to student success in mathematics, much of the prior research and intervention development has focused on instructional techniques. Indeed, even a cursory glance at many educational journals and granting agencies reveals that there is a large amount of time, energy, and resources being spent on determining the best way to convey information through direct, declarative instruction. The current project was motivated by recent calls to expand the focus of research in mathematics education beyond direct, declarative instruction. The overarching goal of the presented series of experiments was to evaluate the efficacy of two novel mathematics interventions designed using principles taken from the literature on non-declarative learning. The first intervention (Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2) used errorless learning and structured cue fading to help college students learn to factor polynomials. The second intervention (Experiments 3 and 4) used errorless learning and structured cue fading to help second grade students improve their understanding of symbolic magnitude. This project also investigated the efficacy of both interventions for students who are disadvantaged in the traditional mathematics classroom: those with working memory deficits and math anxiety.

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2020, Experimental Psychology (Arts and Sciences)

Americans have debated the appropriateness of displaying statues of Confederate soldiers since the monuments were popularized in the early 20th century. Only a few research studies have investigated predictors of attitudes toward these controversial statues. In four studies, I establish a causal relationship between White privilege beliefs and attitudes toward Confederate statues. Participants who are induced to experienced increased belief in White privilege report more negative attitudes toward Confederate statues. I also identify both symbolic threat (i.e., feelings of threat related to a group's culture, values, or identity) and outgroup empathy (i.e., an understanding of an outgroup's feelings) as parallel mediators of the relationship between White privilege and Confederate statue attitudes.