Two winners of one the most prestigious academic scholarships, the Fulbright Grant, are currently living and working in the Dartmouth campus. At the same time, one of Dartmouth's own faculty members is currently in Greece after also winning one of the awards.
The Fulbright Scholars program, named for Senator J. William Fulbright, who founded the program in 1948, is "the U.S. government's flagship international exchange program," said Janel Showalter, a spokesperson for the national private organization that administers the program.
"They are very competitive grants and it is really an honor to get one," Assistant Dean of the Faculty Jane Carroll said.
Over 4,500 grants sponsored by the federal government are awarded each year to graduate students, elementary and secondary school teachers, professionals and faculty members from colleges around the country and the world.
Approximately 750 faculty scholars from the United States travel abroad each year paid for by Fulbright grants.
In addition, about the same number of faculty members at universities in nearly 100 other countries around the world receive grants to come to the U.S.
Showalter pointed out that there are actually two types of Fulbright grants, one for research and the other for lecturing. About 80 percent of visiting scholars come to the U.S. to conduct research, while about the same percentage of American Fulbrighters travel abroad to teach.
Computer Science professor Fillia Makedon, the Dartmouth professor who is currently in Greece, has a grant that actually encompasses both types. She left in January to spend six months studying and lecturing about the impact multimedia technology and information retrieval systems have on electronic commerce.
Dartmouth is also currently hosting two international Fulbright scholars -- geography professor Mykhaylo Grodzynskyy, from Kiev State University in the Ukraine, and professor of foreign language Xing Wang from China's Beijing Normal University.
English department chair Bill Cook, who is Wang's sponsor, said that studying in the U.S. offers Fulbright scholars from other countries several benefits, including direct access to material relevant to their project, the chance to work with host faculty with expertise in their areas of interest and have access to facilities that may be better suited to their academic needs.
The host institution and faculty also benefit from the opportunity to become acquainted with the different cultural perspectives on a given topic that the Fulbright scholar brings with him or her, Cook said.
While at Dartmouth, Cook said Wang will be researching American short stories of the early 20th century, adding that short stories written by American authors are more popular in China than longer works written in the United States.
Grodzynskyy came to the U.S. to continue his research into the environmental indicators of sustainable development for countries, such as the Ukraine, which are in transition.
Besides working on the first draft of a book about what he calls landscape ecology, Grodzynskyy also volunteered to lead a senior seminar on environmental catastrophes.
Grodzynskyy chose to come to Dartmouth based on his experiences at a conference held here several years ago. At the conference he met the professor who would later be his sponsor, environmental sciences department chair Ross Virginia.
Since 1981, Dartmouth has been visited by 19 international Fulbright scholars and 29 Dartmouth professors have traveled abroad on grants awarded through the program.
