Summer Research Position Secured by Ph.D. Student

Ph.D. student Joshua Lambert recently accepted a summer research position at One Earth Future (OEF) to help build a Fisheries Conflict event database with the organization’s Secure Fisheries department. He joins Clayton Besaw, a security studies Ph.D. alumnus and fellow UCF Knight, at the Colorado-based think tank. Lambert will enter his Ph.D. candidacy when he returns in the fall, with a dissertation focus on the diffusive properties of coups d’état.

At OEF, Lambert aids a data collection project that focuses exclusively on disputes surrounding fisheries resources in Eastern Africa. The project will culminate with a data set that will be used by scholars and policy analysts to investigate sub-national drivers of fisheries conflict and their impact on organized political violence. The project includes both machine and human-coded data, and is geo-located for sub-national level spatial analysis.

OEF is a think tank whose vision is “peace through governance.” They are involved in empirical research and local engagement, particularly in countries like Somalia and Colombia. The organization also houses a number of other initiatives, which focus on topics including gender and security, local business development and investment, as well as a series of data sets employed by a variety of researchers. One notable data set, Rulers, Elections and Irregular Governance, speaks directly to Lambert’s dissertation project. In addition, Lambert and Besaw have collaborated to illustrate some of the important features of this data, which can be viewed here.

Lambert uses skills from UCF’s GIS Certificate program to gather remote-sensing data and employ spatial modeling to better forecast political stability or instability. He applies machine learning to understand the impact migration, conflict and climatic factors have on regime change. Lambert is also affiliated with UCF’s Intelligence Community Center For Academic Excellence (ICCAE) as a visiting fellow and graduate research assistant.

“UCF’s Security Studies program and the ICCAE have provided me with great opportunities to improve computational skills and develop expertise in environmental security, conflict and political stability,” Lambert said.