The Fulbright Academy is an independent organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships that advance science and society. We want to help innovative ideas come to fruition by building ties, by supporting individual growth and by advocating for science and technology.

We are an international network of scientists, executives, and scholars established by alumni of the Fulbright Exchange Program, and we invite you to join us. You can also recommend other individuals or institutions who should join the Fulbright Academy. We look forward to hearing from you.

Earlier this month the US State Department announced a new Fulbright Initiative: The International Fulbright Science Award for Outstanding Foreign Students in Science and Technology. State Department officials said that some 50 foreign students will receive the grants in the first year. The grants will not be managed by the bi-national Fulbright Commissions, but rather awarded in one worldwide competition. Recruitment will start this year.

The announcement was made by Karen Hughes (undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs) at the US University Presidents Summit on International Education. This was a two-day summit in Washington for 120 college presidents, which included meetings with Laura Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, and others.

Because we are a worldwide network for Fulbright alumni in science and technology disciplines, the Fulbright Academy was extremely pleased about the initiative, and we look forward to promoting it to the international science community.

The 2006 Fulbrighters in Science Conference is nearly upon us, and so we are now beginning preparations for the 2007 Conference.

The 2006 Conference will be in Berlin on the weekend of March 4-5, 2006. The program includes a dynamic mix of keynotes, interactive sessions and opportunities for participants and speakers to network with each other. It also features a poster session and tours of local institutions. As of today, 116 people have registered - the conference is designed for people in the natural and social sciences, economics, engineering, and technology, and for those whose personal or business interests relate to those fields. Presentations will not be overly technical, but rather geared toward an audience of educated individuals. Registrations are still being accepted. The regular registration fee is 160 Euros ($182), with discounts for current grantees, DAAD alumni, and individuals coming from developing countries.

The 2007 Conference will be in Central America. We are currently accepting proposals from Fulbright alumni groups to serve as host for our 2007 Conference. Several individuals have expressed interest in serving on the planning committee and presenting at the conference, and we are also seeking corporate and institutional sponsors. The location will be announced in March at our Berlin conference. If you would like to be involved in the 2007 conference, please send a note to info@FulbrightAcademy.org.

(1) The Academy is hosting a career development workshop at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to help people understand the process and procedures for expanding their personal and institutional involvement in overseas research. Collaborations in the electronic age will also be discussed at this program on Friday, February 17. Speakers include Debra Egan (Council for International Exchange of Scholars - CIES), David Nothmann (Monsanto), and Flynn Picardal (Indiana University-Bloomington). The career development workshops and the exhibits are free and open to the public. (There is a fee for those who wish to attend the AAAS plenary lectures, seminars, and symposia. Rates are listed on the AAAS website.)

(2) The Fulbright Academy's 2006 Annual Meeting for members and supporters will be at AAAS in St. Louis, Missouri on Friday, 17 February 2006. These meetings are opportunities for members to gather and share their work and their recommendations on how the Academy can better serve its membership. The meeting will be in the late afternoon, immediately after a career development workshop. If you would like additional information or to sign up for our meeting, just click reply and send us a note.

(3) Our next Fulbright Forum will be brown-bag lunch at Webster University, hosted in partnership with their Center for International Education. Webster enrolls approximately 22,000 students worldwide. Founded in 1915 as a small private college, Webster has grown into an international network of over 100 campuses across the United States, Europe, China and Thailand. The lunch will be at their Missouri campus on Thursday, February 16.

(4) The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has invited the Academy to participate in "Research Week," a series of programs during the first week of April highlighting research opportunities and successes. A member of the Fulbright Academy, UNL is one of the top 50 American universities in the number of doctoral degrees granted annually.

(5) Fulbright Forum in Washington, DC. The Academy is hosting a brown-bag lunch on Friday, April 7 in the Washington area. The exact location has not been determined.

(6) If your institution would like to host a Fulbright Forum, please contact the Academy at 207-799-3098 or by email: info@FulbrightAcademy.org.

Singapore Management University (SMU) is our newest institutional member. It has four schools: the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, the School of Accountancy, the School of Economics & Social Sciences and the School of Information Systems. The new state-of-the-art 4.5 hectare (11 acre) campus is located in Singapore's civic district and will support the university's eventual 6,500 undergraduates, along with students in its future graduate programs. As the country's newest university, its educational and administrative practices were modeled after American institutions. Carnegie Mellon University and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania have both played a major role in SMU's creation and development.

FAST is expanding its institutional relations with the academic community though research collaborations. In February we begin work on an initiative funded through a US National Science Foundation (NSF) award to the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Indiana University, Bloomington. The Fulbright Academy is working with the two principal investigators and other Fulbright grantees on a program to increase the public's level of scientific literacy and help the public better understand the positive role that soil bacteria play in the environment. Fulbrighters who work on topics related to soil, bacteria, or biogeochemical cycles are urged to contact us so that we can incorporate them and their expertise in the project.

The soils project serves as a model for other collaborations and science literacy projects conducted as a partnership between the Fulbright Academy and researchers in the US and abroad. If you or your colleagues are submitting a grant proposal for a major research project, please contact the Academy so that we can discuss opportunities for you to partner with the Academy or with its members. In addition to helping us meet our goal of strengthening the alumni network, it also may increase your chance of getting the grant.

In December, the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan and the United States Educational Foundation in Pakistan signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly fund a special Fulbright Program for Pakistanis to study toward PhD degrees in the US. With this support, the total expenditure for sending Pakistani students to the United States will be $157.5 million over the next five years. This new program will fund around 50 students each year and will operate as a companion to the existing Fulbright/USAID Masters program which sends about 100 students a year to the US. With this new funding, Pakistan will be one of the larger Fulbright programs. The priority fields of research will be those established in the Pakistan's Technology-Based Industrial Vision and Strategy for Pakistan’s Socio-Economic Development Technology Document. Essentially, this document puts a priority on science and technology, health, agriculture and economics. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has had a major role in funding the US portion of the agreement which will help to support the long term development of Pakistan and to support its emergence as an emerging scientific and technological force in the world economy.

The following paragraphs describe some of the Fulbrighter activity in Latin America. There are over 1,000 alumni from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, and hundreds of alumni from many of the smaller countries. This growing network is one of the leading reasons for the Academy's decision to have the 2007 "Fulbrighters in Science Conference" in the region.

The Guatemala Fulbright Alumni Association held two important meetings last fall - a November reception with the US Ambassador for more than 150 Fulbrighters followed by a December program to discuss free trade liberalization. The Guatemalan Association was reformed in 2005.

The Fulbright Alumni Association of Bolivia hosted a program for 150 people, including Fulbright alumni, government officials, family members and friends. The US Ambassador to Bolivia, Mr. David Greenlee, was one of the key note speakers, along with Rigoberto Paredes, President of the Alumni Association of Bolivia and Diego Ballivian, Fulbright Program Coordinator at the US Embassy in La Paz. The association also has chapters in Cochabamba and the Santa Cruz. Their website is www.fulbrighter.net.

Because we are a network focusing on science, we are pleased to announce that the Fulbright Commission in Ecuador and the Ecuadorian Foundation for Science and Technology (FUNDACYT) have concluded a cost-sharing agreement. This represents the first time the government of Ecuador has contributed financially to the Fulbright program and is the culmination of several years of hard work on the part of the Fulbright Commission staff.

(Source: Alumni.State.Gov, Fulbright Commissions, and personal communications)

On November 23, the Congress of Guatemala, in conjunction with the National Council of Science and Technology (CONCYT), awarded the title of Guatemalan Scientist of the Year to Fulbrighter Dr. Luis Mejia de Leon. At the ceremony, the Vice President of Guatemala remarked on his life and distinguished career in the field of plant genetics. Dr. Mejia de Leon studied in the U.S. on a Fulbright grant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. He currently teaches and conducts research at the University of San Carlos-Guatemala City, the country’s largest and oldest public university.

In September, Dr. Medge Owen of the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem was in the Balkans, where Kybele was co-host for the first ever obstetric anesthesia meeting in Croatia. Kybele was an organization she started as a result of her Fulbright work in Turkey. After the meeting, attendees took their knowledge to nine different hospitals across the country. Team members originated from 6 countries and included 12 anesthesiologists, an obstetric internist, and a midwife.

Dr. Subal Kar, Professor of Radio Physics and Electronics at Calcutta University, built a relationship with Dr. John Corlett, head of the Center for Beam Physics, Accelerator and Fusion Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) during his Fulbright Fellowship to the US in 1999-2000. They worked on a machine known as Laser-based Ultra-fast X-ray Source (LUX). LUX will generate extremely bright and ultra-small pulses of x-rays that will probe atomic motions in chemical reactions, or in nuclear fusions that fuel stars like our sun. The project may yield a better understanding of photosynthesis, an extremely fast chemical reaction. This may have implications for future energy planning and agriculture, because photosynthesis allows plants to subsist and grow. In 2008 the new machine (about 10 kilometers long) will be ready to catch a glimpse of specific chemical reactions.

Economics is also a science, and so we are pleased to say that Pakistan has appointed a Fulbright alumna, Shamshad Akhtar, to head its central bank. Akhtar was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard University, holds a PhD in economics and has extensive experience in banking policy as well as bank-sector-related regulatory and legal issues. She worked as an economist for the World Bank for 10 years before joining the Asian Development Bank in 1990.

2003 Fulbright Student Juan Du is the Assistant Curator of the 2005 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture. He announced the opening of “City Metamorphose” at the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen. City-building strategies presented at the biennale could be of particular importance to contemporary China, which features "wide roads, aggressive buildings and boisterous advertisements," according to Zhang Yonghe, curator of the biennale. The exhibition will continue until March 10, 2006.

Political scientist Dr. Maria Teresa Romero, has a new book: “Venezuela en defensa de su democracia: el caso de la Doctrina Betancourt” (Fundación Cultura Urbana, 2006). She is an associate professor at Central University of Venezuela specializing in international affairs and Latin American Politics and also a columnist for national daily “El Universal.” Dr. Romero was a Fulbright researcher at the Library of Congress and John Hopkins, Washington, D.C in 1991, and has been president of the Venezuela Fulbright Association since 2004.

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The Fulbright Academy is a non-profit membership-based organization that serves scientists, executives, and scholars worldwide. 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. Our definition of science is quite broad -- it includes social, natural and life sciences as well as disciplines/professions that require or use scientific knowledge. We are not affiliated with the US State Department, the US Fulbright Association or the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

FAST uses the expertise of our network of Fulbright alumni and other 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, sponsorships, and donations from those who share our mission. Membership income is an important part of our annual budget; if you or your institution are not members, please join today. Individual memberships start at $15, and institutional/corporate memberships start at $250.