Rachel V. Tucker (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Communication, University of Connecticut) will defend her doctoral dissertation titled, "Communicative Disenfranchisement During Childbirth: Examining the Outcomes Associated with and Role of Race/Ethnicity and Health Insurance Status in Shaping Black or African American, Hispanic or Latina, and White Women's Interactions with Providers During Childbirth" on Friday, July 18, 2025 at 10:00 a.m. EDT on WebEx. This study used the post-positivist articulation of the theory of communicative disenfranchisement to examine the outcomes associated with adverse interactions between healthcare providers and Black or African American, Hispanic or Latina, and White cisgender women (N = 230) receiving care for childbirth in the U.S., and the intersecting role of race/ethnicity and health insurance status in shaping such interactions. The findings from this study offer theoretical insights that extend our understanding of communicative disenfranchisement as a contextually dependent process, as well as practical insights regarding how to improve maternal healthcare interactions. A copy of the dissertation is available by emailing Michael J, Melnik at michael.melnik@uconn.edu.

Title: Advancing Marginal Likelihoods for Longitudinal Data Analysis Field of Study: Statistics This dissertation proposes a novel Bayesian method that decomposes the marginal likelihood into two distinct components, enabling better assessment of covariance structures conditional on the mean structure in repeated measures data.

Elena is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and PhD researcher with the ICArEHB center at the University of Algarve Portugal. Join us on zoom as she defends her dissertation - "Ancient Futures - Paleoclimate Changes and Social Resilience in late Quaternary Mozambique"

Yijia Gao (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Economics, University of Connecticut) will defend her doctoral dissertation titled, "Competitive Incentives and Environmental Regulation: Three Essays in Environmental Economics" on Wednesday, July 23, 2025 from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. EDT on WebEx.

Dissertation Title: Multi-compartment proteomic signatures of sex-specific responses to exercise-heat stress and acclimation. Department of Kinesiology, CAHNR.