Award-winning Theses and Dissertations
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Every year, the Virginia Tech Graduate School honors several outstanding theses and dissertations, and some theses and dissertations have won external awards. Browse these works here.
- 2016: "Virginia Tech Graduate School honors top scholars of the 2015-16 academic year"
- 2013: "Laura Gambrel, Justin Lemkul receive 2013 Outstanding Dissertation Award"
- 2012: "Robert Neal and Catherine Larochelle receive 2012 Outstanding Dissertation Awards from Graduate School"
- 2011: "Nikkhah wins best dissertation for identification of cell biomechanical signatures"
- 2011: "Graduate students receive William Preston Society Thesis awards"
- 2010: "Graduate School selects outstanding master's research from Class of 2010"
Recent Submissions
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Multi-scale Transmission Ecology: How Individual Host Characteristics, Host Population Density, and Community Structure Influence Transmission in a Multi-host Snail Symbiont System
(Virginia Tech, 2017-05-04)We live in an era of global change, where emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola, Zika, bird flu, and white nose syndrome are affecting humans, wildlife, and domesticated species at an increasing rate. To understand ... -
Sharing the Shuttle with America: NASA and Public Engagement after Apollo
(Virginia Tech, 2015-03-30)Historical accounts depict NASA's interactions with American citizens beyond government agencies and aerospace firms since the 1950s and 1960s as efforts to 'sell' its human space flight initiatives and to position external ... -
Identification and Characterization of Y Chromosome and M Locus Genes in Anopheles and Aedes Mosquitoes Using the Chromosome Quotient Method
(Virginia Tech, 2016-03-22)In mosquitoes, sex determination is initiated by a dominant male-determining factor located on the Y chromosome in Anopheles mosquitoes or in a small Y-like region called the M locus in Aedes mosquitoes. Before my research, ... -
Supporting Open Source Investigative Journalism with Crowdsourced Image Geolocation
(Virginia Tech, 2017-08-10)Journalists rely on image and video verification to support their investigations and often utilize open source tools to verify user generated content, but current practice requires experts be involved in every step of the ... -
"The Pattern is Movement": Images of Timelessness and Patterns of Response in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets
(Virginia Tech, 2017-06-30)T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets is full of beautiful and resounding imagery, yet the art of unfolding these images, discovering the movement and drama taking place in and between them, often remains elusive. In this thesis, I ... -
Optimal Resource Allocation Strategies to Protect Network-structured Systems
(Virginia Tech, 2013-09-17)Protection of critical national infrastructure has received significant attention in the past recent years. As a result, researchers have developed methods to preserve and maintain critical infrastructure systems and ... -
Weird Old Figures and a New Twist: Cultural Functions of Halloween at the Turn of the 20th Century
(Virginia Tech, 2017-06-09)Halloween arrived in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century with the surge in immigration from the British Isles — especially Ireland. However, the folk holiday did not gain widespread attention until the late ... -
Discovery of Novel Strains of Animal Hepatitis E Viruses in the United States: Antigenic and Genetic Characterization, Cross-Species Infection, and Public Health Implications
(Virginia Tech, 2015-03-17)Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is an important human pathogen, with pigs and likely other animal species serving as natural reservoirs. There are currently four recognized HEV genotypes that infect humans within the genus Hepevirus ... -
Molecular Modeling of the Amyloid β-Peptide: Understanding the Mechanism of Alzheimer's Disease and the Potential for Therapeutic Intervention
(Virginia Tech, 2012-03-07)Alzheimer's disease is the leading cause of senile dementia in the elderly, and as life expectancy increases across the globe, incidence of the disease is continually increasing. Current estimates place the number of cases ... -
Identification of Cell Biomechanical Signatures Using Three Dimensional Isotropic Microstructures
(Virginia Tech, 2010-12-03)Micro and nanofabrication technologies have been used extensively in many biomedical and biological applications. Integration of MEMS technology and biology (BioMEMS) enables precise control of the cellular microenvironments ... -
The Mindful Transition to Parenthood Program: Developing and Evaluating a Psychoeducational-Experiential Intervention for Couples Expecting Their First Child
(Virginia Tech, 2012-09-27)The transition from partnership to parenthood can be a time of excitement and rapid change for couples. After the birth of a first child, many couples also experience declines in relationship satisfaction leading to increased ... -
Hypolimnetic Oxygenation Mitigates the Effects of Nutrient Loading on Water Quality in a Eutrophic Reservoir
(Virginia Tech, 2015-09-03)Climate change is predicted to have many diverse effects on freshwater lakes and reservoirs by increasing both hypolimnetic hypoxia and runoff, which will increase nutrient concentrations and degrade water quality. Hypoxic ... -
Responses of Boom-Forming Phytoplankton Populations to Changes in Reservoir Chemistry and Physics
(Virginia Tech, 2016-09-15)Phytoplankton populations are integral to the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems, and phytoplankton are an excellent study system for exploring ecological questions. Reservoirs often exhibit high horizontal (inflow ... -
Development and testing of recombinant B. abortus RB51 vaccine strains carrying M. tuberculosis protective antigens
(Virginia Tech, 2015-06-23)Tuberculosis, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is one of the most prevalent infectious diseases inflicting humankind. The World Health Organization estimates that one third of the world's population, approximately 2.2 ... -
The Operationalization of Capacity Development: the Case of Urban Infrastructure Projects in India
(Virginia Tech, 2015-03-30)Since the 1950s, Capacity Development (CD) has been an important component of international development agendas. It established the widespread consensus that the capacity of individuals and organizations is critical to ... -
Dammed If You Don't: The Palmertown Tragedy of 1924 in Collective Memory
(Virginia Tech, 2016-06-24)On December 24, 1924, a wall of water and alkali muck engulfed Palmertown, a small community in Saltville, Virginia. Houses were swept away and by the time all of the bodies were pulled from the wreckage, the death toll ... -
Brazil Comes to the Future: Living Time and Space in the International Order of Competition
(Virginia Tech, 2016-06-20)The rise of Brazil as an economic power in the last decade has been celebrated by politicians and analysts as an opportunity for the country to take advantage of its visibility and bargaining power in order to effectively ... -
Biaxial Mechanical Behavior of Swine Pelvic Floor Ligaments: Experiments and Modeling
(Virginia Tech, 2014-06-08)Although mechanical alterations to pelvic floor ligaments, such as the cardinal and uterosacral ligaments, are one contributing factor to the development and progression of pelvic floor disorders, very little research has ... -
Tributes to the Past, Present, and Future: Confederate Memorialization in Virginia, 1914-1919
(Virginia Tech, 2015-06-02)Between 1914 and 1919, elite white people erected monuments across Virginia, permanently transforming the landscape of their communities with memorials to the Confederacy. Why did these Confederate memorialists continue ... -
Irreversible Electroporation Therapy for the Treatment of Spontaneous Tumors in Cancer Patients
(Virginia Tech, 2011-12-24)Irreversible electroporation is a minimally invasive technique for the non-thermal destruction of cells in a targeted volume of tissue, using brief electric pulses, (~100 µs long) delivered through electrodes placed into ...
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