Nicklaus LavertyNicklaus Laverty, ’06 is currently a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. State Department, serving in Warsaw, Poland. After UMaine, Laverty completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Nick’s dissertation is entitled “Imperial Janus: Patterns of Governance in the Western Borderlands of the Tsarist Empire.” His research focused on the historical and contemporary politics of Russia with a particular emphasis on historical institution formation, democratization, the development of party systems, and collective action. Nick’s graduate studies were funded in part by a prestigious graduate scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Nick has published multiple peer-reviewed journal articles in his areas of research expertise including “Limited Choices: Russian Opposition Parties and the 2007 Duma Election,” and “The Problem of Lasting Change: Civil Society and the Colored Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine,” both in the journal Demokratizatsiya.