The Fulbright Program was created in 1946 by the U.S. government to share knowledge and forge lasting connections between American institutions and entities abroad. Each year, about 8,000 scholars and professionals are selected to travel, teach, and research in over 160 host countries. Six faculty members and staff as well as three recent alumni from ̽̽ were awarded Fulbright grants to continue this legacy during the 2023-24 academic year. This a snapshot of faculty and staff projects.
Antonio Cepeda-Benito
Expanding the Science of Health Stigmas
What does stigma have to do with whether or not a person smokes?
For ̽̽ psychologist, Antonio Cepeda-Benito, it could be the difference between deciding to quit or actively hiding your habit from your doctor, and it may change based on where you live. One phenomena he is investigating with collaborators in Spain is why smoking rates have begun to rise there since the country passed anti-smoking laws whereas rates have declined in the United States after similar laws went into effect. Cepeda-Benito’s hunch is that stigma—or lack of it—has something to do with it.
“In the United States, smoking is stigmatized,” he said. “In Spain … it is very common if you go to a cafe or some outdoor setting, that people will be smoking.”
Cepeda-Benito runs ̽̽’s Cross Cultural Psychology Lab and studies the prevalence of health-related stigmas such as smoking and disordered eating and how they differ between cultures. He partners with ̽̽’s Cancer Center on methods to motivate smokers, particularly rural and vulnerable populations, to quit. However, Cepeda-Benito spent the summer in Chile on a Fulbright grant working with an international team of collaborators to assess stigma associated with being overweight in adolescents and young adults and to develop a measure it in this population.
Weight-related measures of stigma exist and have been validated in many English-speaking countries where many academic journals are published, Cepeda-Benito explained. “So, they kind of dominate the discourse.”
Cepeda-Benito and his peers wanted to develop a measure and validate it for a broader population outside the United States and United Kingdom. That is the short-term goal. The long-term aim, he said, is to build a network of international scholars interested in studying eating disorders “that will continue to think of new projects together and areas to investigate that will not die after my Fulbright is over.”
Jeanne Harris
Thinking Big About Soil Microbes
Jeanne Harris thinks small. Microscopic really. She studies how microbes and abiotic material such as hard metals in soils affect plant development and evolution. She chairs ̽̽’s Department of Plant Biology and her research focuses more on basic science than on the applied side of the equation. But while participating in the Fulbright Specialist Program this summer at , she was forced to think big.
“They really want to see how they can do things to protect biodiversity here … to improve agriculture, promote human health,” she explained during a phone call from Bogota in June. “So this is sort of that intersection where soil health meets plant, plant health meets human health.”
Harris was there teaching a course on plant symbiosis and sustainable agriculture for faculty members at the university. While many of them understood that beneficial microbes exist that can promote plant growth, they weren’t necessarily clear on the mechanisms behind how they function. Harris helped fill in those gaps. She also explained that complexity reigns when it comes to ideas like partner choice—the way that plants and mycorrhizal fungi exchange resources like sugars and minerals with beneficial partners. These relationships can shift as the soil environment changes and an organism’s needs change.
“Everybody wants to paint things in black and white, but the fact is that there's a lot of fine tuning that goes on,” she said. “Sometimes [mycorrhizal fungi relationships] can actually become sort of parasitic. And that's because everyone's out for a free lunch.”
Complexity also helps explain why certain applications fail when added to a soil. It may not be a great match. Harris likens the process to a “biological market,” where resources shift over time due to environmental factors and cause plants and fungi to trade partners based on their needs. Harris tweaked the class to address local needs—like cadmium toxicity where farmers grow beans.
“They have serious problems of heavy metal, especially cadmium toxicity,” she said, adding that beneficial fungal partners could help sequester cadmium into parts of the plants that people don’t eat.
The other part of Harris’ Fulbright exchange is to consider establishing larger collaborative projects. Columbia is considered a hotspot of biodiversity. Managing soils that support the special strains of crops grown there is part of building a more sustainable future.
“This is pushing me into thinking … how can I use what I know to help tackle some big problems,” she said, “and how can I use what I know, even though I'm much more basic [science] to … help them to look at their problems from a slightly more, a slightly broader perspective.”
Alex Lindsay
Showing Young People the World
As the university’s study abroad advisor for Asia, Alex Lindsay felt he had some brushing up to do. His experience visiting the world’s largest continent (by size and population) was limited to a few trips leading high school students to Mongolia—a country four times the size of Japan with less than three percent of its population.
Part of Lindsay’s job at ̽̽’s Office of International Education is to help students explore the world and promote ̽̽ programs to international scholars. He knows the value of studying abroad because he did it himself, spending a semester in South Africa. But Lindsay’s work portfolio includes managing partnerships with Asian universities where ̽̽ has established exchange programs—the majority of which are in Japan. He applied for a Fulbright Award for International Education Administrators to learn more about the country’s educational system and culture.
“I feel like I'll be a much better resource for our students in terms of advising them for the programs they're interested in and a resource to our office for potential partnerships in the future,” Lindsay said.
He spent the month of June touring various Japanese universities and meeting with individuals from the country’s Ministry of Education Culture, Sports Science, and Technology to better understand their goals and areas of programming alignment with ̽̽. But it was the side trips that made an impression, too. Lindsay can now relate to students what it’s like to take a subway in Japan and the photos of Japanese campuses he will share with ̽̽ students are ones he personally snapped. He wants them to feel comfortable taking that next step in their educational journey.
“When I was in college, I knew I wanted to study abroad, but that was kind of in oddity among my friends,” Lindsay says. “I really want to help … young people get these abroad experiences and have that bigger picture of the world.”
Jane Molofsky
Examining How Invasive Plants Function
Goldenrod. The abundant yellow flower that appears in fields along Vermont roadways in the summer is a native species in New England. However, in South Korea, which has a geographically similar environment, goldenrod is considered invasive. Jane Molofsky studies the theory and mechanisms behind such plant invasions and will head to South Korea’s Andong National University in the spring on a Fulbright grant where she will work with experts in the field to explore using goldenrod.
Molofsky, a professor of plant biology at ̽̽, investigates population dynamics and the evolution of invasiveness. She recently co-developed a hypothesis called optimal differentiation to the edge of trait space—the idea that plants become invasive when they enter a plant community with functional traits that are similar enough to infiltrate the space, but different enough to establish and take over.
Instead of thinking of species as having a set of characteristics that make them particularly invasive, Molofsky proposes thinking more about ecosystem function and “the relationship between the community that's present and the introduced species,” she explained. “There's no one set of traits that make a species invasive, but it's relationship between what's there and what's being introduced.”
If a species is too different, a plant may not survive; too similar and it may get in but never take off. It’s in this third category that opportunity to occupy a new niche—and takeover—exists. During her Fulbright, she will partner with Chaeho Byun, an expert in biological invasives, and use an existing data set he collated of native South Korean flora and invasive species to test the role of functional traits in communities.
The concept of optimal differentiation applies to areas outside biology, too. Consider pop music. When scientists analyzed musical motifs, they found that when the motifs are too similar, they get lost in the shuffle. And if a song is too different, people can’t relate to it and it never becomes a hit, Molofsky said. “But if they're just different enough, then it kind of takes off because there's some novelty involved.”
Cynthia Reyes
Centering Non-Dominant Voices in Education
Before Cynthia Reyes became an academic, she taught middle schoolers in Chicago Public Schools and English as a second language to adults. She understands the importance of engaging immigrant and refugee communities in youth education.
That is why Reyes, associate dean for academic and faculty affairs for ̽̽’s College of Education and Social Services, wrote the book Humanizing Methodologies in Educational Research: Centering Nondominant Communities. And that is why she is in Canada for the next two semesters on two Fulbright research grants working with scholars examining anti-racism and BIPOC communities at the University of Waterloo, Ontario and studying equity in pedagogy at the University of Alberta.
“Language is often perceived as a barrier and I always think about language as a cultural resource,” Reyes said. “I'm really invested in working not only with teachers and students, but students’ families and the communities that they live in, and how do we get conversations going between the two.”
Reyes applied for a Fulbright to Canada because of its history of bilingual education and to connect with scholars working on these issues. In Alberta, she will interview individuals who work with traditionally marginalized populations. “How do people do research with people who have been displaced or have lost their homeland? How do you do that in a culturally sensitive way?” Reyes said. “It's really hard. It takes a lot of time.”
And that can run counter to the demands of academia where publishing is an important piece of the tenure process. Reyes’ work is designed to foster difficult but needed conversations to make sure education communities aren’t making assumptions about what families know and how to advocate for themselves.
“That’s really such a difficult thing, and it's important to do this research so we can help find out what are the most urgent questions families have,” Reyes said. “Universities, especially education departments, can be more thoughtful and more proactive and intentional in the ways they respond to those questions.”
Safwan Wshah
Using AI to Tackle Drought
Safwan Wshah grew up in Jordan, one of the most water scarce regions in the world, and suspected artificial intelligence (AI) might play a role in tackling unwieldy problems. But there was a gap in science available to him at Jordanian universities. He taught himself basic coding and learned about machine learning and neural networks on his own. At ̽̽, Wshah directs the and teaches machine learning courses for applied research projects in systems from healthcare to transportation.
But after a recent visit to Jordan, he noticed the growing gap in AI science and applied for a Fulbright grant to help close it. From June 2023 to September 2024, Wshah will teach computer science courses at Princess Sumaya University for Technology and help researchers develop a master's degree curriculum for AI. He’s also hoping to show through his research how AI can be used for good.
Wshah will also work with a team of Jordanian and ̽̽ investigators to use AI to better predict droughts and create an early warning system for Jordanian water managers and policymakers with both short and long-term lead times. The project will be a proof-of-concept study designed to be scaled for predicting drought and floods beyond Jordan. The researchers will collect data from ground sensors and correlate it with historical satellite imagery they will use to train AI systems to develop predictive drought models.
“This AI technology, it's going to come, we like it or we don't—this technology is going to be in our hands,” Wshah said. “It's our way to, as ambassadors for the AI technology, that we are teaching this technology to others is always to make sure that this is going to be used in a safe way and going to be used for enhancing the quality of life for people.”