Who: Sachin Tripathi, PhD Candidate in Civil Engineering (Structural Engineering). What: PhD Dissertation Defense for the dissertation titled: "Three-Dimensional Temperature Distribution and Thermal Induced Responses of a Lunar Habitat Structure Considering Regolith Cover and Self Shadow Effect." Why: As lunar exploration advances, this study addresses critical challenges in designing safe, sustainable lunar habitats. The findings provide vital insights for robust structural designs, contributing significantly to structural engineering for extraterrestrial environments. This defense is an opportunity for the UConn community, including students, faculty, and researchers, to engage with cutting-edge research for future lunar missions.

Covariate-Assisted Stochastic Block Models: Feature Selection and Latent Factors

Dissertation title: Transforming Elegies in Romantic Britain and Republican China Date: Monday, July 17 Time: 10 am to 12pm Place: SHH 236 Committee Charles Mahoney (Co-major advisor) Liansu Meng (Co-major advisor) Peter Zarrow (associate advisor) Peter Constantine (reader) Johannes Turk (external reader) Victor Zatsepine (reader) If you are not able to attend the Dissertation Defense in person, please see Webex meeting link below. Webex Meeting link: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=me16a76c50c43317ed83f93b7a097f4fe Meeting number: 2868 631 4780 Meeting password: nJPW2ncmX72 Join from a video system or application Dial 28686314780@uconn-cmr.webex.com You can also dial 173.243.2.68 and enter your meeting number. Join by phone +1-415-655-0002 Toll Access code: 28686314780 Global call-in numbers https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/globalcallin.php?MTID=m03db380aee7590cee3bbc96c6f4d99c6

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"