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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Understanding Wikipedia Practices Through Hindi, Urdu, and English Takes on an Evolving Regional Conflict
(Virginia Tech, 2022-02-01)Wikipedia is the product of thousands of editors working collaboratively to provide free and up-to-date encyclopedic information to the project's users. This article asks to what degree Wikipedia articles in three languages ... -
Consequences of avian parental incubation behavior for within-clutch variance in incubation temperature and offspring behavioral phenotypes
(Virginia Tech, 2020-01-17)Parents can have large effects on their offspring by influencing the early developmental environment. In birds, a major way that parents can influence the early developmental environment is through egg incubation. Not only ... -
Save the Babies: Progressive Women and the Fight for Child Welfare in the United States, 1912-1929
(Virginia Tech, 2021-06-24)This project examines two organizations--the Better Babies Bureau and the Children's Bureau--created by Progessive women in the early twentieth century to combat high infant mortality rates, improve prenatal and postnatal ... -
Disaggregating Within-Person and Between-Person Effects in the Presence of Linear Time Trends in Time-Varying Predictors: Structural Equation Modeling Approach
(Virginia Tech, 2021-06-01)Educational researchers are often interested in phenomena that unfold over time within a person and at the same time, relationships between their characteristics that are stable over time. Since variables in a longitudinal ... -
Amplifying the Griot: Technology for Preserving, Retelling, and Supporting Underrepresented Stories
(Virginia Tech, 2021-05-24)As we develop intelligent systems to handle online interactions and digital stories, how do we address those stories that are unwritten and invisible? How do ensure that communities who value oral histories are not left ... -
Principal Leadership in Building a Culture of Disciplinary Literacy
(Virginia Tech, 2021-01-21)This study investigated principal leadership in building a culture of disciplinary literacy. Previous studies investigated and validated the uniqueness of disciplinary literacy (Moje, 2015; Shanahan and Shanahan, 2008; ... -
Tuning the Morphology and Electronic Properties of Single-Crystal LiNi0.5Mn1.5O4-δ
(Virginia Tech, 2020-10-27)The commercialization of lithium-ion batteries has played a pivotal role in the development of consumer electronics and electric vehicles. In recent years, much research has focused on the development and modification of ... -
Distributed Machine Learning for Autonomous and Secure Cyber-physical Systems
(Virginia Tech, 2020-07-31)Autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPSs) such as autonomous connected vehicles (ACVs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), critical infrastructure (CI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) will be essential to the functioning ... -
Unforgetting the Dakota 38: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resurgence, and the Competing Narratives of the U.S.-Dakota War, 1862-2012
(Virginia Tech, 2020-06-04)"Unforgetting the Dakota 38" projects a nuanced light onto the history and memory of the mass hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men on December 26, 1862 following the U.S.-Dakota War in Southcentral Minnesota. This thesis ... -
Number Sequences as Explanatory Models for Middle-Grades Students' Algebraic Reasoning
(Virginia Tech, 2019-04-23)Early algebraic reasoning can be viewed as developing a bridge between arithmetic and algebra. Accordingly, this research examines how middle-grades students' arithmetic reasoning, classified by their number sequences, can ... -
Federal and Local Acceptance of Refugees: The Dual Structures Promoting Community Inclusion
(Virginia Tech, 2019-07-11)This thesis asks the question: what roles do local governments and nongovernmental organizations play in resettling refugees in U.S. cities? To answer this question, I conducted a case study of the refugee resettlement ... -
Interactive Interfaces for Capturing and Annotating Videos of Human Movement
(Virginia Tech, 2019-07-11)In this thesis, I describe the iterative service design process I used in identifying and understanding the needs of diverse stakeholders, the development of technologies to support their mutually beneficial needs, and the ... -
Assessment of the Jones Act Waiver Process on Freight Transportation Networks Experiencing Disruption
(Virginia Tech, 2017-10-27)In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused massive disruption and destruction to the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The intensity of the storm forced the Port of New York and New Jersey to close, forcing cargo ... -
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 ... -
The Formation of Cultural Capital using Symbolic Military Meanings of Objects and Self in an Adult Agricultural Education Program serving Military Veterans
(Virginia Tech, 2018-10-04)The purpose of this qualitative ethnographic case study was to investigate how an adult agricultural educational program generates new learning spaces for military veterans. Utilizing Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural ... -
Wireless Communications and Networking with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Fundamentals, Deployment, and Optimization
(Virginia Tech, 2018-07-10)The use of aerial platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), popularly known as drones, has emerged as a promising solution for providing reliable and cost-effective wireless communications. In particular, UAVs can ... -
Understanding PilB, The Type IV Pilus (T4P) Assembly ATPase
(Virginia Tech, 2018-06-29)The type IV pilus (T4P) is a dynamic long thin fiber found on the surface of many bacterial groups. T4P is a versatile nanomachine; it plays many important roles such as for surface attachment, virulence factor, and surface ... -
Shaping the City from Below: Urban Planning and Citizens' Battle for Control in Roanoke, Virginia, 1907-1928
(Virginia Tech, 2018-05-31)In 2017, urban planners in Roanoke, Virginia, created a plan to construct a new public space that will honor the city's first professional city planner, John Nolen. Nolen is now considered a founder of the urban planning ... -
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, ...