Upcoming Doctoral Dissertations
School of Engineering and Science
DISSERTATIONS IN NOVEMBER
November 11, 2025 - Shabnam Samimi
Candidate | Shabnam Samimi |
Date | Tuesday, November 11, 2025 |
Time | 2:30 PM (Eastern) |
Title | The Role of Endothelial Cells in Protecting Multiple Myeloma Cells from Natural Killer Cell Mediated Cytotoxicity |
Location | McLean 510 |
"Multiple myeloma (MM) is an incurable hematologic cancer marked by the accumulation of malignant plasma cells within the bone marrow. Despite advances in immunotherapy, including
natural killer cell-based strategies, MM cells frequently evade immune surveillance due to protection from the bone marrow microenvironment." Read more
November 12, 2025 - Ke Xu
Candidate | Ke Xu |
Date | Wednesday, November 12, 2025 |
Time | 02:00 PM (Eastern) |
Title | AI-driven Quality Prediction in Additive Manufacturing based on Multimodal Process Monitoring |
Location | Carnegie 315 |
"Additive Manufacturing (AM) has emerged as a transformative technology, yet ensuring consistent part quality remains challenging due to complex thermal dynamics, layer-by-layer fabrication, and material microstructure changes. Postprocess inspection methods to assure part quality are typically costly, time-consuming, and unable to provide real-time feedback for print process optimization." Read more
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
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.