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 40 freely available and openly licensed textbooks are among our most downloaded items.
Communities in VTechWorks
Select a community to browse its collections.
Recent Submissions
Enhancing Perception Systems using V2V Sensor Fusion
Gwash, Ansh Sundeep (Virginia Tech, 2025-07-17)
With the surge in popularity of autonomous vehicles that depend on complex perception systems to make safety critical judgments, it is necessary to test and improve them. One of the ways this can be done is through vehicle-to-vehicle communication. This concept has been around for decades but was first standardized in 2010. Since then, there have been many hurdles in the path to applying this technology. Security, reliability, latency, and cost are the main reasons for the slow growth in this space. Another main problem is the lack of compelling applications that make overcoming these limitations worthwhile for industry. Autonomous Vehicles rely on a number of sensor types, with the most common ones being Cameras, Radars, and LiDAR. The detections from these three sensors are fused into a track list that can be used to plan and control the vehicles movements. This thesis proposes a system to introduce data from Vehicle-to-Vehicle messages into this fused track list. This extra information can be beneficial in cases when the onboard sensors are occluded or have low visibility. City and highway driving scenarios and Software-in-the-Loop testing is used to evaluate the proposed fused track list.
A Closer Look at the End of Leadership : A Digital Followership Collection for Leadership Education
Kaufman, Eric K.; Oyedare, Israel; Haugen, Inga (2025-07-15)
Undoubtedly, the field of leadership has experienced a significant shift in recent years. As followership studies and research gain increasing attention, there is a growing call to prepare for its continued development. Thus, Virginia Tech, through a mini-grant and two years of research, is building a digital followership collection with the goal of supporting and advancing the field. This session will introduce participants to the platform, share its potential benefits across contexts, and demonstrate how artificial intelligence interfaces with the digital followership collection.
Building Leadership Capacity: Digital Badges as a Tool for Workforce Development
Kaufman, Eric K.; Coartney, Jama S.; Westfall-Rudd, Donna M.; Seibel, Megan M.; Friedel, Curtis R.; Carmichael, Celeste; White, Amy; Oyedare, Israel (2025-07-13)
Leadership education is evolving to meet the demands of an increasingly complex workforce. Digital badging presents an innovative approach to recognizing and assessing leadership competencies, providing students with verifiable credentials that demonstrate their readiness for professional roles. The Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL) project has designed a digital badging system to enhance students’ employability skills in alignment with the competencies identified by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). These badges focus on key areas such as communication, decision-making, professionalism, and leadership. The AWT4CL badge structure integrates interactive learning activities with reflective assessments, equipping students with durable skills essential for career success. This poster will highlight the digital badge framework, share insights from pilot implementations with community college faculty, and discuss strategies for increasing industry recognition of these credentials. By engaging educators, administrators, and industry partners, this initiative aims to bridge the skills gap and support workforce readiness in agricultural careers.
Collaborative Leadership for Poverty Reduction: How Does It Work?
Poudel, Sonika; Kaufman, Eric K. (2025-07-15)
Despite national efforts to address poverty, it remains a significant challenge in the United States. This study focuses on leadership strategies employed by civic organizations in a state in the southeastern United States to address poverty. Using a qualitative approach, the research explores how leadership influences poverty reduction. It studies the systemic barriers, organizational dynamics, and leadership approaches that can be most effective in addressing poverty within a state in the southeastern United States. Interviews with 14 representatives from various civic organizations reveal three key themes: poverty as a systemic challenge, participatory leadership, and humble leadership as a way forward. Findings suggest that effective poverty reduction requires collaborative efforts, active listening, selflessness, empathy, and community-driven leadership. These insights contribute to understanding how leadership can be leveraged to address complex social issues of poverty and provide a framework for applying these strategies in similar contexts.
Utility of Ion Mobility – Mass Spectrometry in Peptidoglycan Structural Determination
Harris, David Orion (Virginia Tech, 2025-06-17)
The peptidoglycan (PG) found within bacterial cell walls is a complex megastructure with components that are difficult to identify without significant time commitment. Potential isomers, modifications, and cross-linking patterns within whole cell digests lead to complex samples that typically require manual analysis. The introduction of a method for streamlining the identification of peptidoglycan components (muropeptides) is needed to develop a better structure identification workflow. This work explores trapped ion mobility – mass spectrometry as a tool to provide muropeptide structural information through analysis of ion mobilities and collision cross section (CCS). PG of two filamentous cyanobacteria, Nostoc commune and Limnospira platensis, were chosen for this work as they have not been characterized before now despite commonplace use as sources of nutrition. The analyses revealed that muropeptides can be organized into distinct regions of similar cross-linking structure by comparing their CCS and m/z values. Both species possess typical Gram-negative structures in-line with their classifications as Gram-negative species. The PG of L. platensis was found to contain agmatine as a modification to the D-iso-glutamic acid residue within the peptide stem. This modification was found to exist within most (~90 %) of its identified muropeptides, indicating that agmatine may play an important role in L. platensis growth and development.