Private and public sector organizations have become increasingly interested in promoting diversity. Due to barriers attributed to race and gender, women and minorities often find it hard to break through the glass ceiling. Mentoring is a tool to assist with breaking through the glass ceiling. This interest has led to extensive growth in mentoring research and the design of a more expanded concept, developmental networks. Little empirical research informs our understanding of Black women in developmental networks and their political identities within those networks. This qualitative study, within the framework of grounded theory method and of case study research, examines two research questions: (1) What do Black women federal senior executives value within their developmental networks? (2) How do Black women federal senior executives construct political identity within their developmental networks? Applying the conceptual framework of Black feminist thought and developmental network support theories the study examined the developmental relationships of three Black women senior executives. This research highlights the development of a group of high achievers and the contributions of their self-identified support systems. Data analysis from unstructured person-to-person interviews, a questionnaire, and researcher theoretical memos identified the themes support network, self-definition and self-determination, and ecology of life. The most visible codes were significant friendship, workplace behavior, social network composition, and Black woman. In conclusion, the women valued relationships that produced psychosocial outcomes such as friendship, trust, honesty, direct feedback, and reciprocity. They also valued relationships where they received workplace guidance and career exposure from mentor, friend, sponsor, and ally developers within or outside of the workplace. The women developed networks that provided closeness and consisted of developers from different social arenas. They defined their political identities, roles, coping strategies for life challenges and fostered relationships that recognized the importance of ethnic/racial respect, and understanding personal strength. In addition, the women preferred informal developmental relationships with Black and male developers of different ages. Due to a small sample size, self-reported data and the application of grounded theory method, the findings of this study were interpreted with caution. Provided were recommendations for future research and practice. / Ph. D.

The aim of the thesis is to verify synergy of genetic programming and neural networks. Solution is provided by set of experiments with implemented library built upon benchmark tasks. I've done experiments with directly and also indirectly encoded neural netwrok. I focused on finding robust solutions and the best calculation of configurations, overfitting detection and advanced stimulations of solution with fitness function. Generally better solutions were found using lower values of parameters n_c and n_r. These solutions tended less to be overfitted. I was able to evolve neurocontroller eliminating oscilations in pole balancing problem. In cancer detection problem, precision of provided solution was over 98%, which overcame compared techniques. I succeeded also in designing of maze model, where agent was able to perform multistep tasks.