2025 UMKC Dissertations - Freely Available Online
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Item Illustrating the clinical landscape of Mucorales infection: a comprehensive examination of demographic characteristics, regional variation, length of stay, and readmission rates of cases in the United States(2025) Jones, Andrew Paul; Allsworth, Jenifer E.Mucormycosis is a rare but devastating fungal infection that primarily afflicts immunocompromised patients including those with hematological malignancy, solid organ and bone marrow transplants, and diabetes mellitus. The objective of this study was to assess the prevalence and clinical burden of mucormycosis among hospitalized patients in the United States. The three studies conducted analyzed the Oracle Health Facts® database, a deidentified electronic health record resource, which includes more than 750 participating healthcare facilities, 500 million unique patient encounters, 69 million patients, and 4.7 billion laboratory results between 2000 and 2018. All inpatient hospitalizations were examined for documentation of mucormycosis using an ICD-9-CM code of 117.7 or ICD-10-CM codes of B46.0-B46.9. In study 1, we estimated the prevalence of mucormycosis-related hospitalizations nationally, by census region and demographic characteristics, and described temporal trends. In study 2, we conducted a matched case-control study design to estimate the association of mucormycosis on length of hospital stay. Controls were matched by facility, year of case, sex and age. Finally, in study 3, we conducted a matched case-control study to estimate readmission rates at 30- and 90-days for mucormycosis patients compared to control patients. Results: The prevalence of mucormycosis-related hospitalizations was estimated as 0.12 per 100,000 discharges during January 2000 to June 2018. The highest prevalence and number of cases occurred in western states (i.e. Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming). We also found a higher prevalence of mucormycosis among patients with coagulopathy, chronic heart failure, weight loss and cardiac arrythmias. This analysis confirmed prior findings that mucormycosis was more common among patients with diabetes mellitus, hematological malignancies, and fluid and electrolyte disorders. Mucormycosis was associated with longer inpatient stays; the average length of stay for mucormycosis patients was 23 days compared to 6 days for controls matched by facility, year, sex and age. Regression analyses found that mucormycosis was a significant predictor of increased length of hospital stay, adding almost two days on average compared to matched controls. Mucormycosis patients also had a higher rate of readmission than control patients; they had 30-day readmission rates 35 times higher and 90-day readmission rates more than four times that of controls. Conclusions: While mucormycosis is not a common infection documented in US patients, it has a significant impact of patient length of stay and hospital readmission rates. The study provides an estimate of the prevalence and burden of mucormycosis among US hospital patients. The significant clinical and patient burden associated with mucormycosis showcases the importance of surveillance and understanding required to further optimize treatment protocols and protect susceptible US patients.Item Exploring grandmother kinship caregivers' perceptions of caregiving experiences(2025) Guhin, Taylor Anne; Berkel, LaVerne A.Grandmothers stepping in as kinship care providers is a growing subset of foster care. This study provided new insight into the changes a child endures when receiving care from their grandmother through Bronfenbrenner’s ecological lens. Conceptualizing child development through Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model helps explain how human development can be influenced by a child’s constantly changing immediate and larger social systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). Our study reviews the foster care system; including relative or nonrelative care, which can be formal or informal, as well as congregate care. There are many strengths highlighted in kinship care. For instance, in previous research, children shared that kinship care provided a protective environment that supported emotional recovery and helped them cope with adverse life circumstances (Burgess et al., 2010; Geen, 2004). Also, kinship care provides children with permanence and stability within their microsystem. However, many obstacles arise during this type of caregiving placement. Specifically, kinship caregivers are more likely to be older and have fewer economic resources (Stein et al., 2014), have received fewer educational services (Sakai et al., 2011), and to be in worse physical health than non-kin caregivers (Liao & White, 2014). Therefore, it is imperative to learn more from the grandmother’s perspective, specifically the caregiving struggles and how this change has direct and indirect effects on the child’s microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. Through a qualitative study, the research team interviewed 12 grandmothers and used Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis guide to derive themes and subthemes from the data. This study found three main themes: challenges in caregiving, strengths in caregiving, and resources needed. Specific challenges discussed by the grandmothers were navigating relationships with biological parents, the lack of financial assistance, and the need for childcare. Some unique strengths found were that stability and safety were maintained in the child’s microsystem. Overall, this study offered insight into the child’s functioning in grandmother kinship care through the grandmother's perspective, while utilizing Bronfenbrenner’s ecological lens to examine each level of the child’s ecological system. This study's findings gave specific ideas on how to support grandmother kinship families in clinical settings and identified future research directions.Item Small-volume monogenetic igneous landforms and edifices statistics (SMILES) of Earth and Mars: one morphometric framework to classify them all(2025) Nolan, Joseph Ashton; Graettinger, Alison H.Small-volume (<1 km3) monogenetic volcanoes are the most abundant volcanic landforms on Earth and Mars. The remote classification of these volcanoes remained limited in scope and number due to methodological limitations. This dissertation develops, validates, and applies a dimensionless morphometric framework, known as SMILES (Small-volume Monogenetic Igneous Landform and Edifice Statistics), to improve the classification of these landforms on Earth and to evaluate the transferability of the SMILES method from terrestrial targets to planetary contexts, specifically Mars. By emphasizing dimensionless parameters, the database provides a standardized method to distinguish scoria cones, spatter landforms, and related landforms. SMILES improves the classification of volcanic landforms by distinguishing them from morphologically similar features of non-volcanic origin, such as mud volcanoes.The reliability of terrestrial Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) derived from uncrewed aerial system (UAS) photogrammetry was evaluated by an iterative approach and by comparing these DEM to LiDAR datasets. UAS DEMs are reasonably accurate and reproducible for morphometric analysis. These results reinforce the usage of terrestrial DEMs and further validate the SMILES methodology, while also identifying the limitations of photogrammetry when working with small landforms. The validated SMILES framework was applied to Martian volcanic landforms using Digital Terrian Models created from the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment and Context Camera imagery. The SMILES framework successfully classifies Martian scoria cones and spatter landforms from each other and non-volcanic features. The results demonstrate the utility of the SMILES framework for planetary classification. Additionally, the results infer that eruptive style is the primary control on morphology, while gravity and atmosphere function as secondary modifiers. Future studies can adapt this method and apply it to additional targets.Item SMT-based verification of dynamic access control policies(2025) Dubrovenski, Vladislav; Xu, DianxiangModern software systems increasingly depend on dynamic access control to manage evolving privileges in complex workflows across safety-critical domains such as healthcare, finance, academia, government, and defense. As users create, review, or modify digital artifacts, their access rights must dynamically adjust in real time to maintain security and operational continuity. However, ensuring that these dynamic privilege changes remain correct and consistent presents a fundamental challenge, as subtle errors or unintended interactions in administrative logic can silently compromise authorization integrity, leading to privilege escalation or the denial of legitimate access. This dissertation introduces the Policy Machine Analyzer (POMA), an integrated framework for the formal verification of dynamic access control policies governed by administrative obligations. Administrative obligations define conditional rules that automatically trigger policy updates in response to access events, enabling flexible yet complex runtime authorization. To address this complexity, POMA establishes the first SMT-based verification framework capable of reasoning about evolving authorization states. It systematically determines whether sequences of obligation-triggered updates satisfy or violate access control requirements, ensuring both safety and liveness properties within continuously changing policy configurations. Beyond reachability verification, this dissertation identifies and formalizes a novel problem in access control: the obligation race condition, a concurrency conflict that arises when multiple administrative obligations triggered by the same event simultaneously attempt to modify the authorization state. This class of race conditions has not been previously addressed in the literature and represents a new dimension of policy-level interference. By encoding concurrent obligations and their effects as satisfiability constraints, the framework detects nondeterministic or unsafe authorization outcomes before they manifest at runtime or proves their absence through formal reasoning. In summary, this research establishes a unified, solver-based foundation for verifying adaptive access control systems and introduces the first formal treatment of obligation races, paving the way toward safer, more predictable, and verifiable security in modern automated environments.Item Picturing the American story: John Steuart Curry’s limited editions club illustrations and the Regionalist vision in American literature(2025) Bittel, Erica Sue; Dunbar, Burton L. (Burton Lewis), 1942-; Powell, Larson, 1960-This dissertation examines the late-career illustrative works of American Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry (1897–1946), focusing specifically on his commissions for the Limited Editions Club, a subscription book company, between 1940 and 1946. While Curry is most often celebrated for his painted depictions of the American Midwest, his contributions to book illustration, particularly during the final decade of his career, have received comparatively little scholarly attention. By analyzing four major Limited Editions Club commissions—The Prairie (1940), The Literary Works of Abraham Lincoln (1942), The Red Badge of Courage (1944), and John Brown’s Body (1948)—this study aims to resolve a significant void in art historical scholarship, situating these illustrations within the interwoven cultural, political, and social discourses of mid-twentieth-century America. Employing an interdisciplinary approach that integrates art historical analysis, studies in American history and literature, as well as semiotics, this research explores how Curry’s illustrations engage with the ideals of American Exceptionalism and issues of race, class, and national identity. The dissertation contends that Curry’s images, created in tandem with canonical works of American poetry and prose, function as both aesthetic objects and culturally coded artifacts reflective of the social anxieties and nationalist imperatives of the 1930s and 1940s. Semiotic theory, particularly the frameworks developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, Roland Barthes, and Mieke Bal, alongside Erwin Panofsky’s associated concepts of iconography and iconology, is employed to analyze the layered meanings embedded in Curry’s illustrations and to investigate how these images convey narrative meaning alongside the written word. Primary source materials—including correspondence between Curry and Limited Editions Club founder George Macy housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, original editions of the aforementioned illustrated books, and preparatory works from Kansas State University’s Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art—are utilized to contextualize Curry’s artistic choices and the various forces shaping his commissions. In illuminating the complex interplay between image, text, and context, this dissertation not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of John Steuart Curry’s illustrative oeuvre but also expands the methodological possibilities for studying book illustration within the disciplines of art history and the humanities.