Dissertation Defense Announcements

To impact survival rates by 30%, emergency department (ED) workers should follow the Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support (ACLS) guideline of relying on end-tidal carbon dioxide (ETCO2) monitoring to ensure cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is high-quality. In a large tertiary care hospital-based ED, ETCO2 monitoring was not consistently utilized, despite workers having ACLS training and access to ETCO2 monitoring devices. The purpose of this project was to determine if high-fidelity ACLS simulation and ETCO2 monitoring training affected ED staff’s resuscitation self-efficacy and ETCO2 device application during clinical resuscitations. Twenty-eight interprofessional ED healthcare workers participated in high-fidelity adult cardiac arrest simulation scenarios. Paired-samples t-test results showed a significant pre-post simulation survey total average resuscitation self-efficacy improvement from 3.99 to 4.52 (t= 6.83, p < .001). Ten ED adult cardiac arrest events prior to simulation and twenty events post simulation were retrospectively analyzed for device utilization. Two-tailed paired-samples t-test results showed a non-significant improvement in device utilization (t= -1.96, p= .081), however utilization more than doubled from 20% to 45%. Overall, results indicated high-fidelity simulation can have a significant improvement in resuscitative confidence of ED workers, which in future studies may translate to higher survival rates for adults in cardiac arrest.

The quality of inclusion for young children with disabilities in early childhood learning environments has long been attributed to the effectiveness of the teachers within such settings. As the service delivery system shifted toward more inclusive models, endeavors to improve preparation for inclusion have been marked by efforts to combine the fields of early childhood education and early childhood special education. While the initial development of such programs, commonly referred to as blended, came from the belief that the approach would promote inclusion, it remains unclear how well they actually prepare educators for inclusive practice. Additionally, high variability persists in both inclusive practice and blended preparation, impacting how teachers construct knowledge, a critical component of teacher identity development. This narrative inquiry explored the storied lives of six educators through the contextual theories of teacher identity development and blended preparation identity development. Findings illuminated participants’ professional identity has been constructed across time as they: a) gained new theoretical knowledge that informed their belief systems, b) were engaged in eye opening experiences that impacted personal and professional paradigm shifts, and c) as their perception of agency was enhanced by bidirectional social influences. Implications for research and professional practice are discussed.

The orbital angular momentum of light is a promising candidate as an information carrier in optical communication systems to enhance the capacity of data channels. However, the effects of atmospheric turbulence significantly degrade the quality of light beams, thereby imposing limitations on the range of reliable data transmission. To address this issue, researchers have been actively seeking methods to enhance the resilience of light against fluctuations of refractive index due to the atmospheric turbulence. It has long been recognized that partially coherent beams exhibit greater robustness in propagation through turbulence. Consequently, transitioning from full coherence to partial coherence has been suggested as a solution. Conversely, in OAM-based communications, reducing coherence results in broadening of the OAM spectrum, thus increasing cross-talk between adjacent channels. Therefore, utilizing partially coherent beams in free space communications entails both Benefits and drawbacks.
The main objective of this dissertation is to explore various classes of partially coherent beams through analytical approaches in order to identify a robust OAM spectrum in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. The results are presented in three different articles. The first article introduces a simplified version of the extended Huygens-Fresnel principle which is a widely used method of turbulence propagation. The discoveries outlined in the first article substantially alleviate the mathematical complexity associated with propagation in random media, thereby enabling analytical exploration of the propagation of partially coherent beams in random media.
The second article presents an optimization criterion associated with a specific class of partially coherent beams, substantially enhancing their resistance against turbulence. Finally, the third article thoroughly investigates the behavior of three categories of partially coherent beams in interaction with atmosphere, providing a detailed comparison of their respective resistance. The compilation of these three articles presents a comprehensive study of the impact of atmospheric fluctuations on the orbital angular momentum spectrum of partially coherent beams.

Many research studies have explored the impact of international experience on an organization's strategic decisions and overall performance. However, these studies tend only to examine the connection between a CEO's international experience, such as traveling abroad for work or study during their adult life, and their organization's Environmental, Social, and Governance Performance (ESGP). To expand on this, I examined other methods of gaining international experience, such as personal exposure from living overseas and indirect exposure from foreign-born parents and grandparents. Through the imprinting and upper-echelon theories, I identified CEOs born and raised overseas as "first-generation immigrant CEOs" and CEOs born and raised in the United States by at least one immigrant parent or grandparent as "second and third-generation immigrant CEOs." I then studied the relationship between first-generation immigrant CEOs, second and third-generation immigrant CEOs, and firm Environmental, Social, and Governance performance (ESGP) while also considering the moderating effect of firm size. To conduct this research, I obtained a list of companies from the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 index for FY 2022 (N=444) and data from CSRHub and COMPUSTAT. Although the findings did not support the direct and moderating relationships studied, they provide recommendations for improvement and future research directions.