Fulbright Forum - August 2004
Fulbright Academy of Science & Technology
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  August 2004 
IN THIS ISSUE:
  • Program At Harvard University on 9/1/04
  • Paleoparasitology - linking archeology and public health
  • Achieving our 2004 Goals
  • News from Members & Affiliated Organizations
  • Other Educational Tools On-line
  • Selected New Members
  • Your Organization and Your Membership

  • Greetings!

    This is the August 2004 issue of the Fulbright Academy of Science & Technology's bulletin.

    If you are a first-time recipient, please note that our publication is sent to educational innovators and leaders in scientific and technical fields in the US and around the world. Please refer to the end of this bulletin for additional information about the Academy and our mission. We can be reached at info@fulbrighter.org

    If you are not a member, please consider joining. We look forward to your involvement in the Academy.



    Program At Harvard University on 9/1/04
    The Academy is hosting a reception on Wednesday, September 1 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to recognize local Fulbrighters and local hosts of visiting scholars. Massachusetts has one of the highest concentrations of Fulbrighters, and for years Harvard has been the leading institution worldwide for hosting Fulbrighters.

    The program is in the Agassiz Room at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, 26 Oxford St. At 3:00 there will be a roundtable discussion with a group of Fulbrighters, followed by a reception at 4:30. The topic is the impacts of Fulbright scholarships on scientific innovation and on public perception of science. Panelists include:

    • Mr. Eric Howard, Director, The Fulbright Academy, Maine
    • Dr. Robert George, Professor Emeritus, UNC- Wilmington
    • Dr. Frances Jeffries, Director of the Office of Grants and Sponsored Programs, Bridgewater State College, Mass.
    • Mr. Michael Lytton, General Partner, Oxford Bioscience Partners, Mass.
    • Dr. Medge Owen, Wake Forest University Medical Center, North Carolina
    • Dr. Paul Robilliard, Director, World Water Watch, Mass.

    As of mid-August, registered attendees come from institutions such as Harvard University, Tufts University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Boston College, Lasell College, Salem State College, Bridgewater State College, U-Mass Boston, University of New Hampshire, Byrant College, World Water Watch, The George Institute, Brigham & Womens Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Science Curriculum Inc., Velocity Equity Partners, and Oxford Bioscience Partners.

    We also have some foreign attendees who are doing research in the Boston area (mostly in medical fields). They are from Goteburg University, Tel-Aviv University, the University of Bergen, Rand Afrikaans University (South Africa), University of Alcala de Henares (Spain) and Tenshi College (Japan).

    The Harvard program was made possible through the generousity of two donors and our contacts at Harvard, Dr. E.O. Wilson and Dr. Edward Cutler. If you plan to attend either part of the program, please call Eric Howard at the Academy's office: 207-799-3098.

    More Information & Directions »

    Paleoparasitology - linking archeology and public health
    Dr. Karl J. Reinhard, from the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska, had a Fulbright to Brazil in 2000-2001. While there, he taught and researched the topic of ancient parasitic diseases with his Brazilian colleagues and taught the methods of dietary reconstruction from archaeological sites. The first topic relates to the understanding of the origins and emergence of parasitism and the second relates to the evolutionary basis of diet-related diseases in modern Native Americans, particularly type II diabetes.

    His stay was at the Escola Nacional de Sáude Pública, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz in Rio de Janeiro and the Universidade de São Paulo, and results if the work were published in several journals including the Journal of Parasitology, Experimental Parasitology, and the Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. He and his colleagues also published a special volume of the Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz available in pdf format (link below). This has 29 papers covering a variety of topics ranging from parasite evolution to parasitism of specific cultures in Peru, Chile, Japan, Korea, and other parts of the world.

    The teaching in Sao Paolo evolved into a formal course on Archaeobotany and Native American Health which will be offered yearly, initially taught by USP faculty Sabine Eggers and Gregório Ceccantini and Dr. Reinhard. Archaeologists and botanists from all over Brazil will come with samples from archaeological sites to learn the methods for dietary reconstruction. A section of the course will address the Native American health problems that resulted from modernization of traditional diets. The course is funded by a small CNPq/Fulbright award to Eggers and Ceccantini. Reinhard writes, "I am looking forward to teaching this new course with my Brazilian colleagues and to conducting more research into the emergence of parasitic diseases."

    Photo: Were parasites involved in the death of this 4-year old child? For more information, visit the website below.

    Internet Publication on Paleoparasitology »

    Achieving our 2004 Goals
    We are pleased to announce that our membership program is well on track. We had a successful membership campaign last month - despite the fact that it was summer and many people were on vacation. We also are pleased to note that 15-20% of our members are "sustaining members" or "charter members" -- meaning they are making additional voluntary donations to support our programs.

    The Academy has several goals for this year, including producing this newsletter and organizing meetings, such as the ones described above. For example, the Harvard program was possible because of generous donations from several members, and over 30 people are expected at that meeting.

    Other Meetings:
    * Fulbright alumni and friends from around the world at a gathering on October 8-10 in Athens, Greece, as part of the Fulbright International Interdisciplinary Conference.
    * Fulbright Association (US) will hold its 27th Annual Conference in Athens, just prior to the Greek Conference on October 7-8.
    * The Fulbright Academy is again organizing a meeting of members during the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting. The Conference is on February 17-21, 2005 in Washington, DC.

    Please contact Eric Howard at 1-207-799-3098 (email) if you have questions or would like to see our wish list and learn more about how we would invest your donation in growing the Academy.

    Academy Programs »

    News from Members & Affiliated Organizations
    Mr. Philip Yeo (see photo) and his work at the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and the Singapore Economic Development Board was highlighted in a one-page profile in the business section of The Economist (Aug. 14 issue). The article does not mention his Fulbright to Harvard, where he earned his MBA in the 1970s, but it does describe his role in bringing high-tech manufacturing and innovation to his small country. For example, he led the initiative to build Jurong Island, a 3,200 hectare site used for chemical manufacturing that produced $22 billion in goods in 2003. Revenues from biomedical products are now at $7 billion, or about 8% of their manufacturing output. A new initiative is investing nearly $2 billion to make Singapore a global center of excellence in fields such as cancer, genomics, and nanotechnology.

    The United Nations Foundation has a new electronic newsletter, providing weekly international updates and perspectives. Each issue contains articles on the Foundation's four focus areas: Energy & Environment; Children's Health; Women & Population; and Peace, Security & Human Rights. It also carries reprints from AP and other news services, such as a recent The Boston Globe Editorial (8/11/04), which said that the US should give the UN more credit for the UN's work to alleviate problems brought on by natural disasters in developing countries.

    The Fulbright Commission in Portugal bulletin reported on the results of Dr. Matt Kondolf's Fulbright sabbatical in that country. As a geologist and geographer by training, he teaches environmental science and planning, hydrology, and river restoration at UC Berkeley, and he went to Portugal because California and Portugal face similar water issues. Since his sabbatical in 2001, he has returned three times to work with Portuguese colleagues on research topics, most recently to lead a workshop on the Aqueduto das Aguas Livres involving students in urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture. Back in California, he has been active in administering an endowment to support students of Portuguese descent at Berkeley, hosting a California-Portuguese conference on Mediterranean- climate rivers, and in establishing exchange agreements with universities in Portugal and the Azores.

    Dr. Flynn Picardal of Indiana Univeristy has teamed up with the Academy and others on a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation for research on the role of bacteria in the cycling of iron and nitrogen in soils and sediments. If the proposal is funded, the Academy will work with the principal investigators on a particular area in the grant criteria - disseminating the results of the research. At the same time, the Academy also will be increasing science literacy among the public and showing the public the value of basic and applied research.

    Dr. Cliff Hoelsher of Texas A&M University proudly announces that on August 16, he will receive a grant of $4,292,000 to establish a Food Science Center at the leading agricultural university in Indonesia, the Institute Pertanian Bagor, where he worked as a Fulbrighter in 1988. We will provide more details in the next issue of the newsletter.

    To sign up for the UN Newswire »

    Other Educational Tools On-line
    As in previous issues, we are providing links to selected internet sites -- sites that we find particularly useful, interesting or fun.

  • WWW Virtual Library: International Affairs Resources, part of the WWW Virtual Library System, and now with over 2600 carefully selected, annotated links in 37 international affairs categories. It is administered by Dr. Wayne Selcher, a Fulbrighter at Elizabethtown College in PA, and should be of use to travellers, journalists, researchers, diplomats, businesspersons, teachers, professors, and students, among others.
  • www.ScienceNetLinks.com is an outstanding website for science educators in grades K-12 that is produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), with funding from the MarcoPolo Education Foundation. The CEO of AAAS is Dr. Alan Leshner, a Fulbrighter to Israel.
  • Misconceptions in Science: The July 22 issue of ENC Focus has a quick quiz along with some activities you can do with students and colleagues to separate common misunderstandings and folklore from facts.

      Please continue to share your websites - send us an email at info@fulbrighter.org. Note that we provide these links because they have information that may be of interest to you. FAST does not necessarily endorse the views expressed or the data and facts presented on the sites.

    • Selected New Members
      To promote growth in the Academy, we will be giving a special gift to the 5th person to join each month for the rest of the year. We have some very nice pens make of white birch and some "first-day-of- issue" envelopes of the US Postal Service stamp commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Fulbright Program, issued on February 26, 1996.

      Dr. Maurice Weinrobe is the winner of our gift for the month of August. He is a professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Clark University in Worcester, MA. He has been at Clark since 1976, and his research focuses the economics of population, particularly the impact of long term care insurance on the disabled elderly. During his 2001 Fulbright, he lectured and conducted research at the Universitas Sebelas Maret Surakarta in Indonesia, and a diary of his time there is posted on his Clark University website.

      Dr. Robert Brent is Professor of Economics at Fordham University. His area is Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) applied to health and mental health, and his latest book is The CBA of Health Care Expenditures. His 2003 Fulbright research award was for CBAs of HIV-AIDS interventions in Tanzania, and his studies so far show that: (a) the condom social marketing program just breaks even, but would be beneficial if the current subsidy were halved; and (b) in Tanzania female primary school enrollments have a perverse, positive, direct effect on infection rates. But, via their effect on raising incomes, which lowers infection rates, enrollments have an indirect effect that offsets the direct effect making female enrollments effective and highly beneficial.

      Dr. James Clegg is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the UC-Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, and previously served as the director of the lab. The facility has 65 laboratories and offices for resident and visiting scientists, students and support staff, and large public aquaria and displays provide marine education to 10-12,000 visitors each year. Dr. Clegg's current research focuses on biochemical and biophysical adaptations to environmental extremes, and the organization of enzymes and metabolic activity in cells. His Fulbright in 1998 was to study ancient DNA in encysted embryos of the crustacean Artemia at the University of Ghent in Belgium.

      Please join these Fulbrighters as members of the Academy »

      Your Organization and Your Membership
      The Fulbright Academy is an independent non-profit organization based in the United States. We receive support from selected Fulbright alumni groups, businesses, institutions, organizations, foundations, and individuals interested in developing an international network of leaders in science and technology. We are not affiliated with the (US) Fulbright Association, the US State Department or the Board of Foreign Scholars.

      The Fulbright Academy of Science & Technology uses the expertise of our network of Fulbrighters and leaders in science to address critical problems in education, scientific innovation and economic development. Our database has over 10,000 Fulbrighters and scientists around the world.

      The Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research A*STAR sponsors this electronic news bulletin (see story, above). We are seeking additional sponsors for the newsletter and for our other programs. Call FAST for information.

      While projects may be funded by organizations and foundations that share our mission, membership income is an important part of our annual budget. If you or your institution are not yet a member, please consider joining today.

      Click here for a partial listing of supporters »

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