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
Violence Prevention Programming in Secondary Public Schools in Virginia
Hundley, Sharon Elaine (Virginia Tech, 2026-02-02)
Across the United States violent behavior among youth, particularly adolescents, ages 10 to 19, is occurring at alarmingly high rates. Current literature and statistical data both concur that homicide is the leading cause of death for this age group. This phenomenon is not the result of a single factor or event, nor is it particular to any one subgroup or geographical location. It is the result of a multitude of socioecological factors that affect individuals and their behaviors. Schools provide an ideal venue for addressing these factors through preventative measures and interventions because of their ongoing relationship with adolescents. This cross-sectional interpretive collective case study answered three research questions through interviews with school and community leaders operating in urban areas within the state of Virginia by investigating how urban public secondary schools design and implement youth violence prevention programming, with a focus on how schools are collaborating with community organizations and local government. Data was collected through stakeholder interviews, analytical memos, local crime statistics, and research of current programming. All supplemental data was collected from publicly available resources.
The Promotion of Sustainable Agricultural Practices
Dalton, Arthur; Demchak, Meredyth; Jenkins, Daisy; Pulluri, Sanvi; Serwaa, Elizabeth (Virginia Governor's School for Agriculture, 2025-07-20)
Minimizing the ecological footprint created by agriculture is crucial, as it enables future generations to thrive in an environment that sustains a food supply, both in quality and quantity. Current agricultural practices are polluting the environment through the use of fertilizers and greenhouse gas emissions, significantly contributing to climate change and biodiversity loss. Both issues contribute to a large ecological footprint, which can be defined as the amount of materials required to support an individual’s lifestyle. However, agricultural practices are advancing, aiming to decrease our ecological footprint and mitigate environmental impacts. Modern, sustainable agricultural practices have a positive impact on the environment by reducing pollution in the air, water, and soil. The goal of this review is to analyze strategies for promoting sustainable agriculture practices that minimize the ecological footprint. Technological innovations promote sustainable agriculture by providing methods to combat the globe's growing ecological footprint. Education about sustainable agriculture is crucial for ensuring food security for future generations, aligning with the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of achieving Zero Hunger. Likewise, when education promotes experimental learning, it enables individuals to learn more about the impact of humans on the environment. Without food security, consumers would likely face struggles, including health concerns and higher prices. Policy makers draft laws to ensure the SDG of Responsible Consumption and Production of food for years to come. Economic incentives further encourage the implementation of said laws. The UN’s SDGs of Climate Action, Zero Hunger, and Responsible Consumption and Production are common themes found in the literature. Throughout this review, researchers gained a deeper understanding of the numerous factors that influence agricultural sustainability.
Fairness in machine learning-based hand load estimation: A case study on load carriage tasks
Rahman, Arafat; Lim, Sol; Chung, Seokhyun (Elsevier, 2026-01)
Predicting external hand load from sensor data is essential for ergonomic exposure assessments, as obtaining this information typically requires direct observation or supplementary data. While machine learning can estimate hand load from posture or force data, we found systematic bias tied to biological sex, with predictive disparities worsening in imbalanced training datasets. To address this, we developed a fair predictive model using a Variational Autoencoder with feature disentanglement, which separates sex-agnostic from sex-specific motion features. This enables predictions based only on sex-agnostic patterns. Our proposed algorithm outperformed conventional machine learning models, including k-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest, achieving a mean absolute error of 3.42 and improving fairness metrics like statistical parity and positive and negative residual differences, even when trained on imbalanced sex datasets. These results underscore the importance of fairness-aware algorithms in avoiding health and safety disadvantages for specific worker groups in the workplace.
Congressional Oversight Overlooked or Just Over? The House Appropriations Committee Surveys & Investigations Staff and the Arc of Congressional Competence
Dull, Matthew M. (Wiley, 2026)
This article follows the arc of congressional competence through the development and decline of the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) Surveys & Investigations (S&I) staff, an enduring oversight unit whose investigations were unobserved by design. S&I was quietly reorganized out of existence in December 2024. Why? Using committee reports, archival documents, and interviews this article shows how Chairman Clarence Cannon's 1943 design for S&I shaped its distinctive nonpartisan, under-the-radar oversight; filling a once-powerful niche made untenable in recent decades by partisan conflict. Time-series analysis of S&I study titles from 1975 to 2024 shows that the interplay of subcommittee chair-ranking disagreement and divided government constrained bipartisan S&I oversight. The conclusion situates S&I's history in research on congressional oversight, grounding abstract models, tracing institutional change, and revealing unexpected consequences.
Mathematical modeling of malaria vaccination with seasonality and immune feedback
Qu, Zhuolin; Patterson, Denis; Zhao, Lihong; Ponce, Joan; Edholm, Christina J.; Prosper-Feldmen, Olivia F.; Childs, Lauren M. (Public Library of Science, 2025-05)
Malaria is one of the deadliest infectious diseases globally, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives each year. The disease presents substantial heterogeneity among the population, with approximately two-thirds of fatalities occurring in children under five years old. Immunity to malaria develops through repeated exposure and plays a crucial role in disease dynamics. Seasonal environmental fluctuations, such as changes in temperature and rainfall, lead to temporal heterogeneity and further complicate transmission dynamics and the utility of intervention strategies. We employ an age-structured partial differential equation model to characterize seasonal malaria transmission and assess vaccination strategies that vary by timing and duration. Our model integrates vector-host epidemiological dynamics across different age groups and nonlinear feedback between transmission and immunity. We calibrate the model to year-round and seasonal malaria settings and conduct extensive sensitivity analyses for both scenarios to systematically assess which assumptions lead to the most uncertainty. We use time-varying sensitivity indices to identify critical disease parameters during low and high transmission seasons. We further investigate the impact of vaccination and its implementation in the seasonal malaria settings. When implementing a three-dose primary vaccination series, seasonally targeted campaigns can prevent significantly more cases per vaccination than constant year-long programs in regions with strong seasonal variation in transmission. In such scenarios, the optimal vaccination interval aligns with the peak in infected mosquito abundance and precedes the peak in malaria transmission. In contrast, seasonal booster programs may provide limited advantages over year-long vaccination. Additionally, while increasing annual vaccination counts can reduce overall disease incidence, it yields marginal improvements in cases prevented per vaccination.