Main Events

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Annamalai Annamalai TITLE: DEEP LEARNING-BASED SIDE-CHANNEL EVALUATION ACROSS CLASSICAL AND POST-QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHIC IMPLEMENTATIONS ABSTRACT: A cryptographic algorithm that is mathematically secure can still be broken since its hardware implementation leaks secret information through power consumption or electromagnetic emission. These vulnerabilities are applicable to widely deployed classical encryption schemes as well as emerging [...]

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Temilola Salami TITLE: MORE THAN A MOVEMENT: THE MENTAL HEALTH TOLL OF ACTIVISM AND THE SHIELD OF SOCIAL SUPPORT AT HBCUs ABSTRACT: Student activism has historically contributed to sociopolitical change, with college campuses serving as important contexts for civic engagement and identity development (Ballard et al., 2024; Cabrera et al., 2017; Conner, [...]

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Stella Smith TITLE: BEYOND BORDERS: LIVED EXPERIENCES OF STUDY ABROAD AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON BELONGING, MOTIVATION, AND DEGREE PROGRESSION ABSTRACT: This qualitative phenomenological study explored how students from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) described their study abroad experiences and how those experiences influenced their academic motivation and persistence toward degree completion. [...]

OMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Patricia Miller COMMITTEE CO-CHAIR: Dr. Pamela Barber-Freeman TITLE: DETERMINING IF A BENEFIT RELATIONSHIP EXISTS BETWEEN BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES AND AFRICAN UNIVERSITIES PARTNERSHIPS THROUGHOUT THE GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY ABSTRACT: The goal of this quantitative study was to determine if a benefit relationship existed, based on enrollment data, between HBCUs and colleges and [...]

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Lin Li COMMITTEE CO-CHAIR: Dr. Lijun Qian TITLE: EFFECTIVE TRAFFIC ROUTING UNDER DISASTROUS EVENTS THROUGH MACHINE LEARNING ABSTRACT: Disastrous events such as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods routinely disrupt transportation networks, preventing emergency response, evacuation, and the delivery of critical supplies. Conventional optimization-based routing methods offer strong theoretical guarantees but cannot scale and are [...]

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Noushin Ghaffari TITLE: COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS AND STRUCTURAL PRIORITIZATION OF CANDIDATE BACTERIAL TRANSPOSABLE ELEMENTS FROM LARGE-SCALE GENOMIC DATASETS ABSTRACT: Transposable elements are mobile DNA sequences that contribute to bacterial genome variation, gene disruption, and genome rearrangement. Large-scale computational tools can identify thousands of candidate insertion sequences and related transposable elements, but these outputs often [...]