Nurturing Young Minds: Early Childhood Well-being in Kazakhstan

2024–2025

Quality early childhood education shapes children’s developmental, health, and educational trajectories, yet its role in young children’s well-being, as distinct from academic readiness, remains poorly understood, particularly in Central Asia. As a core team member, I helped build the first child-voiced well-being dataset in a Central Asian context, working directly with 316 children aged 4 to 7 across public and private kindergartens in multiple regions of Kazakhstan and navigating informed assent and child-safeguarding protocols in the field.

Timing and Risk in Academic Probation

2024–2026

First-year transitions are where many students falter, but institutions often respond to academic difficulty too late to change the outcome. Using survival analysis across an institutional dataset of more than 7,000 student records, I modeled when students become at risk of academic probation and which factors shape that timing, rather than treating risk as fixed.

Senior Capstone Project

This past semester, I supervised a capstone project for senior Applied Linguistics students.