U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Alison Cruise has two decades of military experience. Her service — and the challenges she has overcome — inspire her doctoral studies at UNC-Chapel Hill.
By Jess Abel, UNC College of Arts and Sciences
As a squadron commander at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Lt. Col. Alison Cruise was responsible for mentoring and supporting the young cadets who would become America’s next leaders.
She did not take that role lightly.
Every day at the academy, near the base of Colorado’s Front Range, Cruise witnessed cadets balancing rigorous academics and military training. They started before dawn and continued well after dusk, all while navigating living on their own in a new environment.
“It’s different from a typical college student experience,” said Cruise, a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “They’re in that time of their life where they’re trying to figure out who they are, and they’re also in a pressure cooker of extra responsibilities.”
Working with new cadets — and reflecting on the beginning of her own military career — led her to realize there must be better ways to support their psychological development.
Through her doctoral research at UNC-Chapel Hill, Cruise is determined to figure out how.
Taking off
Cruise once thought she would have a typical college experience.
She attended Appalachian State University on a scholarship to compete in cross country and track and field. But the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks occurred when she was a junior. As she watched the events unfold with her college roommate, she knew she wanted to devote her life to service, to something bigger than herself.
A few days later, she found an Air Force recruiter.
“I told her that I wanted to be outside and as physically active as possible,” said Cruise. The recruiter told Cruise aircraft maintenance was the place to start.
“Aircraft maintenance is a little bit of a rough and tumble world, but I loved it,” she said. “It really was outside all the time, physically using your body to fix things, launch and recover aircraft.”
That job, a dream role for Cruise, lasted nearly four years. But when her first enlistment contract was nearing its end in 2006, she felt she might need to leave.
“I am a gay woman. And it was [the era of] “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” she said. “It felt like an integrity issue to be me in my private life and then come to work and pretend that part of me didn’t exist.”
Her mentor, Maurice “Mo” Lee, understood. But he would not let her leave without a plan.
“He was like, ‘You’re going to go to school, you’re going to finish school, and I will help you write your package to Officer Training School, so you can come back to the military as an officer,’” she said.
Lee’s support spurred a new resolve in Cruise. “I said, ‘Alright, let’s do that.’”
A different path
Cruise attended UNC Charlotte and continued her U.S. Air Force service through the North Carolina Air National Guard, deploying to Afghanistan twice while earning her degree in exercise science.
After graduating Cruise returned to active duty as an aviator. She moved to Robins Air Force Base in Houston County, Georgia, where she served as an air weapons officer. She deployed multiple times. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was officially repealed. She met her wife, Megan.
Cruise continued to impress in her military career. She was stationed in Japan working alongside the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and earned the Headquarters Air Force “Air Battle Manager of the Year” award while in Okinawa. She welcomed her first baby, a girl, Shiloh.
When she returned to the United States in 2018, Cruise returned to Robins in Georgia. A year later, she learned she was promoted to major.
But in March 2020, she faced a new challenge: a breast cancer diagnosis at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I got super lucky,” Cruise said. “We caught it early.” Still, it required surgery, a double mastectomy. After she recovered, Cruise deployed with U.S. Air Forces Central Command.
Then, she was selected for squadron command, the catalyst to working with cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
There, she was reminded of the pressure cadets face in their early days of military service, of her own days in basic training. She was inspired by her cadets’ creativity, energy and determination. And she began to dream of ways she could support them further.
“That’s where my research interests come in,” she said. Cruise applied for a program through the U.S. Air Force that would allow her to earn her doctorate while remaining active duty. When she learned she was accepted, Carolina was top of her list of universities.
“I started looking at schools that studied psychology and sports together,” she said. “In the military, we’re not traditional athletes, but we’re tactical athletes.”
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Human Movement Science Curriculum, a cooperative effort between the UNC School of Medicine and the exercise and sport science department in the College of Arts and Sciences, checked every box.
Specifically, Cruise was drawn to the research of Shelby Baez, assistant professor of exercise and sport science, who studies the psychosocial factors on health outcomes after sport-related injury.
“This is the person who I’m going to learn from,” Cruise thought while reading Baez’s research. She planned to use Baez’s research into stress responses as the foundation of her research into the psychological stress faced by young cadets — and how to mitigate it.
Supporting future leaders
Cruise’s research focuses broadly on readiness and retention, pillars that are integral to the military.
“There’s two types of readiness: physical readiness and psychological readiness,” Cruise explained. “Physical readiness, we already have a lot of that figured out. But for psychological readiness, the standard is ‘absence of mental health diagnoses,’ not optimized performance.”
To dig deeper, Cruise is looking at two mechanisms that might help inform psychological readiness: attentional control and cognitive appraisal.
“Attentional control allows you to pay attention to what’s relevant and avoid distractions so that you can make better decisions,” she said. Cognitive appraisal, she continued, is what helps cadets — and everyone — accurately weigh their capabilities against their fear to decide if something is an exciting challenge or a disheartening threat.
“If you look at something as a challenge, you’re much more regulated to go after that challenge. If you look at it as a threat, you are in ‘fight or flight,’” said Cruise.
Together, those mechanisms help inform strategic decision-making, reduce overload and keep cadets engaged and optimistic at the start of their careers. She hopes to work with cadets in UNC-Chapel Hill’s U.S. Air Force ROTC unit, Detachment 590, as a central part of her research.
Cruise will finish the first year of her doctoral program in May. Much of the data collection and analysis are still to come, and she is looking forward to how her dissertation will evolve as she gains more insights from cadets and the “collaborative, supportive” Baez research group.
When she completes her Ph.D., she will return to the U.S. Air Force Academy to apply what she learns as a professor in the athletics department.
It will be a full-circle moment for Cruise to be able to contribute to the resiliency of the military’s newest leaders. Cruise’s own U.S. Air Force journey, over two decades of service, has been defined by her own resiliency. That resiliency — and the support of her family — is what drives her.
“Sometimes, when I think about where I am now and how, in part, I maybe never should have been able to get here, it feels a little emotional,” said Cruise.
“When I have been given opportunities,” she continued, “I have wasted nothing.”