Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Humanitarian Aid and Resilience: A Study of Rural Nepali Educators' Perspectives on Coping and Adaptability in Recreating an Educational Learning Environment for their Students after the 2015 Earthquakes(2020) Corwith, Anne Marie Shimko; Lin, Jing; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 2005 Hyogo Framework pointed to the need for countries to increase resilience at the local level and reduce the need for international aid. Nepal, considered a “fragile” state per the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), received significant international aid to meet the aims of Education for All and Millennium Development Goals. When the 2015 earthquakes struck, international aid for education only reached 1% of the youth impacted. This research investigated educators’ perspectives of responding to and recovering from the earthquakes through a mixed-method, multisite case study to answer the questions: As reported by the UNOCHA Education Cluster 3W report, what is the relationship between the intensity and type of humanitarian aid received (school kits, recreation kits, temporary learning centers and teacher training) by schools in the 14 worst earthquake-hit districts, and the distance from Kathmandu and school population? What are the perspectives of community educators on the level and type of humanitarian aid received after the 2015 earthquakes? What coping capacities did educators utilize in order to establish an educational learning environment for their students after the 2015 earthquakes? What adaptive capacities did educators utilize in order to establish an educational learning environment for their students after the 2015 earthquakes? My research found that educators possessed individual resourcefulness, initiative, and personal strength in addition to community trust to respond to the disaster. Educators lacked access to consistent disaster risk and preparedness information. Lastly, rural educators with connections obtained international aid raising perceptions of inequitable distribution of aid.Item Potential Disasters(2010) Watson, Jennifer Lynn Stewart; Ruppert, John; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The common conceptual thread woven through my work is a fascination with the point at which two things meet, thereby creating a third entirely new event. This ongoing theme of two forces and their point of contact speaks of weakness and controlled failure. Whether it is with feather filled, upholstery fabric forms pinned to the wall by bowed steel armatures, or tense steel rods sprung between wall and floor, my interest lies in exploring how the slow, kinetic action of one, affects the other. I construct three-dimensional drawings with steel rods that rely upon relationships with their surroundings. The starting and ending points of the rods are ambiguous, rather, they are a series of marks that link one point to another. Developed through self-created codes and natural genetic patterning from my personal history, each rod represents a relationship. These installations and three-dimensional drawings are part of the series entitled Potential Disasters. The work has potential for slip, change or collapse. I guide, direct, and balance elements, but once the installation is established, the resulting event is out of my control.Item OPTIMIZATION MODELS AND METHODOLOGIES TO SUPPORT EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS AND POST-DISASTER RESPONSE(2010) Chen, Lichun; Miller-Hooks, Elise; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation addresses three important optimization problems arising during the phases of pre-disaster emergency preparedness and post-disaster response in time-dependent, stochastic and dynamic environments. The first problem studied is the building evacuation problem with shared information (BEPSI), which seeks a set of evacuation routes and the assignment of evacuees to these routes with the minimum total evacuation time. The BEPSI incorporates the constraints of shared information in providing on-line instructions to evacuees and ensures that evacuees departing from an intermediate or source location at a mutual point in time receive common instructions. A mixed-integer linear program is formulated for the BEPSI and an exact technique based on Benders decomposition is proposed for its solution. Numerical experiments conducted on a mid-sized real-world example demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The second problem addressed is the network resilience problem (NRP), involving an indicator of network resilience proposed to quantify the ability of a network to recover from randomly arising disruptions resulting from a disaster event. A stochastic, mixed integer program is proposed for quantifying network resilience and identifying the optimal post-event course of action to take. A solution technique based on concepts of Benders decomposition, column generation and Monte Carlo simulation is proposed. Experiments were conducted to illustrate the resilience concept and procedure for its measurement, and to assess the role of network topology in its magnitude. The last problem addressed is the urban search and rescue team deployment problem (USAR-TDP). The USAR-TDP seeks an optimal deployment of USAR teams to disaster sites, including the order of site visits, with the ultimate goal of maximizing the expected number of saved lives over the search and rescue period. A multistage stochastic program is proposed to capture problem uncertainty and dynamics. The solution technique involves the solution of a sequence of interrelated two-stage stochastic programs with recourse. A column generation-based technique is proposed for the solution of each problem instance arising as the start of each decision epoch over a time horizon. Numerical experiments conducted on an example of the 2010 Haiti earthquake are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.