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Exploring Greater Common Ground: Western Countries and the Turkic and Tajik States of the Central Asian to Trans-Caspian Corridor
No full textFollowing Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, growing cohesion among the Turkic and Tajik states is notable as international and regional power alignments shift. Western countries have coalesced to defend against Russia and develop alternatives to their dependencies on Russia. Seven Turkic and Tajik states along the Central Asian to Trans-Caspian corridor—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Türkiye—are recognized as top candidates for expanded roles in energy supply and product transport. Concurrently, the six former Soviet republics are testing the fraught potential for generational transformation toward operative independence from Russia and more reliable relationships with the West.
The thesis topic is: Western engagement with the seven Turkic and Tajik states along the Central Asian to Trans-Caspian corridor. The research question is: To what extent has the Russia-Ukraine war led Western countries to find common ground with Turkic and Tajik states along the Central Asian to Trans-Caspian corridor? Within theoretical frameworks of linkage and leverage, agency, modernization, and structure, the project conducts empirical data collection, quantitative and qualitative content analysis, hypothesis and proposition evaluation, and policy discussion. The study covers thousands of public records gleaned from official websites of Western states and entities, and Turkic and Tajik states and entities. Background conversations and reliable media sources help to validate or clarify official records. This thesis finds burgeoning realignments, with greater common ground among Western, Turkic, and Tajik states, and much yet to do.Extension Studie
The Enemy Within: Radicalization, Extremism, and the Profession of Arms
No full textThere is a long history of military members engaging in acts of political extremism and the problem has grown in recent years. Because the military is responsible for carrying out violence on behalf of the state, servicemembers must undergo socialization into the military culture and train to engage in combat. With this necessary embrace of a militant culture and acquisition of combat skills, it is perhaps unsurprising that military members would be involved in political violence. This raises several questions regarding extremism and military personnel. First, what aspects of military service and culture may explain the association between military members and political extremism? Existing theories of radicalization and extremism do not sufficiently explain this correlation, requiring further exploration. Furthermore, both servicemembers’ experiences and the rates of extremism differ across and within the military branches. How do servicemembers’ unique experiences within the military help explain why some servicemembers radicalize while others do not?
To answer these questions, I introduce a novel database of instances of military extremism, the Military Extremist Database, and the Social Theory of Military Extremism, which argues the profession of arms involves many experiences associated with extremism that may increase the risk of radicalization among servicemembers; differences across and within the military branches affect the degree of impact these factors have on an individual servicemember and thus their likelihood of radicalization. First, through socialization into the hypermasculine military culture, servicemembers adopt a martial identity defined by a warrior ethos. This identity heightens perceptions of group threats, increases willingness to use violence, and is associated with extremist ideologies like white supremacy, conspiratorial thinking, and religious fundamentalism. The militant warrior ethos also imbues a sense of separation, superiority, or even supremacy relative to the civilian public. These effects are particularly strong among the Marine Corps and the Special Forces community.
Second, military culture fosters a form of “band of brothers” social cohesion which is also associated with extremism. Strong social bonds drive an in-group/out-group mentality, facilitate group deviancy, provide opportunities for connection with extremist individuals, and create avenues for recruitment into extremist organizations. This research shows Army and Air Force combat personnel are more likely to join extremist organizations and extremists from the Marine Corps are most likely to have social ties to other radicalized Marines.
Third, the government entrusts the military to carry out violence on its behalf and combat is a significant part of military culture. Training for and engaging in combat relies on dehumanization, disengagement of moral barriers, and desensitization to violence, all of which are associated with extremism. This analysis demonstrates servicemembers who train for combat are more likely to be extremists than those who train for non-combat positions, whether they engage in combat or not. Individuals who participate in combat are more likely to be extremist than non-combat servicemembers. Lastly, combat-related post-traumatic stress is associated with an increased likelihood of extremism among military personnel.
Finally, the Department of Defense cites the oath of office and its fidelity to the Constitution as a bulwark against extremist activity. The military, however, is failing to adequately educate its members on the oath, which has turned it into a liability. This is particularly true for the Navy and Marine Corps. Extremist organizations and bad actors are manipulating the oath to entice military members towards extremist activity.
To adequately combat extremism within the ranks, and after, the Department of Defense needs a multifaceted approach that addresses each of these concerns This research provides policy recommendations to tackle the problem of extremism while preserving the military’s ability to carry out is mission of national defense.Public Polic
Trust Interrupted: How Transitional Moments Reshape Organizational Trust in the Nonprofit Sector
No full textThe Leadership Academy (“Academy”) is a national nonprofit organization that develops educational leaders committed to advancing transformational leadership in schools. As the organization entered a period of transition refreshing its strategic plan and navigating growing political polarization, questions of trust moved to the center. Despite years of investment in inclusive practices and strong relationships, staff continued to experience uncertainty about decision-making, communication, and the organization’s long-term direction. This raised an important question: How can organizational trust be strengthened and protected during moments of significant disruption?
This project aims to better understand the state of trust at the Academy and to design strategies to preserve and build trust across the organization. While strategic planning provides the structure for the work, the focus is on trust itself. Over the course of a year, the project unfolds through four phases:
• understanding the current conditions of trust
• designing and redesigning systems and practices
• engaging staff in shaping the organization’s future
• putting long-term structures in place to preserve trust over time
Key strategies include bringing together diverse staff groups to give input, creating clearer decision-making processes, offering regular updates on progress, and gathering feedback about how people were experiencing the changes.
What emerged most clearly from this work is that trust does not exist equally across an organization. Instead, trust is layered, shaped by staff members’ roles, identities, experiences, tenure, longevity, and investment in the organization. This means the same process can build trust for some while eroding it for others, particularly when cultural differences and power dynamics go unaddressed. For the Academy, the path forward requires more than improved systems. It requires a deep commitment to cultural responsiveness and the recognition that trust-building must meet people where they are, honoring the varied histories and perspectives they bring. More broadly, this project offers a call to action for education organizations: In times of uncertainty, understanding and attending to the layers of trust within a diverse staff is not optional; it is the work.Educatio
The American Ritual of Violence: A Cultural Analysis of Mass Shootings at Schools in the United States
No full textThis thesis uses anthropology to explore why young white men commit mass
shootings in schools in the United States in an effort to prevent future mass shootings.
Existing scholarship on the topic comes from the fields of psychology, sociology, and
criminology. While anthropologists study violence more generally, there has been limited
consideration of violence in the context of school shootings. In an attempt to further the
anthropological exploration of why young white men commit mass shootings in schools,
this project concentrates on three areas: Foucauldian discourse analysis on hegemonic
masculinity content created by school shooters; the ritualization of the process to commit
a school shooting informed by Roy Wagner’s scholarship on ritual theory analysis; and
an exploration of the body as a site of meaning when paired with a gun in the creation of
hegemonic masculinity. Evidence considered includes the online posts of school shooters
from message boards, YouTube commentary sections, websites, and remnants of their
journals and manifestos. The discourse was coded into primary themes that revealed the
young men who became shooters experienced social isolation, felt attacked by society,
and spent an overwhelming amount of time imagining violent massacres. We must offer
these young men opportunities to reintegrate into society before their feelings of
victimization set in and they view violence as their only pathway to hegemonic
masculinity. It might require writing a new origin story of the American man, one that
does not solely depend on the exercise of violence and power to both identify and elevate
itself above all others at any cost.Extension Studie
SHARD: Spatio-Hierarchical Architectures for RNA Data
No full textWe present a novel hierarchical transformer architecture for integrating morphological features with gene expression data in spatial single-cell analysis. Unlike existing approaches that either process bulk tissue regions or analyze modalities separately, our framework is the first to directly pair individual segmented cell images with their corresponding gene expression vectors through a cross-modal attention mechanism and incorporate information from neighboring cells. Our framework processes both individual cells and their microenvironments (niches) through a multimodal, multi-scale approach that preserves cell-level granularity while capturing tissue context.
We constructed a system with three components: a cell image encoder for morphological features, a gene expression encoder based on the pre-trained scGPT model, and a cross-modal attention transformer that aligns these data types. Together, this model is trained on 17.5 million cells from 20 tissue samples using the 10X Xenium platform, applying masked gene expression modeling with negative binomial distribution loss.
As a result, it improves over existing methods, with superior clustering results, with higher silhouette scores (0.49 vs. 0.32) and cell classification performance comparable to cutting-edge methods.
This thesis establishes a foundation for cell analysis that connects segmented morphological data and gene expression while representing tissue context at multiple scales. These embeddings create more generalizable understandings of cell function and have applications across disease classification, cell type identification, and spatial context analysis.Computer Scienc
Energy Security in Southeast Asia: The Philippines Amidst Rising Geopolitical Tensions
No full textThis thesis examines the path to energy security for the Philippines and the
validity of a pragmatic remolding of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO),
with the Philippines as the crux nation comprising original members of SEATO as the
country’s strongest security partners: U.S., UK, Australia, Germany, France, New
Zealand—and suggested new members Japan, Korea, and Canada. The Philippines’ role
within SEATO takes on a comparative approach with member nations of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Modern international security challenges
illustrate the struggle of the Philippines, as a small Southeast Asian nation amidst the
unilateral actions of a nuclear power like China.Extension Studie
Dynamics Between Residential Composting and Rodent Sightings in Boston
No full textCommensal Rattus species rank among the most widespread urban pests thriving on human-generated resources and posing significant challenges to public health and infrastructure (Lee et al., 2021). Despite their prevalence, there remains a gap in understanding their urban ecology and effective prevention strategies (Lee et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2022a; Lee et al., 2022b). City officials have increasingly turned to composting initiatives as rodent management tools, recognizing the relationship between poorly managed food waste as an attractant for high rodent activity (Lee et al., 2022a; Sánchez et al., 2021; Tamayo-Uria et al., 2014). However, it remains unclear how effectively residential composting contributes to rodent control, particularly across different urban environments and socioeconomic contexts (Lee et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2022a). The “War on Rats” is complex, and assessing the effectiveness of food waste control strategies requires a nuanced understanding of rodent and human behavior (Lee et al., 2022b).
The main objective of my thesis was to investigate the impact of food waste control strategies on rodent complaint levels in Boston from 2022-2024. I focused on how Boston’s voluntary residential composting program and community compost bins impacted 311 rodent sightings reported across neighborhoods. I hypothesized that increased residential composting would decrease rodent sightings, with varying effects across different urban densities. I evaluated these relationships using time series analysis, spatial clustering, buffer analysis, and lagged correlation. Results showed that despite composting participation increasing by 54% (from 17,134 to 26,426 households) and food waste diversion rising by 228% (510.44 to 1,675.13 tons), rodent sightings rose by 0.4% (5,944 to 5,965). Additional analysis of 14 Project Oscar community compost bins revealed rodent activity increases of 180% in Allston and 29% in South End.
K-means clustering revealed four distinct neighborhood patterns based on composting participation and 311 service requests about rodents: low-activity areas with minimal engagement in composting and rodent sightings, moderate zones with balanced participation in both variables, high-rodent sightings (150-350 sightings) with moderate composting adoption, and high-composting neighborhoods (300-900 sign-ups) with few rodent sightings (50-150 sightings).
Additionally, I investigated how composting participation varied across neighborhood characteristics. I hypothesized higher human density areas would show weaker reductions in rodent activity. The data partially confirmed this, with lower-density areas achieving higher composting participation and demonstrating slightly stronger negative correlation coefficients (reaching approximately -.6 by week 20) between household composting and rodent sightings compared to higher-density areas (-.5), consistent across multiple density metrics.
This research establishes a framework for evaluating urban waste management strategies while acknowledging the limitations of using 311 requests as proxies for rodent activity. These preliminary findings can guide municipalities toward improved collection methods and more targeted approaches for measuring integrated pest management effectiveness across diverse urban neighborhoods. The identified patterns suggest that policy makers should implement neighborhood-specific waste management strategies rather than one-size-fits-all approaches across varied urban environments.Extension Studie
Association Between Surgery and 5-year Survival for Patients Diagnosed with Stage I Bladder Adenocarcinoma
No full textBackground: Bladder cancer (BC) comprises of various subtypes, each with unique demographic and clinical characteristics. This study leverages the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data to investigate whether surgical intervention is associated with 5-year mortality for patients with stage I bladder adenocarcinoma (BA).
Methods: 209 patients met BA eligibility criteria, which included complete demographic data and clinical information. A multivariable logistic regression adjusting for age, ethnicity, gender, and neoadjuvant chemotherapy was used to interrogate the association between surgery versus no surgery on 5-year mortality.
Results: Between 1975 and 2021, 115 patients (55%) received a surgical intervention as the primary treatment for stage I BA. Multivariable adjustment for neoadjuvant chemotherapy, ethnicity, age and sex demonstrated that surgery was associated with 64 percent lower likelihood of death (odds ratio [OR] 0.36, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.11 – 0.62, p = 0.02). Further analysis revealed a nonsignificant interaction between surgery and neoadjuvant chemotherapy (p-interaction = 0.07), indicating that the association of surgery with death did not significantly differ based on whether patients received neoadjuvant chemotherapy or not.
Conclusion: This study suggests that tumor resection may be effective in treating stage I BA, highlighting an observed survival pattern for patients that received a surgery.Medical Scienc
Future Ready: Creating a Coherent Career Advising Strategy at The Denver Scholarship Foundation
No full textHigher education in the United States is at a crossroads. College enrollment rates have declined for the past 15 years, and many question whether a four-year degree is worth the time, money, and sacrifice it takes to persist to graduation. Most students cite securing a good job as their primary reason for pursuing higher education, illustrating an evolving education landscape where career conversations and programming must be increasingly prevalent to meet individual student and broader economic needs.
Colorado has a unique education paradox, as it leads the nation in post-secondary education attainment. However, Colorado’s high school graduation and college matriculation rates are below national averages, as a significant portion of its highly educated professional workforce is imported from other states. Post-secondary credentials are required to earn a living wage in Denver, making it crucial to strengthen the state’s education-to-career pipeline to fill available jobs. The context above informed my residency at The Denver Scholarship Foundation (DSF), which was created in 2006 to help make college possible for Denver Public School (DPS) students.
My capstone illustrates my effort to develop a coherent career advising strategy that prepares high school and college students for professional success. By creating psychological safety, focusing on organizational learning, and employing a facilitative leadership approach, I strived to create the conditions for future career advising success at DSF.
During my residency, I analyzed the nonprofit career advising landscape. I also conducted background research on theories and best practices for career advising, including career theory, mentorship and social capital formation, career exposure and experiences for high school students, the role of college internships in helping students avoid underemployment, and career metrics. In addition, I evaluated DSF’s existing career programming and reported on stakeholder insights to inform future program design.
I conclude with recommendations for DSF to clearly define career advising, build staff capacity, create more work-based learning and mentorship opportunities, and implement career metrics. I also share relevant sector-wide implications, such as embracing holistic advising and college student success coaching, strategically collecting and using student career data, facilitating transformational partnerships, and providing affordable pathways through postsecondary education.Educatio
Job Loss and Work Among Older Workers
No full textIn recent decades the older worker population has grown significantly, and its sociodemographic composition has become more diverse. Yet it is not clear what the implications of these demographic changes are for work in older age. Prior research on aging and work has predominately studied more advantaged workers. This dissertation improves our understanding of the labor market experiences of marginalized workers in older age.
In Chapter 2, I evaluate whether Black-White disparities in reemployment likelihood increase, decrease, or remain constant among older workers relative to younger workers and what factors explain these differences. I draw on scholarship on racial disparities in health and evaluate three hypotheses: cumulative dis/advantage (inequality increases over time), aging-as- leveler (inequality decreases over time), and persistent inequality (inequality does not change over time). I test these hypotheses using hazard models and data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. I find that Black-White inequalities in reemployment narrow by about 70 percent in older age, supporting the aging-as-leveler perspective. Relative to their younger counterparts, White older workers experience a greater decline in reemployment likelihood than Black older workers. Though Black older workers face the lowest chance of reemployment. Prior experience, education, and skills do not explain Black-White differences in reemployment across age, suggesting that hiring discrimination and other post-job-loss factors likely underlie these differences.
In Chapter 3, I generate more comprehensive estimates of Black-White differences in the costs of job loss across age and test which theories account for these differences. Scholarship on job loss typically examines changes in earnings only for workers who reemploy and likely underestimates the financial implications of late-career job loss, particularly for minority older workers. In my sample I include individuals who do not reemploy to account for Black and older workers’ lower likelihood of reemployment. Using fixed effects models and data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, I find that workers experience a large decline in earnings following job loss, ranging from 65 to 81 percent 1-3 years after job loss. Older and Black workers experience greater declines in earnings than their White and younger counterparts, but I do not find evidence of Black-White disparities changing across age. I find that job tenure partially accounts for age differences, pointing to human capital, job matching, and deferred compensation theories. However, age and race differences in earnings losses remain either partially or totally unexplained, suggesting that differences stem from unobserved factors that likely emerge after job loss, such as job search characteristics and age and racial discrimination.
In Chapter 4, I examine why less-educated men are more likely to exit the labor force than their more-educated counterparts prior to retirement age. In recent decades there has been an increase in early retirement (labor force exit by around age 60) among men, particularly among those without a college degree. This gap in labor force attachment by educational attainment (what I refer to as the education gap) is of concern because working into older age is critical for creating a sufficient nest egg for retirement. Is the education gap in labor force participation due to choice or constraint? I use the Health and Retirement Study to estimate how much of the education gap is a function of less-educated men disproportionately being unable to work (health status) and disproportionately lacking access to higher-quality jobs with employee retirement benefits that encourage working longer (pensions). I find that differences in health status and in pension coverage account for 67 percent and 22 percent of the gap, respectively. Together these findings suggest that less-educated men likely exit the labor force due to constraint, prior to saving enough for retirement. The education gap in labor force participation could therefore be a precursor to retirement security inequalities in older age.Social Polic