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

Zoom (http://stevens.zoom.us/my/xujia)

"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

Zoom (https://stevens.zoom.us/j/99916596506)

"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

Zoom (https://stevens.zoom.us/j/3898717267?omn=93387757510)

"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

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