Thanks to Fulbright scholarships, 19 GW community members are spending this academic year studying and researching across the globe—from Japan to Poland and from Argentina to Mongolia. Those numbers were good enough to land GW on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of top Fulbright producing schools.
The 13 alumni and six faculty and administrators are examining a wide range of issues, including the economic status of women, HIV/AIDS prevention, eating disorders and higher education reform.
“GW has always been very strong in the Fulbright competition, frequently among the top schools,” says Dianne Martin, associate vice president for graduate studies and academic affairs, who oversees the Fulbright Fellowship Program. “This demonstrates the academic strength that GW has in the area of global learning.”
The brainchild of GW Law School alumnus and U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright, L.L.B. ’34, the Fulbright Scholarship Program provides funding for study and research abroad in a wide range of disciplines, including social sciences, business, performing arts, physical sciences, engineering, and education and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. GW has been recognized by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a top producer of Fulbright students.
The GW faculty and administrators awarded Fulbright scholarships for 2010-11 are participating in a wide range of academic activities.
Efstathia Bura, director of the biostatistics program and associate professor of statistics, will travel to Argentina to research “Sufficient Dimension Reduction Moment Based Methods and Maximum Likelihood Estimation.”
Patrick Forrest, M.L.’04, professorial lecturer in engineering, will research “Protracted Refugee Situations; Improving the U.S. and Canadian Response to an Ongoing Crisis” at University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
Dennis Johnson, assistant dean of the Graduate School of Political Management and professor of political management, will teach courses on American domestic public policy and national political institutions at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China and will travel widely throughout the country to give lectures on current American politics and policy.
Joel Kuipers, professor of anthropology and international affairs, will study the role of language in every day Islamic piety on the island of Java in Yogyakarta, a small province of Indonesia.
Donna Scarboro, associate vice president for international programs and professorial lecturer in English, completed a summer 2010 Fulbright International Education Administrators study trip to Japan, which included visits to Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima.
Marc St. Hilaire, coordinating advisor for GW’s Center for Undergraduate Fellowships and Research, will travel to Germany to participate in the 2010 Fulbright Seminar for U.S. Administrators in International Education.
Steven Tuch, professor of sociology and public policy and public administration, will work on a project titled “Stratification Ideologies in Postcommunist and Capitalist Nations: A Comparative Study of Poland and the United States, 1987-2009” in Poland.
Ten of the winners are recent GW undergraduate alumni and three are recent graduate student alumni.
Matthew LeDuc, M.A.’10; Geoffrey Cain, B.A.’08; Alison Dieringer, B.A.’10; Sweth Ramaswamy, B.A.’10; Megan Schmidt-Sane, B.A.’08; Jessica Thompson, B.A.’10; and Hedwig Waters, B.A. ’09 will research, teach and volunteer in Asia.
Leah Spelman, B.A.’09, will research the influence of European aid on women’s political participation at the University of Jordan Center for Strategic Studies; and Sasha Frankel, B.A.’10, will teach at Bartin University in Turkey and conduct independent research on local women’s employment opportunities.
Amanda McDonald, B.A.’09, will teach and learn the language of Quichua in Ecuador, and Kathy Reilly, M.Ed.’10, will help train teachers at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa.
In Europe, Elizabeth Reynolds, B.A.’09, will teach in Russia and conduct research on Russian views of education reform, and Cherine Foty, J.D.’10, will complete a master of laws in French and European law at Universite Paris 1 – Pantheon-Sorbonne in Paris.