The outlying cities of Phoenix's West Metropolitan experienced rapid growth in the past ten years. This trend is only going to continue with an average expected growth of 449-891% between 2000 and 2035 (ADOT, 2012). Phoenix is not new to growth and has consistently seen swaths of people added to its population. This raises the question of what happened to the people who lived in Phoenix's West Valley during this period of rapid change and growth in their communities? What are their stories and what do their stories reveal about the broader public history of change in Phoenix's West Valley? In consideration of these questions, the community oral histories of eight residents from the West Valley were collected to add historical nuance to the limited archival records available on the area. From this collection, the previous notion of "post-war boomtowns” describing Phoenix’s West Valley was revealed to be highly inaccurate and dismissive of the residents' experiences who lived and formed their lives there.

The purpose of this thesis was to analyze the social media marketing strategies of Goldvana, a recently launched startup who provides a nanotech-enhanced CBD brand, analyze the survey data from over 930 respondents, and make recommendations for Goldvana to improve its social media marketing strategy going forward. After overviewing the science and efficacy of CBD, its legal background, industry trends, and best practices, this thesis will review Goldvana’s offerings, differentiation, and previous social media strategies. Then, this thesis analyzes the data of a qualtrics survey sent to 933 respondents. Among the most interesting trends found were consumers’ heavy prioritization of the credibility of CBD brands, the suggested benefits that consumers were most strongly influenced by (stress relief, pain relief, headache relief), the strong preference of Instagram as a platform to engage with brands on, and significant correlations between CBD use and which benefits of CBD (as well as unique benefits of Goldvana) that consumers consider in their purchasing decision. After analyzing the primary data, industry trends, and best practices, I make three categories of recommendations for Goldvana to revamp its current social media marketing strategy. These recommendations include new tactics for our content strategy, insight on how rebranding may benefit Goldvana, and ideas to install advertisement campaigns that are compliant with the guidelines of both social media platforms and the FDA.

The purpose of this thesis was to analyze the social media marketing strategies of Goldvana, a recently launched startup who provides a nanotech-enhanced CBD brand, analyze the survey data from over 930 respondents, and make recommendations for Goldvana to improve its social media marketing strategy going forward. After overviewing the science and efficacy of CBD, its legal background, industry trends, and best practices, this thesis will review Goldvana’s offerings, differentiation, and previous social media strategies. Then, this thesis analyzes the data of a qualtrics survey sent to 933 respondents. Among the most interesting trends found were consumers’ heavy prioritization of the credibility of CBD brands, the suggested benefits that consumers were most strongly influenced by (stress relief, pain relief, headache relief), the strong preference of Instagram as a platform to engage with brands on, and significant correlations between CBD use and which benefits of CBD (as well as unique benefits of Goldvana) that consumers consider in their purchasing decision. After analyzing the primary data, industry trends, and best practices, I make three categories of recommendations for Goldvana to revamp its current social media marketing strategy. These recommendations include new tactics for our content strategy, insight on how rebranding may benefit Goldvana, and ideas to install advertisement campaigns that are compliant with the guidelines of both social media platforms and the FDA.

In this paper, I cover the background and economic history of green buildings, including four case studies. Based on this exploration, I find that green roofs and walls are best suited to dense, highly paved cities with little capacity to expand their sewer systems. Green infrastructure is best suited for stormwater management to avoid combined sewer overflow (CSO) pollution and managing urban heat island (UHI) effects, while at the same time providing many positive externalities for people and the environment. Green buildings take those benefits and fit them into a smaller area (on roofs and walls), which is most applicable where tearing up pavement to provide more ground-level green space and expanding the sewer systems would be too costly.

Amidinates and guanidinates are promising supporting ligands in organometallic and coordination chemistry, highly valued for their accessibility, tunability, and comparability with other popular anionic N-chelating hard donor ligands like β-diketiminates. By far the most powerful way to access these ligands involves direct metal-nucleophile insertion into N,N’- substituted carbodiimides. However, the majority of reported examples require the use of commercially accessible carbodiimide peptide coupling reagents with simple alkyl substituents leading to low variation in potential substituents. Presented here is the design, synthesis, and isolation of a novel N,N’-bis[3-(diphenylphosphino)propyl]carbodiimide via an Aza-Wittig reaction between two previously described air stable substrates. At room temperature, 3-(diphenylphosphanyl-borane)-propylisocyanate was added to N-(3-(diphenylphospino)propyl)-triphenylphosphinimine, leading to product formation in minutes. One-pot phosphine-borane deprotection, followed by simple filtration of the crude mixture through a small, basic silica plug using pentane and diethyl ether granted the corresponding carbodiimide in high purity and yield (over 70%), confirmed by 1H, 13C, and 31P NMR spectroscopy. In addition to accessing different central carbon substituents, modification of phosphine substituents should be easily accessible through minor variations in the synthesis. With these precursors, anionic amidinates and guanidinates capable of κ4 -N,N,P,P-coordination may be accessed. The ability of the labile phosphine arms to associate and dissociate may facilitate catalysis. Thus, this carbodiimide provides a tunable, reliable one step precursor to novel substituted amidinates and guanidinates for homogeneous transition metal catalysis.

Purpose: This paper serves to illustrate the risks that affect multinational organizations during this new era of global production and increased supply chain complexity. This paper also strives to showcase the benefits of conducting a Network Optimization analysis on a firm’s logistics system including but not limited to reducing the impact of supply chain market and operational risk, improving efficiency, and increasing cost savings across the organization. Approach: This paper will have two main sections beginning with an in depth look into the theory supporting supply chain logistics network optimizations. Through this literature review, the best practices in the industry will be compared to risk mitigation methodology to determine an analytical process that can be applied to companies considering conducting a network optimization. The second stage of this paper takes a clinical look at the aerospace industry and the implementation process of a Logistics Network Optimization at an industry leader to ultimately recommend additional considerations they should implement into their process. Recommendation: To ensure the effective adoption of a network optimization in the aerospace industry, and other manufacturing industries, the maintenance of logistics data and creation of long term 3PL partnerships are needed for success. It is also important to frame a network optimization not as an operational project, but rather a critical business process aimed to mitigate risk within the supply chain though a four-stage risk identification process.

This project analyzed the utilization rates of respective factories for Company X compared to the Manufacturing Utilization Policy to identify discrepancies in the policy baseline trigger and when the factories are ramped to full utilization. The current policy bases three different factory types, ATM, DS/DP, and FSM all on the same baseline of FSM. This was originally set in place from a lack of sufficient data for the other factories and now that there is enough data to identify the utilization rates of each factory type, a more suitable baseline for each can be determined. If continuing to use the FSM baseline, Company X will be designating certain factories as underutilized, triggering the manufacturing utilization policy and inefficiently allocating the building expenses, thus increasing the cost per unit of products produced.