ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst

We are now able to accept submissions directly in ScholarWorks. For submissions that are not doctoral dissertations or masters theses, please log in with your NetID, click the + (plus) in to the top left corner, and select the Submit Research option.

Graduate students: Directions for submissions can be found in this guide. Please email scholarworks@library.umass.edu if you have any questions.

UMass users: If a dissertation or thesis is campus only, you may download it directly from ScholarWorks after logging in with your NetID.

Please see our ScholarWorks guide for more information about submitting your work to ScholarWorks.

Featured Items

Data Do's and Don'ts: A Primer on Indigenous Data Sovereignty

Anderson, Jane; Smith, Vanessa

2026

A Mighty Event: Eight Lessons Learned by Bringing People Together Through Music to Support Our Mission

White, Caroline J.; Fill, Kim D.

On the evening of November 7, 2025, the University Libraries at the University of Massachusetts Amherst held its annual Fall Reception, attended by an audience of 300. “An Evening with Folk New England: A Tribute to Eric von Schmidt” represented both a return to the longstanding tradition of an event held to showcase the Libraries while thanking our donors for all they make possible and an exceptionally successful and memorable version of that event. Celebrating the partnership of Folk New England and the Libraries' Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, the event generated so much interest that it was ultimately moved to a larger venue, and the move impacted all aspects of the event. Although the planning team cannot count on replicating the event or its impact in the near future, the team took away many lessons from the planning and pivoting, as well as from the event itself.

2026-03-19

Regional Invasive Species & Climate Change Research to Practice Paper: Rock you like a hurricane: The perfect storm for an invasion

Putnam, Aly B.; Al-Shayeb, Sofia M. A.; Buonaiuto, Daniel M.; Daniel, Wesley; Geiger, Megan Lynn; Lieurance, Deah; Parsons, Elliott W.; Pfingsten, Ian; Williams-Soriano, John Paul; Evans, Annette E.

Hurricanes (also called typhoons or cyclones) and other rare weather occurrences are increasing in intensity and frequency with global climate change. These extreme weather events can drastically alter ecosystems in ways that directly or indirectly facilitate the introduction, establishment, spread, and impacts of invasive species. For example, high winds or flood waters during hurricanes can disperse invasives and displace native species. Impacts could also occur after the main storm event; invasive species can invade during relief efforts or establish more easily in disturbed habitats [1,2]. Various possible mechanisms link hurricanes and invasive species (Figure 1). To identify shared challenges as well as region-specific dynamics and possible impacts, we highlight case studies from the Southeast, Pacific Islands, Caribbean, and Northeast regions of the United States (Table 1). By synthesizing examples across diverse ecological and management contexts, this summary can help practitioners anticipate common mechanisms of spread and consider strategies that could be implemented before and after hurricane events to manage vulnerable species, habitats, and ecosystems.

2026

Recent Submissions

Open Access
Developing Faculty Readiness to Teach Online: An Examination of the Online Teaching and Design Fellowship in Indonesian Higher Education
(2026-02) Hikmatullah, Nanak
Indonesia’s higher education system faces a pressing challenge: despite its demographic advantage, the country continues to struggle with low participation in tertiary education. Online learning offers a promising pathway to address these challenges by expanding access across geographic and socioeconomic boundaries. However, a critical barrier to meaningful implementation lies in faculty readiness to teach online. This study investigated how Indonesian faculty members developed online teaching readiness through participation in the Online Teaching and Design Fellowship (OTDF), a structured faculty development program grounded in the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework and the Humanizing Online Learning (HOL) model. Thirty faculty members completed a five-week program integrating conceptual learning, reflective dialogue, and design practice. Employing a convergent mixed-methods design, the study gathered quantitative data (pre- and post-training readiness surveys) and qualitative data (reflective journals, open-ended surveys, and teaching artifacts). Data were analyzed through a three-phase, complexity-informed evaluation model, before, during, and after the program, to capture the dynamic progression of faculty readiness. Findings revealed that readiness to teach online is not a static state achieved at the end of training, but an ongoing, developmental process shaped by the interaction among beliefs (teaching philosophy), intentions (learning goals), perceived ability (confidence), and enactments (planned and realized practices). It is continually negotiated as participants respond to contextual conditions such as workload, competing commitments, and technical proficiency, factors that influenced their readiness trajectories and course design outcomes. Regarding teaching philosophy, participants with multifaceted views tended to refine or expand their beliefs, while those with singular views often shifted toward more complex understandings. In terms of learning goals, pedagogical skills were generally attainable within the program’s timeframe, whereas technical skills required longer-term development. Statistical analyses indicated significant gains in perceived ability across all skill areas; however, variations in participants’ individual trajectories revealed multiple pathways to increased confidence. Although participants’ action plans reflected strong intentions to enhance online teaching, actual enactments varied in both completion and quality, highlighting a gap between planning and implementation. From the lens of the CoI and HOL frameworks, competencies related to Emotional Presence and Teaching Presence showed the greatest improvement, while technical aspects of Teaching Presence advanced more modestly. Cultural Presence emerged in participants’ philosophies and plans but was rarely evident in their enacted practices. Overall, the study concludes that faculty readiness to teach online encompasses not only shifts in philosophy and the achievement of learning goals but also the translation of these shifts into observable practice. When contextual constraints arise, readiness manifests as a negotiated and uneven process, often characterized by partial and varied enactments.
Open Access
What Modality Can Mean: An experiment-based theory of overt causatives as circumstantial modals
(2026-02) Hill, Angelica
This dissertation investigates the relationship between the meaning of overt causatives, such as English's 'make' and 'force' (e.g., 'Jane made George go to the store'), and the meaning of circumstantial modal auxiliaries such as 'have to' and 'need to'. (e.g., 'George had to go to the store') both from a formal semantic and psycholinguistic perspective. By further developing and then extending an anchor semantics for modality, I argue for a unified semantics of causatives and modals where overt causatives are analyzed as circumstantial modals. I show that this proposal not only accounts for the data that highlight the similarities and distinctions between overt causatives and circumstantial modals, but also has the added benefit of making predictions about the meaning of other causative constructions given the tight-knit relation the syntax-semantics interface has according to anchor semantics. My proposal is further supported by novel priming results which show that overt causatives and circumstantial modal auxiliaries are processed similarly, suggesting that the two constructions may access similar abstract modal representations during language processing.
Open Access
Demographics, operational resources, and grants: Exploring urban forest management program outcomes at the municipal level in New York State
(2026-02) Hargrave, J. Rebecca
Urban forests are managed for the collective good of the residents. Municipalities are the primary managers of a community’s urban forest, and while individual trees may provide similar benefits and values from one community to the next, municipal capacity and resources vary greatly. This variation leads to differences in the types and scale of urban forest management services offered, which potentially affects the quality and quantity of that urban forest’s benefits. An understanding of how and why municipal urban forest management programs differ, as well as the needs and barriers they face, is beneficial to governmental and not-for-profit organizations that aim to support urban forest management and amplify the benefits of trees. First, a systematic review of national, regional, state, and sub-state municipal urban forest management programs was performed to establish a baseline understanding of themes and trends pertaining to urban forest management characteristics, services, needs, barriers, and intentions. Second, a formal survey was disseminated to municipalities in New York State to ascertain the status of the state’s municipal urban forest management program, to identify differences among municipalities based on population size, affluence, and proximity to metropolitan areas, and to explore opportunities for program support. Third, a formal survey was conducted and combined with community characteristics data to formally explore the local characteristics and resources of successful and unsuccessful municipal applicants, as well as those that did not apply, to New York State’s urban and community forestry grant program. Commonalities and trends among these three groups were identified to enhance our understanding of which communities are more likely to be awarded public urban forest management funds and why. All three chapters aim to enhance the knowledge of urban forest management support agencies and ultimately improve the condition and services of urban forest management programs across New York State, and to inform the global urban forestry sector more broadly.
Open Access
Data-driven strategies for sustainable transit and safer roads
(2025-02) Han, Zhuo
Transportation systems face growing pressures to improve sustainability, efficiency, and safety. Urban rail transit (URT) systems provide essential mobility but consume substantial amounts of energy, while roadway crashes remain a major public health crisis largely driven by human behavior. This dissertation addresses these challenges through two complementary research streams that apply advanced data-driven methods to support sustainable and safe transportation planning. The first research develops a machine learning framework to forecast daily energy use in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) system. By combining planning metrics with forecasts of ridership and temperature, the XGBoost model achieved accurate multi-week predictions. Scenario analyses show temperature as the primary external driver of energy demand, with service volume (trips and distance) the most effective operational lever. The second research introduces a novel typology of fatal crash behaviors using narrative data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Natural language processing and clustering identified fifteen behavior types, revealing urban–rural contrasts and providing new insights for targeted safety interventions. Overall, this dissertation contributes methodologically by integrating predictive modeling with structured and unstructured data, empirically by revealing key drivers of URT energy use and fatal driver behaviors, and practically by offering decision-support tools for transit agencies and safety policymakers.
Open Access
Robust Generative Flows via Wasserstein Proximal Regularizations Based on Gradient Flows and Mean Field Games
(2026-02) GU, HYEMIN
Generative flows model the transformation of a source distribution into a target distribution, given finite samples, through continuous-time dynamics, offering a natural connection to transport partial differential equations (PDEs). In the sense of numerical PDE solving, they can be viewed as simulating particle evolution rather than discretizing space, thereby providing tractability for solving high-dimensional PDEs. Moreover, when the transport-type PDE is built under physical or biological knowledge, generative flows can serve as scientific surrogates that simulate system behavior. In this dissertation, generative flows are formulated in two complementary ways. First, as Wasserstein gradient flows, which minimize a divergence over time. Second, as finite-horizon mean field games, which optimize velocity fields to match a target distribution at a terminal time. To address the instability of divergences for empirical distributions and the ambiguity of unconstrained velocity fields, Wasserstein proximal regularization is introduced—using a dual formulation for Wasserstein-1 and a dynamic formulation for Wasserstein-2—to promote smooth, stable, and well-posed flows. The contributions of this dissertation are: (i) the development of Wasserstein gradient flow–based generative algorithms that incorporate Wasserstein proximal regularization into their dynamics; (ii) the development of finite-horizon mean field game-based generative algorithms that incorporate Wasserstein proximal regularization into their dynamics; (iii) a theoretical establishment of the robustness of Wasserstein-1–proximal regularized f (KL) divergence under mild conditions for arbitrarily complex target distributions, demonstrated through comparative evaluation against its unregularized counterpart and other Wasserstein-p–proximal regularizable models; and (iv) an application to biomedical modeling that integrates our novel force-matching method, originally developed in molecular dynamics, to construct a generative surrogate for the evolution of cellular state distributions from static single-cell data.

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