ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst

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

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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
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.
Open Access
Practical Encrypted Databases with Oblivious and Expressive Query Processing
(2026-02) Feng, Weiqi
Cloud computing and rapid data growth have driven many organizations to outsource large datasets to cloud databases in order to reduce management costs. However, these datasets often contain sensitive information, necessitating encryption to ensure compliance and security. Encrypted databases (EDBs) have thus emerged as a critical technology, enabling secure and efficient query processing over encrypted data. Despite substantial progress, existing EDB systems face two key challenges. First, practicality: stronger security often reduces performance; for example, oblivious query processing suffers from significant bottlenecks that hinder its real-world applicability. Second, functionality: many EDBs support only basic queries and cannot handle more expressive yet common operations such as conjunctive queries or approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. This dissertation addresses these challenges through the following contributions: Obliviousness: First, we propose a new construction for recursive oblivious RAM that reduces the number of interaction rounds between parties compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) solutions and guarantees a de-amortized cost. Second, we introduce a novel framework that combines an oblivious hash table with oblivious search trees to create a more efficient oblivious map for key-value stores, achieving both improved asymptotic complexity and greater practical efficiency. We also develop an optimization for oblivious search trees that reduces the overhead of hiding query types. Third, we develop a technique for preserving pointer relationships during oblivious accesses and use it to build a complete system for oblivious graph query processing. All of these constructions, together with existing SOTA methods, are implemented and released as a well-tested, thoroughly documented open-source library. Query expressiveness: We design new functional encryption schemes that support conjunctive queries, including single- and multi-value filters, column-sum checks, range queries, and equi-join queries. Our schemes enable secure composition across multiple functionalities and ensure that, if any condition fails, the server learns nothing beyond the overall non-match. We further show that access-controlled inner-product function-revealing encryption (ACIPFRE) enables a secure outsourced ANN system. We also present a more efficient function-hiding inner-product functional encryption (FHIPFE) scheme that improves on prior state of the art and derive an ACIPFRE from it. Collectively, these contributions advance EDBs by improving the efficiency of oblivious access mechanisms and expanding the range of supported secure queries.
Open Access
Examining host fishes, habitats, and range-wide status of the Yellow Lampmussel (Lampsilis cariosa)
(2026-02) Farrington, Stefanie
The freshwater mussel Yellow Lampmussel (Lampsilis cariosa) is declining throughout its range along the Atlantic Slope of the eastern United States and Canada, and the species is a target for proactive conservation to avoid federal listing. Understanding threatened species biology, particularly if it varies across regions, is a vital part of developing conservation and management plans and evaluating their efficacy. There are several key information gaps for this species that are crucial for informed planning; these include understanding of the species’ host fishes and habitat use. My dissertation addressed these information gaps through literature synthesis and field and laboratory studies. In Chapter 2, I synthesized existing literature and identified 16 research and conservation needs for L. cariosa; these needs range from research on the basic physiology and behavior of the species, to creating standardized protocols for surveys and DNA sampling, to ultimately developing a range-wide species conservation and restoration plan. In Chapter 3, I confirmed that Striped Bass (Morone saxatilis) is a suitable and ecologically relevant host for L. cariosa by producing 282 juveniles in our laboratory trial and observing three potential L. cariosa on naturally infected M. saxatilis. In Chapter 4, I provided evidence for the ecological relevance of seven mussel-host relationships across three watersheds on the Atlantic coast, including five novel associations. In Chapter 5, I identified two distinct mesohabitat combinations with high predicted probabilities of L. cariosa presence in the Connecticut River, covering approximately 3.3 km2: 1) sandy, shallow (0‒2 m river depth) areas near (i.e., <50 m from) banks and islands and; 2) non-sandy areas further from banks (25‒125 m) at shallow-intermediate river depths (0‒4 m). Collectively, these findings can be used by practitioners to characterize suitable habitats for L. cariosa, assess access to ecological hosts, and consider geographic variation in ecology, threats, and conservation needs to create effective strategies for species recovery.
Open Access
Preschool and Childcare Expulsion: A Family Perspective
(2026-02) Dushane, Danielle
The growing concern over preschool and childcare expulsion practices, due to children’s behavioral challenges, has prompted research dedicated to expulsion rates, contextual factors, educator experiences, and interventions designed to mitigate the use of expulsions. However, expulsion from the family perspective has been largely absent from the current body of research. The purpose of this study was to center the family perspective to broaden our understanding of the impact of preschool and childcare expulsion. This study utilized a basic interpretive qualitative research design that involved in-depth interviews with six families from New England who had experienced preschool or childcare expulsion. Findings revealed that families felt targeted by their child’s program due to their child’s behavioral challenges. Families described an overall lack of program communication, collaborative efforts, and program support prior to the expulsion. Overwhelming feelings of anger, frustration, and guilt were also experienced by the families. The study also includes a discussion of its limitations and offers implications for both practice and future research.

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