LEXINGTON, KY. (Nov. 3, 2011) -The University of Kentucky was recognized by the Chronicle of Higher Education this week as a top producer of U.S. Fulbright Scholars for the 2011-12 academic year, with five recipients as of Oct. 7.
UK is a top producer of Fulbright Scholars among research institutions, according to the Chronicle's listing.
The prestigious Fulbright Scholar Program is the flagship international exchange program of the U.S. and provides grants that allow distinguished academics to spend extended periods of time studying and teaching at foreign universities.
Economics Professor William "Josh" Ederington will be researching the design and effects of international environmental agreements at the department of economics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium on a Fulbright-Schuman grant from February-June 2012.
Ederington will be investigating how to design and structure an international environmental agreement to induce countries to both sign and then comply with the obligations of such an agreement, as well as looking at the impact of an international environmental agreement on trade flows and foreign direct investment decisions.
Political science Professor Donald Gross will be teaching American politics and the development of American foreign policy to undergraduate and graduate students at University of Ljubljana in Ljubljana, Slovenia this spring. Gross's research and teaching interests are in American politics, including campaign finance, legislative politics, political parties and executive branch politics.
Harry LeVine III, associate professor in the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry Department, Center for Structural Biology has been selected as a Fulbright Scholar to Sweden. LeVine will be working with Linköping University researchers Peter Nilsson and Per Hammarstrom in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology from February to June 2012. Their goal is to improve the selectivity of a class of brain imaging agents for the detection of neurodegenerative diseases. Linköping is 200 km south of Stockholm.
Economics Professor Jenny Minier received a Fulbright-Schuman grant on European Union Affairs. Minier will be studying from February to June 2012 at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, doing research on regional income gaps within the European Union.
"My proposed research includes examining whether the persistently poor regions of Europe are poor because they have fewer resources, or because they use them less efficiently," she said. "I am also interested in the current and historical factors that explain differences in productivity between the poor and rich regions of Europe, and how expansion (adding countries that are poorer than the E.U. average) has affected poor areas within the existing E.U. members."
American studies Professor Alan Nadel will be doing research in Rome this spring, as well as teaching a master’s-level seminar in Naples on the plays of African-American playwright August Wilson.
Nadel will be analyzing post-World War II American, German, British and Italian film to explore the connection of historical, cultural and social changes of the war's fundamental re-alliances in order to understand how they helped shape Europe’s culture today. His research in Rome will focus on the Italian film aspect of the larger project.
In addition to these five, political science Professor Horace Bartilow participated in a seminar that dealt with the effects of Globalization on German and European National Identity in Berlin and Brussels.
"The issues covered in the seminar are consistent with my current research examining the effects of economic globalization on democratic governance as it interacts with a country's ethnicity."
The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Under a cooperative agreement with the bureau, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars assists in the administration of the Fulbright Scholar Program for faculty and professionals.
