research.

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.

I served as one of two lead analysts on the project’s flagship qualitative study, conducting PERMA-H-guided thematic analysis of 316 child interviews in NVivo, and led a PRISMA systematic review on positive psychological interventions for young children’s mental health, screening 2,900 records across six databases. The work produced Q1 publications, a chapter in Kazakhstan’s 2023 National Education Report, and a methodological paper on ethical research with young children, with recommendations directed at early childhood educators and policymakers.

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.

The analysis identified critical windows in the first-semester transition where institutional support is most consequential, pointing to structural gaps in how universities support students through that period. The findings translate into concrete, timing-sensitive recommendations for higher education leaders on student persistence and experience.

When the Russia–Ukraine war disrupted long-established mobility patterns, it was unclear how STEM students in Kazakhstan, a region where most border-region graduates had historically chosen Russian universities, were rethinking where and whether to study abroad. Through 29 semi-structured interviews with current and prospective mobile students across six border regions, conducted in Russian and Kazakh, I co-authored a study examining how the conflict reshaped their decisions.

Analyzing the interviews thematically in NVivo, the study found that mobility decisions had become highly sensitive to geopolitical turbulence, driven by safety, financial, and social concerns that the conventional push-pull model does not fully capture. The work offers higher education institutions practical guidance on supporting students caught in geopolitical crises.