VTechWorks
VTechWorks provides global access to Virginia Tech scholarship, including journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, conference papers, slide presentations, technical reports, working papers, administrative documents, videos, images, and more by faculty, students, and staff. Faculty can deposit items to VTechWorks from Elements, including journal articles covered by the University open access policy. Email vtechworks@vt.edu for help.
Open Access Policy
Virginia Tech's open access policy enables researchers to deposit the accepted version of scholarly articles with no embargo.
Theses and Dissertations
Virginia Tech was first in the world to require ETDs in 1997, and continues to add scans of older theses and dissertations.
Open Textbooks
More than 50 freely available and openly licensed textbooks are among our most downloaded items.
Communities in VTechWorks
Select a community to browse its collections.
Recent Submissions
Redesigning the Comprehensive Fitness Assessment for Virginia Tech Recreational Sports: An Evidence-Based Framework for Test Selection, Administration, and Interpretation
Wilson, Evan (2026-06-22)
Comprehensive fitness assessments (CFAs) are commonly used in collegiate recreational sports and commercial gym settings to evaluate multiple domains of health and fitness. However, the existing CFA used by the Virginia Tech Recreational Sports Department lacks clear test selection, standardized testing procedures, and meaningful interpretation of test results. The purpose of this project was to redesign the CFA into a more consistent, evidence-based assessment tool while preserving practicality, trainer discretion, and client-centered test selection flexibility.
The revised CFA was developed through a review of current literature and exercise guidelines along with consideration of the feasibility of each test. Pre-participation screening, body composition, balance, muscular power, muscular strength, muscular endurance, cardiorespiratory fitness, and flexibility were all included in the review. The following three resources were created: a test-selection flowchart, an updated recording document, and a trainer-facing CFA booklet. These materials provided procedural standardization, safety considerations, normative reference tables for test result interpretation, and a decision-making framework based on client age, risk factors, physical ability, and training background.
Seven Virginia Tech Recreational Sports personal trainers participated in pilot testing of the revised CFA. Trainers completed a 25-minute orientation to the new CFA resources, practiced administering the revised CFA using mock client scenarios, and provided feedback during a focus group. Trainers reported that the revised CFA improved confidence, consistency, professionalism, and increased value to clients compared to the previous model. Feedback identified areas for improvement including clearer inclinometer instructions, clarification of optional tests, corrections to some normative tables, better equipment/improved setups for the vertical jump test and TUG test, and a learning session for trainers to familiarize themselves with the revised CFA before implementation.
Final revisions were made based on the trainer feedback. The revised CFA provides a clear structure, includes evidence-based tests suitable for Virginia Tech’s Recreational Sports setting, improves ease of use for trainers, and adds meaningful interpretation of client results.
YpeB stability affects germination possibly through delaying SleB activity in Bacillus subtilis
Shams-Eddin, Marcel; Pinkham, Alexandra; Williams, Naomi; Popham, David L. (American Society for Microbiology, 2026-06)
Bacterial endospores formed by Bacilli and Clostridia can persist for decades and survive a wide range of killing mechanisms but can rapidly germinate in permissive environments. SleB and CwlJ are partially redundant germination-specific lytic enzymes that degrade Bacillus spore cortex peptidoglycan, contributing to the transition to the vegetative state. SleB interacts with YpeB, which may hold it inactive until germination starts. YpeB is rapidly proteolyzed during germination, which may release SleB to degrade the cortex. HtrC cleaves YpeB, but YpeB is still degraded in the absence of HtrC, suggesting the contribution of other proteases that are associated with the inner membrane. We hypothesize that at least one additional protease serves a YpeB degradation role. A mutant strain lacking five spore-associated proteases had significantly delayed spore germination and YpeB degradation when compared to the wild type. It is hypothesized that delayed YpeB degradation might cause SleB to become active later during germination. To further characterize the role of YpeB stability on SleB activity, cortex muropeptides were analyzed using HPLC and mass spectrometry. A decrease in two SleB-associated muropeptides was seen in the protease mutant strain after 30 and 60 min of germination when compared to the WT, which might be the consequence of delayed SleB activity. Identifying protein-protein interactions during germination could guide manipulation of spores either to increase the germination efficiency, rendering the spores more susceptible to killing, or to prevent germination, making the spores inefficient in causing human disease.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Open-Source Textbook in a Large, Middle-Year Engineering Mechanics Course
Ryan, Olivia; Grohs, Jacob R.; Dillard, David A.; Lord, James K.; Wallwey, Cassie; Chaback, Benjamin; Walz, Anita R. (ASEE Conferences, 2025-06-23)
This full paper examines how students interact with a new open-source mechanics textbook to assess its effectiveness. Foundational middle-year engineering courses, like Mechanics of Materials, usually occur in undergraduate engineering students' second and third years after completing the required general coursework (e.g., math, physics, and chemistry). These courses are often characterized by large enrollments, primarily lecture-based formats, and a significant amount of required content. In these types of classes, it is a common practice to require students to buy a homework access code and a textbook to complete the assigned online homework. This requirement places a financial burden on students because of the high cost associated with online access codes and textbooks. Furthermore, engineering students do not spend much time interacting with the textbook and tend to interact with content that helps them complete their homework assignments. Therefore, improving the quality and access to textbooks may be crucial to enhancing student engagement and learning in these foundational courses. This study examines how students utilize and perceive a free, open-access online textbook during its initial implementation in a middle-year engineering course. It also compares this usage with course materials from similar courses that use traditional, cost-based materials. To understand student opinions, we administered pre-and post-surveys, as well as focus groups, in classes that piloted the textbook. We found that students valued the open-access textbook utilized in the course due to its affordability, conciseness, and helpful visual representations. In addition, they appreciated that the book was free. This work can help improve large middle-year engineering classes with respect to the financial strain on students and effective course materials. Findings from this study contribute to ongoing discussions about the role of open educational resources (OER) in alleviating financial strain, improving student engagement, and enhancing learning experiences in engineering education.
SoundBreak: Studying vulnerabilities exposed by Audio Adversarial Attacks on Trimodal Models
Hussain, Aafiya Shamshad (Virginia Tech, 2026-07-13)
Foundation models that jointly process audio, visual, and textual inputs have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of reasoning and generation tasks. Despite these advances, the robustness of such systems against adversarial manipulation remains insufficiently explored. This thesis presents SoundBreak, a comprehensive study of untargeted adversarial attacks that perturb only the audio modality in trimodal audio-video-language models. We introduce six base attack objectives and a combined objective that target different components of the multimodal pipeline, including audio encoder representations, cross-modal attention distributions, internal hidden-state dynamics, and output token likelihoods.
Extensive experiments conducted across four state-of-the-art multimodal models and multiple benchmark datasets show that audio-only perturbations are sufficient to induce substantial performance degradation, achieving attack success rates of up to 96%. The combined objective achieves the highest attack success rate, while the encoder-space objective provides the clearest high-effectiveness, low-distortion trade-off, reaching 89.12% ASR with LPIPS 0.08 and SI-SNR -1.77 dB. The lowest-distortion objectives achieve LPIPS 0.06 and SI-SNR around 0 dB, but with lower ASR.
Our analysis further reveals that prolonged optimization contributes more significantly to attack effectiveness than increased dataset scale, while transferability across models and audio encoders remains limited. Additionally, automatic speech recognition systems such as Whisper are found to respond primarily to overall distortion magnitude, reaching attack success rates exceeding 97% under high-distortion objectives. Collectively, these findings expose a previously underexplored single-modality vulnerability in multimodal systems and highlight the need for robust defense mechanisms based on cross-modal consistency and agreement verification.
The Hidden Role of Followership in Poverty Reduction
Kaufman, Eric K. (2026-07-09)
Efforts to reduce poverty are typically framed as leadership challenges—calling for better strategies, stronger leaders, and more effective organizations. This lightning talk challenges that assumption by positioning poverty reduction as fundamentally dependent on followership. Drawing on recent research on social service organizations (Poudel & Kaufman, 2025; Varela, 2013), this presentation integrates insights from U.S. poverty measurement (e.g., Dalaker, 2022), global frameworks such as the Multidimensional Poverty Index (United Nations Development Programme, 2025), and practitioner perspectives on frontline work (Kaufman, 2025).
Poverty is not a singular condition but a multidimensional and context-dependent phenomenon, shaped by how it is defined and measured. These choices influence which populations are seen, which interventions are prioritized, and how success is evaluated. At the same time, poverty alleviation efforts operate within complex systems involving networks of organizations, stakeholders, and communities, where coordination, shared purpose, and distributed action are essential.
Within these systems, followership plays a critical yet often unacknowledged role (Matshoba-Ramuedzisi, et al., 2022). Frontline practitioners, partner organizations, and community members enact forms of followership that influence implementation, accountability, and ultimately outcomes (Fabiano, 2024). Building on prior work identifying “hard truths” about poverty reduction, this talk argues that overlooking followership limits both theory and practice.
By reframing poverty reduction through a followership lens, this session contributes to emerging conversations on leadership–followership systems and offers practical implications for advancing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 1: No Poverty.