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

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

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

To view past Doctoral Dissertations, please visit this website.