Electronic communication, most notably email, is ubiquitous in higher education and remains the dominant, most commonly used communication method in the workplace. Unfortunately, student emails are often abrupt, lack salutations and signatures, and can even be riddled with errors that make it difficult to understand their intended message. This…

Machine learning (ML) techniques have been successfully applied to a wide array of applications. This dissertation aims to take application data handling into account when developing ML-based solutions for real-world problems through a holistic framework. To demonstrate the generality of our framework, we consider two real-world applications: spam…

This dissertation addresses the problem of practice of the high rate of employees in financial organizations clicking on phishing links, positioning their companies at risk of a data incident or breach. The financial sector was the most breached industry in 2022 (Schwartz, 2022) and was impacted the most by malicious phishing emails (Trellix…

This dissertation research is a case study centered on graduate student responses to eight (8) risk and crisis emails sent from two (2) University of Minnesota leaders delivered between February 2020 and August 2021. The study joins conversations about technical communication, risk, and crisis communication, as well as advancing work on digital…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

Throughout my career as an elementary music educator, I constantly sought ways to decenter myself as the instructor and make space for student agency and independence to flourish. However, my efforts over 10 years were rooted in Western Eurocentric thought. Where I thought I was creating a more egalitarian environment, my Whiteness shielded me…