Lisa Foreman has been an active participant in multiple research programs on campus since her freshman year. Now, in her third year, she has effectively incorporated her passions for political science and Russian studies into her research.

Foreman was able to pave her own path with her studies, thanks in large part to the Source Project, a first-year honors research program in which students can choose between various streams of study, ranging from education to sustainability in art, to complete research in the humanities.

“When I saw other people doing research, I was like ‘Oh man! I need to start researching!’ Foreman says. “By the time I was accepted to Binghamton and to the Source Project, I was already so excited because this was what I was waiting for, now it was my turn to join the scholarly conversation.”

Foreman, who grew up on Staten Island, developed her core research interests as a first-year student. She also credits the program with allowing her to continue research in Russian studies.

“Before I had even accepted my enrollment to this school, I was already attending info sessions and learning about what it would be like to be in the specific track that I was interested in,” she says. “I felt like I was appreciated immediately, and I felt like I was really understood as an applicant.”

In addition to her research projects, Foreman is involved with TEDxBinghamton University. As the director of content, she plays a significant role in organizing the annual conference in the spring, and encouraging student speakers, alumni speakers and professionals who want to share their message on the TEDx stage.

“We tap into every corner of the University possible, while also bringing something new to them,” Foreman says.

During the summer of 2022, Foreman took part in the Summer Scholars and Arts Program, conducting research in sentiment analysis in relation to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. She was referred to the program by a former professor, Mikhail Filippov, who now serves as her advisor.

“We have already started to work on her 80-page honors thesis and I have no doubts that she will complete it successfully,” says Filippov, a professor of political science. “Overall, it is a very rewarding experience for me, largely because Lisa acts as a highly motivated, excellent student with self-discipline.”

Foreman uses a research plan, inspired by her work in the Source Project, to analyze tweets selected from the Twitter accounts of influential political leaders such as President Joe Biden and U.S senators.

Foreman identifies key words and phrases that correlate with sentiment. A single tweet is analyzed for its polarity, as in whether it is positive or negative, as well as the degree at which this is expressed, which is considered as its subjectivity. For example, a tweet with positive polarity and high subjectivity would have a positive sentiment.

As she outlines the background, methods and question of inquiry in her fundamental work, Foreman is able to improve the guidelines and accuracy of her project.

“By unpacking certain cross sections of social media, information and conflict, my research can be used to expand awareness regarding political social media,” she says. “I amalgamated so much knowledge and understanding of this process, but things can definitely be narrowed.”

Foreman says she has had a unique experience studying Russian literature during a time of war in the region. Through her classes, Foreman experienced the Russian-Ukrainian conflict from a humane and scholarly perspective.

“I was in a Russian language course at that point, and one of my classmates was Ukrainian,” she says. “It was spoken about a lot within the Russian department, and even outside of that. It was interesting to not only discuss it in a casual sense, but to really be exposed to people who were directly affected by it, while also considering it as an academic.”

The application of computer programming in her project introduced a new aspect that allowed for greater creativity, Foreman says. “With an essay you write until you feel like your argument is complete, but that’s kind of ambiguous,” she says. “Coding felt more artistic and creative, more so than any other math or science class I had taken before, as well as how much you can do with it.”

Foreman intends to explore the role of social media in conflict and how computer-aided text analysis can be used to understand it. She hopes that her project will contribute to the growing discussion of how social networking platforms present global affairs.

“Social data science is an emerging discipline that my project fits into,” Foreman says. “I’m just trying to keep up with the curve and contribute something to this discussion while tying it into another fairly new discipline.”

Seden Akcinaroglu analyzes trends in domestic terrorist attacks to predict when they will occur in the future.

Akcinaroglu, an assistant professor of political science at Binghamton, specializes in international conflict and rivalries. In the past, she has focused on three general areas: civil wars, international rivalries and terrorism. Her interdisciplinary project with Binghamton University computer scientists homes in on the relationships between major events in a country and its terrorist attacks.

“We are trying to understand, in a very dynamic way, how we can actually predict some terrorist attacks,” Akcinaroglu says. “Right now, a lot of the studies are very static.”

Yu David Liu, an assistant professor of computer science, says Akcinaroglu’s dynamic research direction is “challenging but essential, considering the fast pace of global events.”

He says the project uses public sources such as online newspapers and databases. “It then performs data analysis to correlate individual factors and the historical attack data,” Liu says. “Prediction is made based on findings of these correlations from historical data.”

Liu says computers streamline the data collection and analysis so predictions can be made quickly.

Previously, Akcinaroglu worked to unravel the effect of natural disasters, economic status and militarized disputes on terrorist attacks. “When states are engaged in militarized disputes with other states, terrorist attacks increase,” she says. “The terrorists find it as an opportunity to attack.”

The same is true, Akcinaroglu says, for cases in which a country is weakened economically. When natural disasters hit, however, terrorist attacks tend to decrease.

“It seems that terrorists do care about reputation to a certain extent,” Akcinaroglu says, “so during times of natural disasters, they don’t want to alienate supporters.”

These findings challenge how terrorist organizations are normally perceived to operate. “For us, any atrocity can be attributed to a terrorist organization. The fact that they kill civilians is basically telling us that they don’t care,” Akcinaroglu says. “But they do care about reputation, and some of them care more than the others.”

Her current project uses a complex model to encompass as many factors as possible and look at how those factors affect terrorist organizations’ decisions to attack.

Akcinaroglu, who is from Turkey, says her interest in researching terrorist attacks began when the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a rebel organization in Turkey, announced it would not attack the country following the devastating 1999 earthquake. Akcinaroglu says she saw the same thing occur in Indonesia later, and it made her curious about terrorist organizations’ hesitation to attack.

Flynn took a more fact-based, analytical approach, which he’s pursuing as a doctoral candidate in political science. “I like to step back from the heat of the fire,” he says, “and see what the evidence shows.”

What has that view shown him? Recently, it was an examination of efforts to shame nations that have a spotty record on human rights and whether multinational corporations distance themselves from those countries. He and colleagues found foreign corporate investment had a positive relationship with greater respect for human rights. Likewise, publicly shaming those countries led to reduced foreign investment.

“It’s a hopeful finding,” Flynn says, one that points straight at his research interest: political networks, the interaction of domestic and international politics and their intersection with human rights and conflict. The study, published in International Studies Quarterly, joins an analysis of domestic politics and their influence on military spending published in Foreign Policy Analysis.

“U.S. foreign policy, especially since the Cold War, touches on so many issues,” Flynn says. And domestic and even individual political needs drive foreign policy, despite a separation promoted in American politics since George Washington was president.

Add to that the rise of the military-industrial complex in the 1950s, increased human rights awareness following World War II and U.S. involvement in world economic development, and quickly you see that foreign relations becomes domestic politics and vice versa.

“People, whether they be representatives or bureaucrats, have some kind of interest they’re seeking to advance,” Flynn says.

Flynn’s work corrects how people view foreign relations, says Benjamin Fordham, Flynn’s doctoral committee chairman. “Most people tend to focus on international conditions” as driving foreign relations, says Fordham, a professor of political science. “But you can’t understand the whole situation until you understand the internal situation.”

That’s a worldwide approach, but Flynn is supporting it with research into U.S. foreign policy operatives since World War II. Even now, Flynn admits to a certain bemusement at teaching a classroom of students who have no experience of the Cold War, who instead grew up with the threat of terrorism in their backyards. They’re often unaware of how the same institutions — banking interests, individual bureaucrats, international economic realities — affect or even create the world they live in.

“I love that interconnectedness,” he says.

“I had an epiphany a few years ago,” said Martinek, an associate professor of political science at Binghamton University. “Judges are just like the rest of us. No matter how accomplished the judge, nonetheless, they may still be looking around for clues.”

Martinek’s interest in the judicial system began during a graduate school class in which she studied state Legislatures. Eventually, her studies expanded to state courts and then the federal courts. Now, she focuses her research on the U.S. Courts of Appeals, powerful courts that set legal precedents with a strong influence on U.S. law.

Martinek is working on a book about the appellate court titled “Psychology of Judicial Choice.” She conducted research for the book last spring with support from Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. “I’ve worked on the project for several years,” she said. “It was nice to have a block of time to develop it. While the institute is full of academics, it was a different set of academics, not just political scientists. It was the best audience for me because I had to think about how to frame it.”

The project focuses on how small-group psychology affects the decision-making process at the appellate court level.

Federal appellate courts are composed of panels of judges. Martinek’s work is focused on understanding the dynamic among those judges and how it affects their decisions. She looked at thousands of cases to help her understand the mental process behind their rulings.

Martinek, co-author of a book titled “Judging on a Collegial Court: Influences on Federal Appellate Decision Making,” has learned a lot about judges’ personalities and mental makeup through interviews for her books. Federal judges, for example, are a lot like the politicians who appoint them.

“Often what they say is pretty profound,” she said. “… Judges really seem to care what people really think about them.”

Benjamin Fordham, professor and chair of the University’s political science department, was recently named a Henry Kissinger Scholar for the 2010-2011 school year.

The government-sponsored position, awarded to one person per year, will support Fordham as he spends 10 months in residence at the library using its materials for his research. He hopes to gather information for a book.

“I’m really interested in the ways that domestic, political, and economic considerations influence foreign policy decisions,” Fordham said. “I want to do research on the rise of the United States as a world power and the politics of that process — who supported this expansion of American foreign policy interests and who opposed it and why.”

Fordham plans to divide his research into two parts. He will first analyze manuscripts, books and periodicals written between 1890 and 1945 to get a feel for the public policy of the time period.

“I want to look at the papers of some of the people involved in this process to get a sense of how they understood the expanding economic interests of the U.S. and the rest of the world,” he said.

He then will gather data about the United States during that period — key imports and exports, congressional support and opposition and overseas economic interests — to obtain an understanding of the country’s past economies.

“The rise of the U.S. as a world power is a puzzle in some ways, because the U.S. became very powerful economically before it took on an expanded role in the world,” Fordham said. “Their foreign policy decisions lagged far behind the material power that was necessary to implement them.”

An area that Fordham plans to study is why the United States sought to control foreign economic markets, with reasons ranging from controlling them to protect its own export interests to seeking a way to expand its economy through investments.

Fordham said he became interested in the topic while researching American foreign policy during World War I and the Cold War.

Carolyn Brown, director of the office of scholarly programs at the Library of Congress, said Kissinger Scholars are selected for the position by a small committee in the library. She said Fordham was chosen based on the strength of his proposal and the amount of related materials available at the library.

“Fordham’s proposal was notable for the importance and originality of his research project and the clarity with which he presented it; the quality of his references, which were very strong and by fine scholars; and the value to his research of having an extended period of research time at an excellent library,” she said.

The program is funded by friends and admirers of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state who received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his foreign relations efforts during the Vietnam War.