This thesis looks at how WNBA players used their platform to stand up for social and political change during the 2020-2021 season. This research focuses on the documentary Power of the Dream (Porter, 2024), which follows the Atlanta Dream and other WNBA players during a time of a global pandemic, racial injustice, and an election year. Guided by public relations scholars Bernays (1961), Curtain and Gaither (2007), Ciszek (2015) for my methodology. By using the Cultural-Economic Model (CEM) (Ciszek, 2015) and understanding their five interconnected components to guide understanding of activism in sports. By using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), this research found five key themes in the film: power in unity, bigger than basketball, symbolism and strategic communication, intergenerational leadership and emotional labor, and political impact. The WNBA players did more than play basketball, they used their voices and actions to create change. They wore t-shirts with powerful messages, sat out games to protest injustice, and supported political candidates. Their teamwork and leadership helped make a real difference, including helping elect Georgia’s first Black senator. This study shows how athletes can be powerful leaders off the court. It also highlights the emotional strength and care that went into their work on and off the court. The WNBA’s activism reminds us that sports are not isolated from the real world, they are part of it, and athletes have the power to shape it.

The Northern Gulf of Alaska (NGA) is a biologically productive system, culturally and economically sustaining Alaska’s coastal communities, with inorganic nutrients as an important foundation of this important food web. Nonetheless, seasonal cycles, interannual variability, and nutrient chemistry all influence nutrient dynamics, creating challenges in the overall understanding of the NGA ecosystem and the resources it provides. Therefore, this work examines nutrient sources, sinks, and trends over time and location to identify and explain key nutrient dynamics within the NGA. One key process is the exchange between dissolved (potentially bioavailable) and particulate nutrients that is examined in Chapters Two and Three. In Chapter Two, the seasonal and interannual cycles of dissolved nutrients are examined, and in Chapter Three, the sources, transport, and role of particles as nutrient reservoirs are considered. Finally, in Chapter Four, the Copper River, a major source of both dissolved and particulate nutrients to the nearshore NGA, and its associated freshwater plume are discussed with respect to the transport of resources under variable wind conditions.

Unconscious patients who are resuscitated after cardiac arrest often have a poor prognosis for neurological recovery and are routinely treated with therapeutic hypothermia as a standard of care. This intervention aims to reduce the risk of death and minimize brain damage. However, results from the Targeted Temperature Management 2 (TTM2) trial in 2021 indicate that cooling does not improve neurological outcomes in these patients. This finding raises questions about the neurological benefits, particularly regarding neurogenesis, of the rewarming phase of therapeutic hypothermia, as well as the effects of repeated cooling and rewarming cycles. Neurogenesis has been largely overlooked in therapeutic hypothermia research, leaving significant gaps in our understanding. Notably, hibernation and therapeutic hypothermia share physiological similarities, but hibernation is a more complex process that confers neurological protection against cardiac arrest in the Arctic ground squirrel (AGS), an extreme hibernator. Specifically, during hibernation, AGS repeatedly lower body temperature to as low as 1 to -3°C, along with reduced blood flow and metabolism during torpor, then periodically rewarm to normal levels during brief interbout arousals. These repeated cooling and rewarming cycles happened at least eight times during hibernation. Building on this knowledge, this thesis explores the possibility that cooling and rewarming could activate neurogenesis and thereby improve the benefits of therapeutic hypothermia by replacing dead and damaged neurons. As proof of concept, I developed a method for measuring hippocampal neurogenesis in the AGS across three seasonal states: summer active, hibernation torpor, and interbout arousal.

Despite decades of traction and respect that Indigenous Knowledge has gained, Western and other sources of academic sciences diverge at the point of what is acceptable, what is real, and what is valid regarding Indigenous spiritual belief systems interwoven throughout Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous management practices. My project uses Kiŋikmiut1 ukpuliivut2 and iniqtautit3 as a framework to bridge the understanding for people outside our culture about how our spiritual belief system and customary Iňupiaq4 laws ensure balance and sustainability5 ofthe resources that our people depend upon. In this work, I seek to address the misconceptions that dominant Western scientific worldviews have of Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous spirituality within natural resource management. Through studying Kiŋikmiut oral histories of our elders, my project builds a framework for Kiŋikmiut governance, which maintains social order and balance in our community and our spirit world, especially as it pertains to our hunting, fishing, and gathering way of life. As an Iňupiaq Indigenous researcher whose epistemology comes from the Kiŋikmiut worldview, my research authentically presents the reciprocal relationships between our people and all living and nonliving things from our taġiuq6, nuna7, pitaksrat8, and siḷa9 and all that they provide for us. This project offers an inside view of Kiŋikmiut Ukpuliivut: An Iňupiaq Frameworkfor Bridging Spirituality and Stewardship in Natural Resource Management for the scientific community to learn from and better understand Indigenous ways of knowing in natural resource management and beyond. It presents recommendations for transforming natural resource management frameworks to build equity and respect for Indigenous Knowledge and traditional management practices to ensure adaptive, flexible, holistic management of our traditional food resources10. ----- 1 Kiŋikmiut means the people from Kiŋigin. Kiŋigin means the high place named for the mountain that stands behind our village. The post base -miut means the people of that place or tribe. 2 Ukpuliivut are our spiritual beliefs that are woven into our Indigenous Knowledge system and our traditional management practices. 3 Iniqtautit are our traditional laws that govern our Kiŋikmiut ways of life. 4 Iňupiaq means the real people. Iňupiat are the plural form of the word Iňupiaq. 5 The word sustainability is used in relation to the framework ofthis project, with the understanding that the health, wellbeing, and abundance ofnatural resources is inextricably linked to our Siḷam Inua and the balance that is maintained by adhering to our ukpuliivut and iniqtautit. This concept has also been explored and described by Dr. Oscar Kawagley in the Yup’ik way. (A. O. Kawagley 1995). 6 Taġiuq is ocean. 7 Nuna is land. 8 Pitaksrat means animals. 9 Siḷa is our air/weather spirit that extends into the universe. 10 Our traditional food resources are the fish, wildlife, and other resources, such as marine mammals, fish, birds, duck eggs, shellfish like crab, wild greens, berries, and more, harvested throughout all seasons of the year in accordance with our ukpuliivut and iniqtautit.

The purpose of this project is to create a communication link from a Student Ground Station at the NOAA facility in Fox to the Cubesat Communication Platform (CCP) Cubesat . The Student Ground Station will send Commands (Uplink) and receive Telemetry (Downlink). The radio onboard of the CCP Cubesat is the GOMSpace AX100, which is a Commercial off the shelf system. The GOMSpace AX100 uses Cubesat Space Protocol and AX.25 standards for their packet structure. The GOMspace AX100 uses Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) for modulation. My project will use a Software Defined Radio (SDR) that was coded in Matlab to communicate with the GOMSpace AX100. For Uplink, I will receive bits from COSMOS and conform to Cubesat Space Protocol and AX.25 standards. After I have Cubesat Space Protocol and AX.25 encoded bits, I perform FSK modulation on the bits and send the voltages to the SDR. In Downlink, I will receive samples from the SDR and perform FSK demodulation. After I have bits from demodulation, I will perform AX.25 decoding, then Cubesat Space Protocol decoding. The payload is then extracted from the decoded bits, then the payload data is sent to COSMOS for interpretation. I was able to successfully send commands to the GOMSpace AX100 and I was able to decode Telemetry packets sent by the AX100, which means I was are able to establish a communication link to the AX100.

The benthic environment in southern Kachemak Bay, Alaska provides critical ecosystem services, processing organic matter from the land and the sea, and returning nutrients to the food web. In Kachemak Bay, concerns have arisen that marine agriculture (mariculture) operations in the form of salmon hatcheries and oyster farms may have negative impacts on the local environment. This thesis investigates the seafloor sediment environment to assess these potential impacts under salmon hatchery net pens in Tutka Bay Lagoon, and under an oyster farm in Jakolof Bay. We found that beneath the net pens, high waste inputs of fish food, feces and dead fish contribute to negative impacts on the local environment. Very few sediment organisms were found, and most are likely excluded from that habitat by lack of oxygen that arises due to inputs of excess organic matter. Furthermore, the hatchery site showed high oxygen and carbon fluxes associated with microbial and physical processes, because macrofaunal organisms were not present. Time series data show how the lagoon frequently experiences conditions that are outside of the regionally expected values and indicate that waste inputs from hatchery operations, together with the isolated nature of the lagoon, contribute to low oxygen conditions persisting in the deeper portion of the lagoon. Overall, the Tutka Bay Lagoon salmon hatchery has an adverse impact on the local environment. However, oyster farms sites did not show any negative impacts on this specific environment, being similar in terms of their community and ecosystem to non­ mariculture sites, which are good measures of ecosystem status.

Wildfire is the dominant disturbance in boreal forest ecosystems, and its frequency and severity are increasing with climate change. This dissertation examines how wildfire affects boreal stream habitats, food webs, and fish movement across spatial and temporal scales in interior Alaska. In Chapter 2, I compared burned and unburned streams 10 to 15 years post-fire using habitat survey, water chemistry, and aquatic community composition data. Burned sites had marginally significant lower canopy cover (-19.6%, p = 0.095), coarser substrate (+23.7 mm, p = 0.102), and higher macroinvertebrate abundance (626 ± 361 vs. 331 ± 349 individuals/m2, p = 0.03); fish biomass was more than twice as high in burned sites. In Chapter 3, I combined stable isotope analysis (δ13C and δ15N values) with simulations from the Aquatic Trophic Productivity (ATP) model to evaluate how wildfire alters food web structure and productivity for up to 50 years post-fire. Field observations revealed that burned streams had greater aquatic macroinvertebrate diversity, longer food chains (δ15N range = 6.2‰ vs. 3.4‰), and lower δ13C values in primary producers, suggesting increased algal energy inputs to food webs. ATP model outputs supported these patterns, predicting persistent increases in macroinvertebrate biomass and fish production for decades following fire. Bayesian isotope mixing models further indicated that juvenile Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and Arctic grayling (Thymallus arcticus) in burned streams relied more on algal-based food resources and exhibited broader niche widths. Chapter 4 applied a spatial stream network model and strontium isoscape to estimate where Arctic grayling reared and moved throughout life. Approximately 20% of modeled fish locations occurred in burned areas, which is roughly proportional to their availability (~23% of the basin), suggesting no strong preference or avoidance at the basin scale throughout the lifetime of individual fish. Larger, mature fish with higher dry mass were disproportionately associated with burned habitats. Life-history clusters characterized by long­ distance movement were more common in burned sites, suggesting that post-fire habitats may provide key foraging opportunities within the boreal riverscape. Overall, my dissertation integrated empirical field data, modeling approaches, and spatial analyses to provide a broad assessment of how wildfire influences the structure and function of boreal freshwater ecosystems.

The recent historic low salmon returns in the Yukon River contribute to an ongoing humanitarian crisis for subsistence users and Indigenous Peoples with cultural and well-being ties to salmon. After over a decade of relative calm, the marine parasite Ichthyophonus has undergone a resurgence and is once again infecting Yukon River Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha; king; Taryaqvak; Ggaal; Gath; Łuk choo, hereafter referred to as king salmon) at high rates, with currently unknown consequences for survival of migrating adults. This thesis pairs multiple knowledge systems to assess the prevalence, severity, and impact of Ichthyophonus on adult Yukon River king salmon during their upriver spawning migration. Organized as two chapters, I conducted work that suggests highly infected king salmon may experience mortality before reaching spawning grounds due to Ichthyophonus and its interactions with other stressors. Infection severity significantly declined as fish migrated upriver, consistent with selective mortality of severely diseased fish. However, infection prevalence remained largely unchanged during migration, which we attribute to detection limits of testing coupled with infection progression. Through dialogues at community gatherings facilitated in two fishing-dependent Yukon River communities, I sought to co-interpret research findings alongside the Tribal Council and community members. Participants highlighted Ichthyophonus as only one of a myriad of co-occurring challenges faced by Yukon River king salmon and consistently voiced concerns that a focus on disease would be used to assign blame for salmon declines that they felt were more attributable to factors such as marine bycatch, and overfishing. Overall, the approach and findings contribute to an elevation of, and stronger inclusion of, Indigenous Knowledge, Tribal governance, local knowledge, and ecological stewardship within western fisheries science and management. While this thesis provides evidence that Ichthyophonus may indeed contribute to king salmon mortality in-river, it should not be used to diminish the voices of community dialogue participants who emphasized the importance of considering the impacts of industrial fisheries, broader environmental factors, as well as historical and cross- jurisdictional management practices when explaining the low salmon abundance and population declines. I dream this thesis will contribute to mending a proverbial collective fishing net to steward fisheries by uplifting Tribal sovereignty and governance, intentionally weaving together many ways of knowing to guide us toward more equitable, respectful, and restorative salmon management for future generations.

Research suggests that addressing a supervisee’s personal factors in clinical supervision is critical to developing their therapeutic capacities (Aponte, 1994; Krug and Schneider, 2016; Southern, 2007; Zorga et al., 2001). However, little is known about the factors contributing to clinical supervisors’ decisions to address supervisees’ personal development and dispositions in clinical supervision, despite their importance in supervisees’ professional development. The purpose of this grounded theory study was to discern the nuanced narratives of clinical supervisors and construct a theory of factors related to their decisions regarding whether to address or not address the personal development and dispositions of supervisees in clinical supervision. Using a qualitative approach to the research, the study drew on a purposive sample of clinical supervisors across the United States. A brief demographic questionnaire was followed by in-depth, semi-structured interviews for data collection. Interview transcripts were analyzed using a social constructivist grounded theory methodology. Analysis of the transcripts identified nine themes related to the primary research question: (a) boundaries, (b) conflict avoidance, (c) poor supervisor-supervisee fit, (d) supervisee resistance, (e) time constraint, (f) gatekeeping role, (g) supervisory match process, (h) rapport, and (i) supervision training experiences. Analysis of the participants’ responses to a sub-inquiry identified two additional themes: (a) supervision is not therapy and (b) it’s a gray line. The findings of this exploratory study may benefit clinical supervisors and training programs by offering strategies to assist supervisors in addressing the personal factors of supervisees. The implications of the findings suggest the need for doctoral programs in the helping fields to incorporate improved formal supervision training to reduce barriers to addressing supervisees’ personal development and dispositions. These implications may help to create more comprehensive theories on clinical supervision and improve training experiences for mental-health trainees.

Attribution studies have shown that warming Arctic temperatures have led to a substantial loss of sea ice and an increase in large wildfire seasons. With wildfire and sea ice decline impacting everyday life by disrupting transportation or damaging infrastructure, for example, a clear need for skillful forecasts at seasonal timescales has emerged. This dissertation addresses critical challenges in seasonal prediction for wildfire and sea ice in Alaska. The first study evaluates outlooks of Buildup Index derived from three seasonal forecasts to assess their skill in predicting fire conditions. Forecast skill is greatest during the wind (April 1-June 10) and drought (July 21-August 9) fire subseasons and in the Western Boreal subregion of Alaska. Combining the forecasts into a multimodel ensemble substantially improves skill. Next, the same seasonal forecasts undergo a comprehensive evaluation of temperature and precipitation in Alaska. While forecasts exhibit similar biases in average precipitation, biases in average temperature vary among the models. However, wrong forecasts for all models tend to forecast temperature anomalies that are too warm. Case studies of good and bad forecast years suggest that forecast skill is influenced by the strength of teleconnection indices relevant to Alaska climate. The final study quantifies impacts of anomalous ocean heat content (OHC) in the Bering Sea and ocean heat transport through the Bering Strait on September Arctic sea ice concentrations (SIC). The addition of one-time OHC anomalies in the Bering Sea results in enhanced SIC decreases along the shallow continental shelves near Alaska but increases on the order of ~10% in the Central Arctic. Increasing SIC is modeled by suppressed upward heat flux and atmospheric forcing. This research was conducted in collaboration with community partners, and their sustained engagement ensured that the resulting tools and insights were scientifically robust and directly relevant to operational decision making.