Faculty Profile: Britt Cartrite
Political Science Assistant Professor Britt Cartrite was backpacking through Europe in 1989 - the year of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the falling of the Berlin Wall.
"I was in Europe when the Berlin Wall fell -- that crystallized my interest in political science," he says. "Suddenly the impossible was possible."
Earning his doctorate at the University of Colorado in 2003, Dr. Cartrite says he realized after he finished his dissertation exploring ethnopolitical mobilization in Western Europe, he was ultimately dissatisfied with the results.
He was accepted into a post-doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania, and while there began to explore complexity theory and agent-based modeling. He is applying that theory to his dissertation to expand the explanatory and, hopefully, predictive power of his research.
"When viewed through complexity theory, the various disparate strands of my research finally came together," he says.
Dr. Cartrite says he went into graduate school thinking he would love to teach, then fell in love with research. Attracted to Alma by the liberal arts curriculum and the opportunity to work with undergrads, he says his work here is a balance of the two.
In his spare time, Dr. Cartrite loves to travel, ski, garden and camp, as well as spend time with his two children.
