The Fulbright Academy would like to recognize those US universities and colleges for being major “suppliers” of students for the Fulbright program. The 15 institutions accounted for about 25% of the 1,100 US students went to study in one of 140 different countries with either full or partial support from the Fulbright Program.

The Institute for International Education provided the statistics below. The numbers after the institutional name are the number of applicants, followed by the number of awards.

** Columbia University (92 / 31) ** University of California – Berkeley (85 / 26) ** Yale University (76 / 24) ** Harvard University (98 / 20) ** Brown University (53 / 18) ** Stanford University (67 / 18) ** University of Michigan – Ann Arbor (86 / 18) ** University of Texas at Austin (59 / 18) ** Duke University (50 / 17) ** University of Pennsylvania (76 / 17) ** Pennsylvania State University (61 / 16) ** University of California – Los Angeles (51 / 14) ** Washington University (39 / 12)**

In total, students from some 250 US institutions went abroad in 2004 as Fulbrighters. The annual application process for this year began on May 1, and applications are due on October 21st. The US Student Fulbright Program is open to individuals with a BA or equivalent, master's or doctoral degree candidates, or young professionals or artists. Candidates from other countries who wish to come to the US have similar requirements. Professors, alumni and friends play key roles in getting these promising young scholars to apply for the Fulbright program, so please promote the program to younger scholars.

Alumni of the Fulbright program celebrated the Centenary of Senator Fulbright’s birth at events around the world. The founder of the world-famous exchange program which bears his name died in 1995.

The largest gathering was in Frankfurt, Germany, under the motto “100 Years of J. William Fulbright - International Understanding Changes The World". The Frankfurt event was organized by the Fulbright Alumni e.V. and the U.S. Consulate General in cooperation with the German-American Fulbright Commission and the Center for North American Studies at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University. The day-long program included opening remarks by Charge d’Affairs John Cloud of the U.S. Embassy and Mrs. Harriet Mayor Fulbright, widow of Senator Fulbright and Honorary Ambassador of the Fulbright program. A panel discussion on the Fulbright program as a transatlantic source of ideas, and a performance by Fulbright musicians rounded out the day. Almost 200 invited guests, many of them Fulbright alumni, joined the celebration.

The German-American Fulbright Program is today the largest binational Fulbright program in the world. Since 1952, when the Federal Republic of Germany became the 25th member to join the Fulbright Program, the German-American Fulbright Program has sponsored over 40,000 students, researchers, teachers, professors and other academic professionals from Germany and the United States. This exchange builds on the long tradition of cooperation and dialogue between American and German students and educators. Providing a new generation of Americans and Germans with opportunities to experience each other's country firsthand is an essential part of maintaining and strengthening the transatlantic dialogue that will determine the future of our bilateral relationship.

(source: website of the US Consulate in Frankfurt)

2006 is the 60th Anniversary of the Fulbright Program, and so the Fulbright Academy is working with its members, partners, and foundations to carry out a series of programs as part of this upcoming special anniversary. More information will be available in the summer and fall.

In the meantime, we continue to organize Fulbright Forums, a series of events held in the United States and abroad. The Forums bring together Fulbright scholars, Academy members, leaders in the various scientific and technical disciplines, and the public.

One Fulbright Forum is planned for Thursday October 6 in Cambridge, MA, in conjunction with the 15th Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. The “Ig Nobels” are awarded each year by the Annals of Improbable Research, to recognize scientists and scientific research that is fun, interesting, and unusual. Past winners have done research on topics such as the physics of hula hoops, “the effect of country music on suicide,” and “chickens prefer beautiful humans”. The prizes are handed out by actual Nobel Laureates before an audience of 1,200 in Saunder’s Theater.

Forums are typically held in conjunction with other meetings or in partnership with universities, research organizations, or Fulbright alumni groups. We would welcome requests from member and non-member institutions to serve as hosts for a Forum. If you would like to be a sponsor or a partner in organizing a forum on a topic of particular interest to you or your organization, please contact the Academy at +1-207-799-3098

Maggie Alario, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and a 1998 Fulbrighter to Uruguay, will be at the University in Santa Marta in Colombia this June. Located where the Andes meets the Caribbean, the city is surrounded by many unique ecosystems. She will be leading a seminar and working with faculty, with the goal of helping this and other institutions develop an environmental education curriculum that incorporates the scientific, educational and economic realities of less-developed nations. As a member of the Academy's board of directors, she will also be represeting our organization at meetings with local Fulbrighters.

Dan Drollette, a science journalist and Fulbrighter to Australia in 1996, wrote an article on wildfires, drought and climate change in Australia for the April issue of Natural History. In the 2003 wildfires, the flames stopped just yards from the radio dishes of NASA’s Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex, vital for maintaining contact with dozens of spacecraft, including the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Losing the complex would have been a serious setback for space research, potentially causing communications blackouts for eight hours a day. The article included photographs of the Yale-Columbia telescope at the Mount Stromlo Observatory, which was destroyed by the fire.

The Fulbright Academy regularly profiles new members in our newsletter. The information is to help build ties among the Fulbright community, and it was either submitted by the member or is based on publicly accessible materials on the individual's website.

Julio Cruz is a Peruvian who worked for many years at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo, retiring from his anesthesiology work in 1998. His Fulbright experience was back in his home country in 2000, where he spent five months at the Faculty of Human Medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Piura. As a result of that experience, he decided to help raise the standard of teaching and research in Peru by moving back permanently three years later.

Roman Polyak is a Russian professor of mathematics and operations research who works at George Mason University in Maryland. He immigrated from Russia to the US in 1988, and 13 years later was proud to represent the US as a Fulbright Scholar to Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. A mathematican, Dr. Polyak developed a special theory and principal for constrained optimization, which has become an important tool for solving real-life nonlinear optimization problems, such as those that arise in engineering.

Frank Ferrari is an oceanographer at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Specializing in invertebrate zoology, his link with the Fulbright program is as the 2002 host to Dr. Eduardo Suarez-Morales, a Senior Researcher on zooplankton from the College of the Southern Frontier (ECOSUR) in Quintana, Mexico. Their project related to the historic biogeography of the freshwater Copepoda of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Margaret Elvekrog has spent this year as a student Fulbrighter studying chemistry at Stockholm University. A 2004 graduate of Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI, she will start graduate school at Columbia University in the fall. Her research and interests are in the field of De Novo protein design, and in her work she is using a model protein to explore the cation-pi interaction.

B.G. Unni is senior assistant director of the Biochemistry Department at the CSIR Regional Research Laboratory in Jorhat, Assam, India. Dr. Unni went to Texas A&M University as a Fulbright Fellow in 1988. According to him, the value of international education was that it opened up a global perspective, taught students to be independent, enabled the student to learn the latest techniques, developed personal confidence and created lasting friendships across borders. Dr. Unni now serves as Secretary of the India Fulbright Alumni Association’s North East Chapter.

The Fulbright Academy is an independent non-profit organization based in the United States. We receive organizational and financial support from institutional and individual members, selected Fulbright alumni groups and commissions, corporations, foundations, and other entities interested in developing an international network of leaders in science and technology. We are not affiliated with the Fulbright Association (US), the US State Department, or the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

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. We interact with thousands of Fulbrighters and scientists around the world.

Academy projects are funded by contracts, grants, and donations from those that share our mission. Membership income is an important part of our annual budget; if you or your institution are not a member, please consider joining today.