OUR NEIGHBORS AT WAR. Elizabeth Hanson, intelligence officer, economics major.

She attended Maine's Colby College at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, an event that may have helped shape her career path. The attacks prompted Hanson, an economics major, to review the relationship between religion and economics in her senior year.

Her provocatively titled effort, "Faithless Heathens: Scriptural Economics of Judaism, Christianity and Islam," picked up threads from Christianity's Bible, Judaism's Torah and Islam's Quran, and examined the major monotheistic religions' approach toward economics.

Hanson wasn't a typical economics student who viewed her degree as a ticket to a lucrative job in the financial sector, said Michael Donihue, a professor who oversaw her independent study project, similar to a senior thesis.

"There are some who come into economics because they're interested in making money," he said. "Others want to look at the world in a different way."

Donihue said he was surprised to learn she was working in Afghanistan.

"She wasn't the superstar student that you'd get in a textbook sense but she had an intellectual curiosity and this interest in looking beyond the textbook," he said. "She wasn't very interested in the raw data, but the behaviors behind it."