Pathways to a World-Class University: Leadership Approaches of Mongolian Higher Education Institutions

Barkhuu, Otgonbat University of Pennsylvania ProQuest Dissertations 2025 해외박사(DDOD)

World-class universities are recognized as leading institutions that can enhance national competitiveness. Consequently, the establishment of a world-class university has become a national priority for many countries striving to thrive in the global economy. This study explored the leadership strategies employed by two Mongolian public higher education institutions that are emerging as world-class universities. A qualitative, multi-site case study method was used to gather data from key stakeholders, including rectors, senior administrators, and faculty members.The study's findings revealed that creating and sustaining a world-class university in a transitional context is a complex process requiring multiple leadership approaches. The emergent model of Harmonizing Leadership involved the participation of various stakeholders in a coordinated fashion, utilizing both top-down and bottom-up leadership strategies. The rector and senior administrative leaders played a crucial role in implementing reforms and initiatives at the National University of Mongolia and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology. Their efforts aimed at developing talent, building research infrastructure, leveraging internationalization, and navigating top-down governance. The Mongolian government also significantly facilitated international donor support for capacity building and investment in research infrastructure.The research findings suggested that the external environment plays a crucial role in shaping the approaches of campus leaders at higher education institutions in countries undergoing transition, in light of the unique economic, social, and political forces they face. Campus leaders at the two Mongolian public institutions faced challenges such as decreased government funding, limited institutional autonomy, and frequent political interventions. This study concludes that developing an effective leadership approach to building a world-class university in countries in transition requires an iterative process of harmoniously balancing top-down and shared leadership principles.

From Sponsorship to Partnership: New Models for University-Philanthropy Research Alliances

Rao, Shiyun Serena University of Pennsylvania ProQuest Dissertations 2025 해외박사(DDOD)

As universities have become more reliant on philanthropies for research funding, new models for university-philanthropy collaboration have emerged. These alliances operate as social contracts in which universities provide intellectual capital, legitimacy, and access to expertise, while the philanthropic organizations provide resources beyond funding and a vision for impact through innovation. Through their partnership efforts, these new university-philanthropy alliances enable research at a larger scale and with greater agility than the parties might achieve working separately.This qualitative case study examines the motivation, modality, evolution, and complexities of three unique university-philanthropy research alliances in the United States: the Allen Institute for AI with the University of Washington; the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub with the University of California, San Francisco; and the Wyss Institute with Harvard University.This study reveals three key findings. First, these alliances are driven by normative motivations, a shared commitment to societal impact, and pragmatic needs for resource complementarities. Second, relational contracts, characterized by implicit factors and trust, play a more significant role in shaping these partnerships than explicit legal agreements. Third, structural adaptations and cultural transpositions create fluid and flexible organizational boundaries, distinguishing these partnerships from other forms of research collaborations.By examining these alliances, this study provides critical insights for university leaders and philanthropists seeking to establish or refine their own partnerships. It also contributes to broader discussions on the evolving role of philanthropy in higher education, the social contracts between universities and their research sponsors, and the strategic pursuit of new research sponsorship models.

Grammatical Gender and Number in Pennsylvania Dutch: Continuing Down the Path of Nominal Deflection

Fisher, Rose The Pennsylvania State University ProQuest Dissert 2025 해외박사(DDOD)

A prevailing position in contact linguistic research is that inflectional morphology is less flexible and less likely to undergo change due to language contact compared to other domains. On the other hand, there is evidence of a cross-linguistic tendency for inflectional complexity to be reduced across time. Case loss, namely the loss of dative case in most modern Pennsylvania Dutch varieties, is a well-documented example; however, few experimental studies examining grammatical gender and number in Pennsylvania Dutch exist. Gender and number are consistently assumed to function much as they do in German, where inflectional complexity is largely maintained compared to many other Germanic languages. In this dissertation, I trace the diachronic development of gender and number inflection from Pennsylvania Dutch source dialects and through earlier Pennsylvania Dutch dialects. The experimental portion of this study documents grammatical gender and number agreement in two modern dialects of Pennsylvania Dutch, those spoken by Old Order Amish and Mennonite communities in Pennsylvania. Syncretism in the interwoven case, gender, and number paradigms characterizes every stage of Pennsylvania Dutch history including the present day. While the nominal inflection of the Mennonites is more conservative than the Amish, both groups show evidence of having systems that are more reduced than older Pennsylvania Dutch varieties. Like many of its Germanic relatives, including English, Pennsylvania Dutch is on a path to becoming more analytic, replacing its inflectional complexity with more transparent and easily acquired systems. Contrary to similar changes in its close relatives, PD is undergoing these changes more rapidly. This higher rate of change is likely due to intense contact with English, which serves as a catalyst.

Access and Success Programs for the Historically Underrepresented in Higher Education: Student Perspectives

Abney, Jamiere N University of Pennsylvania ProQuest Dissertations 2024 해외박사(DDOD)

This practitioner-led dissertation used qualitative methods to explore the perspectives and lived experiences of historically underrepresented college students enrolled in higher education opportunity programs. This exploratory study engaged students of color, first-generation students, and students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Data were collected from students attending three selective, predominantly White, residential liberal arts colleges in New York State through an emic-focused practitioner research approach that employed semi-structured interviews, focus groups, document and archival review, and observational fieldnotes. This dissertation is grounded in theories of belonging, cultural capital, and social reproduction, and it is situated within the current context of higher education diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at a polarizing sociopolitical moment in the United States. This study marks a departure from the corpus of research on college opportunity programs, which is primarily quantitative. This research connects students’ sense of belonging to their overall experience at selective liberal arts colleges, and to their specific experiences of financial, academic, and social support, program structure, recruitment, and outreach. Findings can be used to inform university-based understandings of program impact by those designing, implementing, and evaluating targeted opportunity programs. Belonging emerged as an exponentializing impact factor shaping students’ lived experiences and perspectives on the efficacy and quality of their programs.

Knowing What We Don't Know! Detecting and Learning Out-of-Distribution Data in the Open World

Gummadi, Meghna University of Pennsylvania ProQuest Dissertations 2024 해외박사(DDOD)

Current Artificial Intelligent (AI) systems have seen remarkable success in various applications. However, this success has been limited to the closed-world assumption. These systems assume they will be deployed in stationary environments, only encountering In-Distribution(ID) instances drawn from the same distribution as their training data. On the contrary, current AI systems are no longer limited to stationary environments and have ventured into the dynamic, open world, where the number of concepts is unbounded and encountering novel, Out-of-Distribution (OOD) instances that lie beyond the training distribution is the norm. The success of these closed-world AI systems has yet to translate to the open world, where their expertise is lacking, leading to their catastrophic failure. For reliable operation in the open world, AI systems must recognize and adapt to its dynamic, uncertain nature. Detecting OOD instances and adapting to them by incrementally learning them would enable AI systems to be reliable and evolve continually in the open world, similar to biological systems. Drawing inspiration from our innate ability to identify and adapt to novel situations by reasoning and monitoring our cognition, this dissertation presents open-world learning frameworks that can reason over their uncertainty to monitor their performance to identify novelties and adapt to them. This dissertation investigates the two problems of open-world learning: (1) OOD detection and (2) continual learning to detect and incrementally learn OOD instances. For OOD detection, this dissertation investigates and presents feature representations that prevent feature collapse of ID and OOD data by imparting a specific structure to ID feature sets, which improves reliability for generating low-confidence scores for OOD instances. In addition, this work also shows the benefit of leveraging the context under which the network generates the scores for further improvement in OOD detection. Empirical evaluations across multiple benchmarks in the classification and segmentation domains show significant improvement over comparable OOD detection baselines and demonstrate generalization abilities. This dissertation also looks at OOD detection and continual learning together in a single feature representation and introduces a novel open-world learning framework. Evaluated in the classification domain, the framework enables OOD detection and accommodation in a natural continual learning loop. This dissertation's contributions to improvements in OOD detection and a novel unified framework for open-world learning provide significant advancements toward the successful and reliable use of AI systems in the open world.

Don't Judge an Album by Its Cover

Fischer, Sean University of Pennsylvania ProQuest Dissertations 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

Do Democrats and Republicans listen to the same music? Watch the same movies? Read the same books? It would be reasonable to conclude, based on popular press reporting, that members from the two parties effectively in their own cultural bubbles with few cultural preferences crossing over between them. If true, this condition threatens to erode the social fabric that we rely upon to smooth over partisan conflict and disagreement, as apolitical lifestyle and cultural preferences act as a sort of social glue. However, the academic research behind these claims is mixed, with credible evidence on both sides of the debate. Jumping into this research gap, this dissertation attempts to improve upon the methods used in prior studies to clarify the extent to which partisans share cross-party cultural preferences.The main methodological improvement comes from a reworking of how audience networks are constructed from a combination of survey and digital trace data. Across three pilot studies, I demonstrate how this method works and how it suggests that partisans' cultural preferences are not substantively polarized. But, all of the datasets analyzed in these pilot studies are flawed in crucial ways, making it hard to draw generalizable conclusions from them. As such, I follow up with this dissertation's main study: a network analysis of an original dataset pairing behavioral data from Spotify with survey responses. Applied to this more robust dataset, my network-based approach finds that shared cultural preferences span across party lines, especially when people only share a few preferences. Larger sets of shared preferences are more likely to run between those with shared partisan identities, but these types of strong ties are very rare, even among co-partisans. However, these observational network-based results leave open an important question: what might be causing notable acute cases of partisan cultural polarization? I test one possible answer: elite political cues. I test this possibility via a simple survey experiment placing the musician Jon Bon Jovi in different contexts and asking subjects to evaluate him and his music. In doing so, I find that even an extreme political cue given through the survey is unable to generate strong reactions among subjects.Ultimately, this dissertation makes two important points. First, that partisans actually appear to share a substantial number of cultural preferences, undermining claims of partisan cultural bubbles. Second, that for partisanship to influence cultural preferences, people likely need to be exposed to persistent, strong, and diverse cues from both elites and peers. Together, these conclusions point to an important limit in the spillover of partisanship and its influences on the nonpolitical parts of our lives.

"I'm a Kid But I Still Deserve Respect": Conceptualizing Youth Expertise

Ogburn, Laura University of Pennsylvania ProQuest Dissertations 2025 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation examines how youth expertise is conceptualized, valued, and actualized within a high school afterschool program run through a center for university-community partnership. Youth expertise exists at the intersection of youth voice/participation literature and theories of expertise. Youth voice initiatives often function as tokenistic efforts that fail to genuinely engage young people's knowledge, while youth advocacy frameworks like youth-led participatory action research and youth organizing provide stronger models for centering youth perspectives. While literature on youth advocacy espouses a strong underlying value of youth expertise, the concept remains undertheorized. Traditional Western conceptions of expertise focus on individual credentials and specialized knowledge. More recent scholarship on expertise has emphasized social processes, collaborative knowledge production, and knowledge held by those directly affected by problems but without formal credentials. Drawing from these lines of scholarship and that of Black feminist and indigenous epistemologists, a theory of youth expertise challenges adultist assumptions by recognizing young people as legitimate sources of knowledge. The eight-month study employed participant observation, semi-structured interviews with adult staff and volunteers, focus groups with high school participants, and document review of program materials. The research identifies an important tension between organizational values and implementation practices. While the university center leadership espouses a value of youth expertise, the organization lacks formalized systems specifically designed to support it. Consequently, the successful recognition and utilization of youth expertise depends largely on the dedication of individual staff members who create spaces where young people's knowledge is valued in practice. Youth expertise manifests in three interconnected dimensions. First, it is relational, emerging through trusting relationships in which adults intentionally disrupt normative age-based hierarchies. Second, youth expertise is experiential, grounded in young people's direct lived experiences. Third, youth expertise is perspectival, offering vantage points that are not accessible by adults. This framework positions youth expertise not as a developmental steppingstone toward adult expertise, but as a legitimate epistemological resource that enhances collaborative knowledge production. The findings suggest implications for educational practice, organizational structures supporting youth-adult collaboration, and broader conceptions of expertise.

Advanced Optical Instrumentation for the Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope

Kofman, Anna Marina University of Pennsylvania ProQuest Dissertations 2024 해외박사(DDOD)

For over 60 years, scientists have been studying the oldest observable light in our universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), in order to probe the evolutionary history of our universe and develop its defining fundamental model. To observe this relic radiation, instrument teams have developed space-based and ground-based telescopes capable of mapping the microwave sky down to arcminute scales, including experiments such as Planck, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). However, more sensitive instruments are needed to further rule out competing evolutionary models and place tighter constraints on cosmological parameters such as the primordial baryon density, the Hubble constant, and the growth of structure in our universe. In response to the call for higher sensitivity measurements of the millimeter sky, the Simons Observatory (SO) has developed a Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) and three Small Aperture Telescopes (SAT) to study the CMB from the Chilean Andes. The LAT houses the 2.4 m diameter Large Aperture Telescope Receiver (LATR), the largest cryogenic receiver built for studying the CMB to-date. The LATR will house over 62,000 Transition Edge Sensor (TES) detectors operating at 100 mK and sensitive to frequencies between 27 GHz and 280 GHz. These detectors, and the supporting optical and readout components, will live inside of 13 Optics Tubes (OT) in the receiver. In order to achieve the sensitivity requirements set by the SO science team, nearly a decade of research, design and testing work went into developing the telescope and its receiver. This thesis will present the motivations behind the mechanical, optical, cryogenic, readout and shielding designs for the LATR and OTs. In particular, this thesis will focus on the work surrounding the development, final design, and testing of the Optics Tubes and their integration into the receiver.

Search for Higgsinos in Compressed Mass Spectra Using Neural Networks in the Atlas Detector and Design Verification of the AMAC ASIC for the ITk Upgrade

Lu, Sicong University of Pennsylvania ProQuest Dissertations 2024 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation presents two major projects undertaken during my PhD in the Penn ATLAS group, addressing challenges in high-energy physics analysis and detector development to advance our understanding of the universe.The first project focuses on the search for Higgsinos in compressed mass spectra, a promising scenario in Supersymmetry (SUSY) that addresses the hierarchy problem and provides a viable dark matter candidate. Nearly mass-degenerate Higgsinos with splittings of O(1 GeV) have been challenging to detect due to their elusive signals and overwhelming backgrounds. Using 140 fb−1 of proton-proton collision data at √ s = 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector, a novel analysis targeted events with a high-pT jet, significant missing transverse momentum, and a low-momentum displaced pion track. My work utilizes fully connected neural networks and an improved semi-data-driven background estimation method, achieving exclusions of Higgsino masses up to 190 GeV with splittings between 0.3 to 1.1 GeV, significantly extending sensitivity beyond the LEP limit of 95 GeV. The results show excellent agreement with Standard Model predictions, demonstrating the robustness of the analysis.The second project involves the design verification of an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), the Autonomous Monitoring and Control (AMAC) chip, developed for the Inner Tracker (ITk) in the ATLAS Upgrade for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). My contributions include developing an automated analog-function testing framework, a workflow for chip characterization, identifying critical prototype design flaws, and a cocotb-based design simulation routine. Simulations and prototype testing confirmed the ASICs robustness against radiation-induced single-event effects (SEE) and compliance with specifications, enabling the transition to production. These efforts ensure the reliable operation of the ITk detector under HL-LHC conditions, supporting the pursuit of new physics discoveries.Collectively, these projects advanced experimental particle physics, providing tools for probing Beyond Standard Model theories, including SUSY, while laying the foundation for future discoveries at the HL-LHC. .

Innovative Approaches to Revenue Diversification for Small, Private Colleges and Universities

Sooreea, Rajeev University of Pennsylvania ProQuest Dissertations 2025 해외박사(DDOD)

There is much debate about the survival and future of small, private, nonprofit colleges and universities in the United States. Most of them are facing fiscal austerity and their long-term financial sustainability is being questioned. This is in part because of the demographic, technological, regulatory, and other challenges that are impacting higher education but, more important, because small institutions are primarily tuition-revenue dependent. Without being able to secure their financial futures, small, private colleges and universities may not be able to fulfill their unique missions and key roles in society. To ensure their survival, it is imperative that they devise new approaches to doing business.The purpose of this study was to uncover innovative approaches to revenue diversification for small, private nonprofit colleges and universities. It examined why and how leaders at these institutions engaged in such approaches and the challenges they faced in their decision-making processes. A multiple case study research methodology was used to frame the research. It focuses on a sample of three institutions-Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts; Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana; and Denison University, Granville, Ohio-that have demonstrated significant improvement in their revenue streams in the past five years due to their institutional commitment to innovation. A qualitative research method through semistructured interviews of senior leaders in strategic and operational positions at these institutions captured the lived experiences of the individuals directly involved in the innovation initiatives and revenue strategies.This study has attempted to contribute to the field of higher education in two ways. First, the findings from this study may be used as practical key takeaways for senior leaders at small, private colleges and universities who seek to strategically engage in innovative ways to create sustainable financial futures for their institutions. Second, this study has contributed to the body of literature that lies at the intersection of academic business-model innovation, revenue diversification, and institutional decision making for small, private colleges and universities.