Dissertation Defense Announcements

Although women and racial minority entrepreneurs make considerable contributions to society by creating their ventures, they often face additional barriers and limitations that explain the differential rate of new venture creation between men and women, White and racial minorities. Therefore, it is crucial to uncover mechanisms to help support women and racial minorities in the venture creation process. One such mechanism is supportive entrepreneurial figures such as entrepreneurial role models, mentors, and founders, all of which can play an essential role in the decision to become an entrepreneur. Despite understanding the positive influence that these supportive entrepreneurial figures can have on entrepreneurial behavior and outcomes, research has yet to examine how these relationships are shaped by the gender and race of the supportive entrepreneurial figure in the process of new venture creation. I test hypotheses with a sample of 417 entrepreneurs across two-time points. Results are intricate and complex, illustrating how in some cases, the positive influence of the entrepreneurial role model, mentor, or founder is dependent on the gender or race of that individual. My findings contribute to how supportive entrepreneurial figures shape new venture creation for women and racial minority entrepreneurs.

The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a belt of convective systems around the equator with showers and thunderstorms, is an important feature not only to the tropical societies whose water budget depends on it, but also to the atmospheric science field to understand how will the Earth respond to a warming climate. Former studies found that annual and zonal mean ITCZ position is related to interhemispheric atmospheric heat transport (AHTtotal). The radiative imbalance at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) transported across the equator to the cooler hemisphere explains the ITCZ position and its shift. Using idealized model simulations with a ``slab'' ocean, researchers found that an increase in the interhemispheric TOA radiation contrast causes an increase in cross-equatorial energy flux by the Hadley circulation and a shift of the ITCZ towards the warmer hemisphere. The theory that relates AHTtotal and ITCZ position is called energetic theory.

In this dissertation, we analyze Tropical rain belts with an Annual cycle and a Continent-Model Intercomparison Project (TRACMIP) model simulations to test the energetic theory. TRACMIP is a project of idealized models that fill the gap between Couple Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) idealized aquaplanet projects and fully-coupled projects. TRACMIP models are thermodynamically coupled to a slab ocean. TRACMIP has idealized tropical continent setups with both present-day and quadruple CO2 (4xCO2) concentration experiments, which can help us understand ITCZ shift and potential precipitation changes over land under a warming scenario. Our findings suggested that TRACMIP simulations do not support energetic theory's expectations under a warming climate.

All of our models simulated a northward shift of ITCZ and mass transport under a warming scenario. Our models disagreed on the changes of the energy transported by Hadley cells and the total energy transported by the atmosphere. In general, the link between mass transport changes and energy transported by the Hadley cells changes broke down the most during Northern Hemisphere tropical wet season. The link between changes of the energy transported by the Hadley cells and total energy transported by the atmosphere broke down the most during Northern Hemisphere tropical dry season. Breakdown of one or both of these links caused the overall link between ITCZ shifts and total energy transport changes to break down.

We encourage more studies to be done on energetic theory and climate change. We look forward to combining energetic theory with monsoon theories to develop a self-contained tropical climate model.

Motivated by the government's clean energy targets, the penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) is increasing. These DERs interconnections bring the added generation and storage capacity at the distribution level. Also, with the increasing implementation of smart inverters and Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS), the flexibility of the DERs can be leveraged to solve the distribution grid issues like over abnormal voltages, intermittencies, and thermal overloads. The proposed work focuses on the development of a robust distributed control architecture to control and optimally manage the load and PV variations using energy storage by creating the virtual clusters of the distribution grid.

The proposed approach adopts a distributed control approach by partitioning the grid into manageable clusters through an improved spectral clustering-based approach. The cluster of the distribution grid represents a good balance of local load and DER generation. An approach for reactive power to voltage sensitivity is also proposed for voltage regulation purposes at the cluster level based on the grid measurements. The clusters configurations adapt to accommodate the varying grid topology or changing load and DER generation. For the distribution grids receiving the set-points at the substation level for management of transmission power flow, an Alternating Direction Methods of Multipliers (ADMM) based sharing optimization is proposed to share the area set-points among the clusters based on the state of charge of each cluster. The controllable assets of each cluster (BESS) are managed through model predictive control. The improvement in the grid resiliency is demonstrated through the implementation of the complete framework to support the loads on the healthy part of the grid without interruptions during the contingency/outage scenarios on the distribution grid.

Considering the progressive growth of healthcare expenses in the national economy, many of those impacts are directly seen in the cost to our publicly and privately funded healthcare insurance programs. This research will utilize a version of the Behavioral Healthcare Utilization Model (BHUM) to conduct a comparative analysis of medical insurance payers and discharge dispositions. It will look at all payer types of healthcare funding in comparison to discharge disposition outcomes concerning acute care hospital admissions for patients that are age 45 to 75 and when diagnosed with Medical Severity Diagnosis Related Code 207, Respiratory Failure with Mechanical Ventilation Greater Than Ninety-Six Hours. This study will evaluate the lengths of stay, payer type, total charges of an acute care hospitalization as well as the discharge dispositions of those cases with the moderating effects of age, gender, and race on those relationships. The analysis will utilize the MS-DRG 207 as a control variable so that discharge disposition is moderated by the predisposing patient characteristics utilized by health systems and insurance payers to monitor per patient profit or loss variances. This research hopes to provide perspective on both the financial and quality of care aspects of a healthcare payer's influence on the healthcare system and how this impact may outweigh sociocultural and sociodemographic variables. Research objectives will benefit health system executives, healthcare insurance payer systems, and legislative planning committees. It will show how those differences in care management could affect long-term healthcare costs associated with care through hospital lengths of stay and payer influences on this utilization services.