Upcoming Doctoral Dissertations
School of Engineering and Science
DISSERTATIONS IN NOVEMBER
November 18, 2025 - João Luís Lins
Candidate | João Luís Lins |
Date | Tuesday, November 18, 2025 |
Time | 11:00 AM (Eastern) |
Title | Reinforcement Learning with Supervised Alignment for Grounded Truth |
Location |
"Truth is the foundation of trustworthy, ethical, and competitive AI. Without a factual basis, large language models (LLMs) may appear fluent while thinking erroneously, mimicking reasoning yet inherently misunderstanding causality, thereby growing a gray box where misconduct flourishes. Recent advances like RLHF and RLAIF strive to align LLMs with human intent but falter when labels are absent, biased, or unverifiable." Read more
November 18, 2025 - Gengwu Zhao
Candidate | Gengwu Zhao |
Date | Tuesday, November 18, 2025 |
Time | 1:00 to 3:00 PM (Eastern) |
Title | Detecting and Refactoring Mock Clones in Java Test Code: From Empirical Evidence to Automated Framework |
Location | Babbio 503 |
"Mocking frameworks, such as Mockito, EasyMock, and PowerMock, have become indispensable in modern software testing by enabling developers to isolate test dependencies and improve test controllability.However, as mocking becomes increasingly common, it introduces a distinctive form of redundancy that differs fundamentally from traditional code clones." Read more
November 24, 2025 - Kun Wu
Candidate | Kun Wu |
Date | Monday, November 24, 2025 |
Time | 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM (Eastern) |
Title | Towards Efficient and Verifiable Machine Unlearning |
Location | GN303 |
"As machine learning systems become increasingly integrated into socially and privacy-sensitive applications, ensuring their compliance with data protection regulations has become critical. In particular, it is essential to efficiently remove the influence of specific data from trained models and to verify the success of such removal. This dissertation addresses these challenges by developing frameworks for efficient and verifiable machine unlearning (MU)." Read more
November 24, 2025 - Ahmadreza Zaeri
Candidate | Ahmadreza Zaeri |
Date | Monday, November 24, 2025 |
Time | 10:30 AM (Eastern) |
Title | Numerical and experimental analysis of 3D/4D printed functionalized fibrous biomaterial via electrohydrodynamic printing |
Location | Babbio 541 |
"This thesis presents the development of biomimetic tissue constructs by integrating additive manufacturing (AM) with electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing. The work focuses on replicating the complex fibrous microstructure of muscle tissues, specifically the spindle-like ellipsoid geometry, using a novel polymer melt-based EHD printing system. Chapter 1 introduces a numerical and experimental study of 3D/4D fibrous biomaterials. A predictive numerical model simulates microfiber formation under key bioprinting parameters, offering high control over geometry." Read more
November 25, 2025 - Leone Z. Young
Candidate | Leone Z. Young |
Date | Tuesday, November 25, 2025 |
Time | 2:00 PM (Eastern) |
Title | Estimating the Effort and Cost of Project Management for Complex Systems via a Model-Based Engineering Approach |
Location |
"The practice of modern project management (PM) has been applied across industries, and its standards, fundamental processes and body knowledge have become matured and abundant across many fields globally. Yet, major PM processes are adapted differently through various projects, organizations, industries, and professional standards." Read more
DISSERTATIONS IN DECEMBER
December 16, 2025 - Thomas Beitel
Candidate | Thomas Beitel |
Date | Tuesday, December 16, 2025 |
Time | 10:30 AM (Eastern) |
Title | Graviton Detection and Its Quantum Aspects |
Location | Babbio 203 |
"There has been a great amount of speculation on how gravity works on a quantum level, but very little
experimental input. Recently, we have shown that single gravitons, the expected quantum particle of gravity,
can be detected. Here I will summarize how single gravitons can be detected and discuss how this result
facilitates the study of gravitational waves and the exploration of quantum gravity, inspired by historical tests
probing the quantization of light." Read more
School of Business
DISSERTATIONS IN NOVEMBER
November 19, 2025 - Jingyun Huang
Candidate | Jingyun Huang |
Date | Wednesday, November 19, 2025 |
Time | 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM (Eastern) |
Title | Three Essays on Data Mining and Text Analysis of Social Media Data: Exploring Firms and Customer Behavior |
Location |
"The three essays provide a comprehensive understanding of how organizations and individuals adapt their social media behaviors to evolving algorithmic environments, institutional expectations, and audience dynamics in the digital communication era." Read more
To view past Doctoral Dissertations, please visit this website.