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Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access , URBANIZATION AND VECTOR-BORNE DISEASE IN MIGRATORY AND NOMADIC WILDLIFE(University of Oklahoma – Graduate College, 2026) Verrett, Taylor; Becker, Daniel; Bridge, Eli; Kelly, Jeffrey; Ross, Jeremy; Wimberly, MichaelVector-borne diseases (VBDs) represented 30% of all emerging infectious diseases at the start of the century (Jones et al. 2008) and pose a devastating global health burden, causing an estimated one million deaths every year. Arthropod vectors and the pathogens they carry are highly sensitive to changes in their environment, and VBD infection dynamics are therefore expected to respond strongly to ongoing anthropogenic impacts on climate and the landscape. Anthropogenic land-use change, such as urbanization, is the most frequently cited influence on the emergence of zoonotic VBDs. Intensifying anthropogenic land-use can increase VBD prevalence by altering the composition of host and vector communities and by exposing hosts to features of urban landscapes that can interact with immunity, such as immunotoxic pollutants and sources of anthropogenic provisioning. Because infection dynamics of VBDs are intricately linked to vector distributions and environmental conditions, they are uniquely difficult to predict in wildlife taxa that undergo periodic long-distance movements to track seasonal fluctuations in resources. For example, migratory wildlife may be exposed to variable levels of vector activity and urban land-use throughout the distinct breeding, overwintering, and stop-over sites used throughout their annual cycle. In addition, the physiological demands of migration are a source of intrinsic stressors that could interact with extrinsic anthropogenic stressors to shape seasonal infection outcomes. Studying the intersection between animal migration, anthropogenic land-use, and infectious disease is impactful both for the conservation of vulnerable migratory populations and to predict how pathogens might be dispersed to human and wildlife communities across their large geographic range. For example, migratory birds can facilitate the long-distance dispersal of ticks vectoring Lyme borreliosis, and mediate the spread and enzootic maintenance of West Nile virus after its introduction to the Western Hemisphere. In this dissertation, I take three distinct but complementary approaches to evaluating how anthropogenic land-use interacts with seasonal wildlife movement to produce vector-borne infection outcomes across ecological and evolutionary scales. Chapter 1 centers on Australian black flying foxes (Pteropus alecto), a nomadic nectarivore with winter foraging movements that bring it into increasing contact with anthropogenically modified landscapes and human populations when natural food sources are scarce. Our molecular and phylogenetic work identifies overwintering black flying foxes as hosts of a newly described bacterial VBD closely related to zoonotic Borrelia lineages (e.g., the causative agents of Lyme disease in humans), suggesting this species and its ectoparasites warrant further study as potential sources of zoonotic VBDs at the human–wildlife interface in Australia. In Chapter 2, I focus on temperate migratory songbirds to study how land-use intensity and proximity to spring migration could jointly affect VBDs (haemosporidian parasites and West Nile virus) in New World sparrows wintering in central Oklahoma. I did not find evidence of enzootic West Nile virus activity in overwintering sparrows across 4 sampling years, but both land-use and seasonality predicted birds’ infection with haemosporidian parasites. Wintering in urban or suburban habitats overall reduced the probability birds would be infected with any haemosporidian parasite relative to wintering in more natural habitats. I also report evidence that the stationary non-breeding season is a period of active transmission for at least one group of haemosporidian parasites, challenging the paradigm that acute haemosporidian infections do not impact temperate migratory bird populations outside the breeding season. In Chapter 3, I evaluate the possibility of migration and urban tolerance as host traits that impact patterns of diversification by host-switching in avian haemosporidia by exposing birds to more heterogeneous habitats and their parasite communities over evolutionary time. I found that while urban tolerance did not affect co-evolutionary relationships between hosts and parasites, bird species undergoing long-distance migration had haemosporidian associations that contributed less to global cophylogenetic congruence, suggesting migration drives host-switching events in a common VBD.Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access , Selections from The Student's Catullus for AP and College Latin(OU Press, 2026-11-10) Daniel H. Garrison; Nava R. CohenAlthough his poems survived the Middle Ages in only a single copy, Catullus has become a canonical author in our time; his artistry and range place him with Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. And since its first edition, published in 1989, The Student’s Catullus has become the definitive introductory text for students. This new edition is expanded and revised to make Catullus more accessible to today's readers. This new edition includes the following features: - 15 poems recommended by the College Board to prepare students for AP Latin - 16 additional poems suitable for advanced high school or intermediate college - A new design that features expanded English commentary appearing alongside the poem - Reconsideration of Catullus' nuances and meaning with fidelity to his language, grounded in contemporary ethical understanding - A Latin-English Catullan vocabulary relevant to each poem - New maps by John Wyatt Greenlee with place names in Latin This edition retains these time-proven features of the previous editions: A brief overview of Catullus’s life and artistic persona, a Who’s Who of the people in Catullus’ poems, an explanation of Catullan meters, and a glossary of literary terms used in the commentary. Selections from The Student's Catullus for AP and College Latin draws on decades of classroom experience and retains the effective methods of previous editions while at the same time addressing the needs of today’s students.Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access , Learning Geometry Through Intrinsic Representations and Data-Driven Processing(University of Oklahoma – Graduate College, 2026) Zhang, Haoliang; Cheng, Samuel; El Amm, Christian; Cao, Jie; Li, Qi; Zhao, ShangqingThis thesis explores data-driven and intrinsic methods for efficient 3D shape representation and processing. While many learning-based approaches rely on large labeled datasets or shallow geometric cues, we instead leverage intrinsic structures—such as curvature, geodesic distance, and the logarithmic map—to enhance generalization, robustness, and geometric fidelity. We first investigate learning-based methods for efficient mesh representation. To better capture local geometric structure, we propose an improved pooling operator for 3D morphable models that incorporates intrinsic geometric information through vertex normals. Building on this representation, we introduce Neural QSLIM, a geometry-aware framework that learns QSLIM-guided topological updates to improve mesh reconstruction quality in autoencoders. Beyond mesh representation, we study intrinsic geometry for non-rigid shape analysis by proposing a fully unsupervised method for discovering compact, stable, and ordered intrinsic landmarks via Karcher means, which can be directly incorporated into existing shape correspondence methods. Finally, we extend these ideas to mesh repair with a data-free learning framework that reconstructs missing regions directly on the input mesh while preserving the original topology and geometric fidelity, eliminating the need for external training datasets. Together, these contributions demonstrate how intrinsic geometry and self-supervision can reduce reliance on large-scale annotations in neural geometric pipelines.Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access , Evaluation of Radio Frequency Ablation in Human Left Atrial Tissues for Atrial Fibrillation Using Optical Coherence Tomography(2025-09-10) Selvaraj Mercyshalinie, Ebenezar Raj; Patterson, Dylan; Mutembei, Bornface; Ladymon, Avery; Yan, Feng; Pandit, Kaustubh; Peek, Hayden; Fung, Kar-Ming; Zhang, Qinghao; Wang, Chen; Cui, Yan; Liu, Junyuan; Liu, Ronghao; Martins, Paulo N.; Stavrakis, Stravros; Zhang, Ke; Miller, David R.; Tang, QinggongDespite its widespread adoption, the success of radiofrequency (RF) ablation is often limited by challenges in achieving durable, transmural lesions while avoiding complications such as incomplete ablation or over-ablation. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) offers high-resolution visualization of cardiac tissue, enabling real-time assessment of lesion depth. Therefore, we investigated the impact of RF ablation on donated human left atrial tissue using an OCT imaging system to assess lesion formation in a controlled laboratory setting. RF ablation lesions were created at durations of 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 seconds (s), and their effects were quantified by calculating the attenuation coefficient from OCT images. To identify tissue regions in the image, a U-Net model was employed for segmentation, achieving a mean intersection over union (IoU) of 0.9748 with an inference time of 82 milliseconds. Our results demonstrated clear differences in tissue response before and after ablation, with distinct lesion characteristics across the tested durations. One-way ANOVA analysis yielded a p-value of 1.09 × 10−8, confirming statistically significant differences among the ablation durations. These findings highlight the potential of SD-OCT for precise, real-time monitoring of ablation effects. Future work aims to integrate OCT with ablation catheters for clinical applications, enhancing the precision of catheter-based treatments for conditions like atrial fibrillation.Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access , Media constructions of gendered helplessness and the decentring of women in Lagos slums during the COVID 19 pandemic(2026-09-17) Tommy, Solomon; Ogwezzy-Ndisika, Abigail O.; Faustino, Babatunde Adeshina; Aleshinloye, OluwaseunThe COVID-19 pandemic emphasized long-standing social disparities, including the marginalization of disadvantaged populations in popular media coverage and narratives. This study investigates this, examining how Nigerian media coverage of resilience realities in Lagos slums in the wake of the pandemic positioned the response of slum-dwelling women, with critical attention given to the intersection of vulnerability and agency. Grounded in framing theory, feminist perspectives and development media theory, the study adopted a qualitative content analysis of news reports from January 2020 to October 2021. Findings showed a significant under-representation of women-centered, slum-based adaptive activities when compared to the full population of slum-based pandemic coverage, with narratives disproportionately focused on official/institutional and male voices. Consequently, women were relegated to narratives of passive victimhood and dependency in media frames, with helplessness gendered to women’s disadvantage, effectively diminishing their roles as community leaders and economic actors. These disempowering depictions emphasise prevalent class-based power dynamics, especially as regards women, while also delegitimizing slum residents’ contributions to urban resilience, which informs the call for increased inclusiveness in dominant media narratives.