2016 Alumni

All Fulbright Scholars | 2016

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Benny D. Freeman

Distinguished Chair

Valerie Hudson

Distinguished Chair

Yolanda Moses

Distinguished Chair

Angus Rupert

Distinguished Chair

David Stoesz

Distinguished Chair

Ruth Wallace

Distinguished Chair

Gregory Alexander

Senior Scholars

Patricia Aufderheide

Senior Scholars

Derek Bailey

Senior Scholars

Ralf Georg Dietzgen

Senior Scholars

Calum John Drummond

Senior Scholars

Clinton Fookes

Senior Scholars

Hillary Haldane

Senior Scholars

Sundhya Pahuja

Senior Scholars

Anya Reading

Senior Scholars

Bradley Zebrack

Senior Scholars

Hichem Demortier

Professional Scholars

Chris Dixon

Professional Scholars

Peter Hudson

Professional Scholars

Sally Ursula Jane Salmon

Professional Scholars

Kristian Wale

Professional Scholars

Marcel David Zimmet

Professional Scholars

David Bishop

Postdoctoral Scholars

Kathryn Crowe

Postdoctoral Scholars

Laura Eadie

Postdoctoral Scholars

Kathryn Gilbey

Postdoctoral Scholars

Simon Graham

Postdoctoral Scholars

Brendan Quinn

Postdoctoral Scholars

Dr Matilda Anderson

Postgraduate Students

Rachelle Peta Cole

Postgraduate Students

Millicent Cripe

Postgraduate Students

Jenna Margaret Crowe-Riddell

Postgraduate Students

Travis Franks

Postgraduate Students

Raechel French

Postgraduate Students

Vafa Darren Ghazavi

Postgraduate Students

Shruti Gujaran

Postgraduate Students

Sophie Hollingsworth

Postgraduate Students

Monique Hurley

Postgraduate Students

Shraddha Kashyap

Postgraduate Students

Craig William McCormack

Postgraduate Students

Daniel McNamara

Postgraduate Students

David Ian Rawson

Postgraduate Students

Sean Reilly

Postgraduate Students

Hannah Ryan

Postgraduate Students

Gideon Singer

Postgraduate Students

Caitlin Blanche Trethewy

Postgraduate Students

Benny Freeman Distinguished Chair

Home InstitutionThe University of Texas at Austin
Host InstitutionCommonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
Award NameFulbright Distinguished Chair in Science, Technology and Innovation (Sponsored by CSIRO)
DisciplineManufacturing in Membrane Materials
Award Year2016

Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Science, Technology and Innovation (Sponsored by CSIRO)

Benny Freeman is the Richard B. Curran Centennial Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Chemical Engineering. He earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. In 1988 and 1989, he served as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI), Laboratoire Physico-Chimie Structurale et Macromoléculaire in Paris, France. Dr. Freeman’s research is in polymer science and engineering specifically in mass transport of small molecules in solid polymers. His laboratory focuses on gas and liquid separations using polymer and polymer-based membranes, developing and characterizing new materials for hydrogen separation, natural gas purification, carbon capture, water/ion separation, desalination, and fouling resistant membranes. His research is described in 395 publications and 22 patents/patent applications. He has co-edited 5 books on these topics.

He has won numerous awards, including the PMSE Distinguished Service Award (2016), Fellow of the Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Division of ACS (2014), AIChE Clarence (Larry) G. Gerhold Award (2013), Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award from The University of Texas (2013), Society of Plastics Engineers International Award (2013), Roy W. Tess Award in Coatings from the PMSE Division of ACS (2012), the ACS Award in Applied Polymer Science (2009), AIChE Institute Award for Excellence in Industrial Gases Technology (2008), and the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program Project of the Year (2001). He is a Fellow of the AAAS, AIChE, ACS, and the PMSE and IECR Divisions of ACS. He has served as chair of the PMSE Division of the ACS, chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Membranes: Materials and Processes, President of the North American Membrane Society, chair of the Membranes Area of the Separations Division of the AIChE, and chair of the Separations Division of AIChE.

Benny’s interests in new materials design for separations important for clean water, clean energy, and manufacturing process intensification aligns synergistically with the world-leading materials science and characterization research at CSIRO. He will work closely with colleagues at CSIRO, the University of Melbourne and other institutions across Australia to lay the groundwork for a long and productive, bilateral collaboration to develop, characterize and understand, at a fundamental level, disruptive, over the horizon, separations membranes for applications such as air separations, desalination, high value materials recovery from waste (e.g., waste to energy), toxic materials separation from waste and recycle/recovery of critical and strategic materials and metals. Benny has a strong interest in seeing results from fundamental research reduced to practice, which is also a topic of common interest with his Australian colleagues.

On a personal front, Benny is intensely interested in exploring the historical and cultural heritage of Australia, discovering the extraordinary natural beauty of Australia and sailing with current and new-found friends and colleagues.

Professor Valerie M. Hudson, PhD Distinguished Chair

Home InstitutionProfessor and George H.W. Bush Chair at The George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University
Host InstitutionCoral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs, Australian National University
Award NameFulbright Distinguished Chair in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (Sponsored by ANU)
DisciplineInternational Affairs in Foreign Policy, Women, Peace and Security
Award Year2016

Valerie M. Hudson is Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair in The George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, where she directs the Program on Women, Peace, and Security. An expert on international security and foreign policy analysis, Dr. Valerie M. Hudson received her PhD in political science at The Ohio State University and came to Texas A&M University from a senior faculty position at Brigham Young University. In 2009, Foreign Policy named her one of the top 100 Most Influential Global Thinkers. Her co-authored book, Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, and the research it presents, received major attention from the media with coverage in theWall Street Journal,New York Times,Financial Times, Washington Post,BBC,CNN, and numerous other outlets. The book also received two national book awards. Her co-authored bookSex and World Peace, published by Columbia University Press, was named by Gloria Steinem as one of the top three books on her reading list. Her most recent book, with Patricia Leidl, isThe Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy, published in June 2015. Hudson was also recently named a Distinguished Scholar of Foreign Policy Analysis by the International Studies Association.

Dr. Hudson has developed a nation-by-nation database on women (http://womanstats.org) that triggered both academic and policy interest (the latter includes its use by both the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and various agencies of the United Nations). Using this data, Hudson and her co-principal investigators from The WomanStats Project have published a wide variety of empirical work linking the security of women to the security of states, with research appearing in International Security, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, and Politics and Gender.

Throughout her career, Dr. Hudson has demonstrated a strong commitment to collaboration with other scholars both in her own field and in other disciplines, and received significant research grants, including grants from the US Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative and the National Science Foundation, to support her work in international affairs. Her research and teaching experience is also complemented by three major teaching awards and numerous research awards, and she has recently been awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Hudson served as vice president of the International Studies Association for 2011-2012. She is a founding editorial board member of Foreign Policy Analysis, and also serves on the editorial boards of Politics and Gender and The American Political Science Review.

Dr. Hudson hopes to spend her time in Australia researching the implementation of UNSCR 1325 by the Australian government and military through its National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, as well as developing a more in-depth understanding of the field of Foreign Policy Analysis as it has evolved in Australia. She is looking forward to meeting scholars throughout Australia that have similar interests. Her family will accompany her, and they are keen to see and learn as much about “Oz” as possible.

Dr. Yolanda T. Moses Distinguished Chair

Home InstitutionUniversity of California Riverside
Host InstitutionNational Centre of Cultural Competence (NCCC), University of Sydney
Award NameFulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Competence (Sponsored by the NCCC, University of Sydney)
DisciplineAnthropology
Award Year2016

Yolanda received her Magna Cum Laude degree in Anthropology from the University of California Riverside in 1976. She then went on to teach and conduct research at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and California State University Dominguez Hills before moving to New York in 1993 to the City University of New York, (The City College) and the Graduate Center as professor of Anthropology and President of CCNY. From 2000 to 2003 she was President of the American Association for Higher Education and Senior Researcher in the Anthropology Department at George Washington University in Washington D.C. Yolanda returned to UC Riverside in 2004.

She currently serves as Professor of Anthropology and most recently as Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Excellence at the University of California, Riverside from 2007-2016. Dr. Moses’ research focuses on the broad question of the origins of social inequality in complex societies through the use of comparative ethnographic and survey methods. She has explored gender and class disparities in the Caribbean, East Africa and in the United States. More recently, her research has focused on issues of diversity and change in universities and colleges in the United States, India, Europe and South Africa.

Her honors and awards include The National Donna Shavlik award for leadership and Mentoring Women in 2007 (ACE); Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2009; Visiting Professor, University of Melbourne, Intercultural and Indigenous Studies Program 2014; Distinguished Research Lecturer Award UC Riverside 2015; The Franz Boas Award for Distinguished Service to the Field of Anthropology (AAA) as a Public Intellectual 2015; and The Dyason Fellowship to Support Collaborative Research and Innovation, University of Melbourne 2016. In addition Yolanda has received major grants from the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her research and innovative projects including the nationally acclaimed “Race: are we so different” project (2007-2015) (www.understandingrace.org).

Yolanda is interested in exploring more fully the concept of culture used in the Cultural Competency model at the University of Sydney to compare it to Universities in the U.S. The concept of culture is something that the field of anthropology sees as a fluid, dynamic and evolving concept that the discipline have been tracking and reporting on for almost two centuries in the U.S. as it relates to individuals and groups. She notes that there is a need for more understanding of the very important role of “multiple cultural understandings.” That is, how are institutions and individuals both cultural constructions? How do they deconstruct and reconstruct themselves? She would also like to learn and enhance her own scholarly knowledge about how the University of Sydney uses the concept of cultural competency to organize its transformational change and inclusion strategies; with the unique feature of placing the well- being and success of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander students, staff and faculty at the centerpiece.

Yolanda will be traveling to Australia with her husband with visits from her adult children during her stay.

Angus Rupert MD, PhD Distinguished Chair

Home InstitutionU.S. Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory, Fort Rucker Alabama
Host InstitutionDefence Science and Technology Group, Aerospace Division Melbourne.
Award NameFulbright Distinguished Chair in Advanced Science and Technology (Sponsored by DST Group)
DisciplineTactile Cueing Technologies
Award Year2016

Angus gained his PhD. in Neurophysiology from the University of Illinois in 1979 and then pursued his MD degree at the University of Toronto in his native country Canada, finishing in 1982. Following an operational tour in the Azores as a U.S. Navy flight surgeon, he began his research career at the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola, Florida where he specialized in vestibular psychophysics associated with the unusual acceleration environments encountered in flight and in space. As a result of the measures and countermeasures he developed for the Navy, CAPT Rupert was assigned to NASA Johnson Space Center for 12 years to continue development of solutions to aerospace mishaps.

Dr Rupert developed, based on psychophysics experiments, techniques to conduct perceptual analysis of aviation spatial disorientation mishaps for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and other nations, including Australia. To maintain pilot orientation continuously and prevent spatial disorientation mishaps, Dr Rupert developed the concept of tactile cueing as a tool for pilots and as a prosthesis device for patients with balance dysfunction. For the past 20 years, Dr Rupert has refined tactile cueing and integrated 3D auditory and traditional visual displays with tactile cues to create multisensory cueing for pilots. Due to his flight tests and tactile cueing demonstrations in the United States and Canada, the Australian MOD has recently selected Dr Rupert’s tactile cueing technology as one of five key technologies for the Capability and Technology Demonstrator program.

Angus matches his vocation of developing aerospace safety devices with his avocation of flying. While in graduate school, he obtained his commercial pilots license, aircraft mechanics license, and parachute riggers license to create a skydiving school, which in part supported his graduate education. As an avid aviator, he has flown his single engine Cessna across the north and south Atlantic to his duty stations and throughout Europe, Africa, and South America.

Angus will work with the Australian MOD and the Defence Science & Technology Group in Melbourne to introduce and integrate tactile cueing onto helicopter platforms and ground soldiers in order to demonstrate the additional capabilities provided to pilots and soldiers. He will also provide versions of tactile cueing to the civil aviation community as well as demonstrations of tactile cueing as a prosthesis device for balance impaired patients. Lastly Dr Rupert will provide lectures and examples of perceptual analysis of aviation mishap investigation to the ATSB (Australian Transport Safety Bureau).

Dr. Rupert is looking forward to meeting and sharing new concepts and technologies with the Australian aviation community.

David Stoesz, PhD Distinguished Chair

Home InstitutionProfessor and Director, MSW Program, Kean University
Host InstitutionFlinders University and Carnegie Mellon University Australia
Award NameFulbright Distinguished Chair in Applied Public Policy, Sponsored by Flinders University and Carnegie Mellon University Australia
Discipline Social Policy
Award Year2016

Dr. David Stoesz received his doctorate from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Since then he has published articles and books on various aspects of social policy, including public welfare, the Clinton Presidency, children’s services, international development, financial services, and politics and policy. From 1995 to 2000 he held the Wurtzel Endowed Chair at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the coauthor of American Social Welfare Policy, ed. His book, Quixote’s Ghost: The Right, the Liberati, and the Future of Social Policy, received the Pro Humanitate Literary Award. A Fulbright award at the University of Birmingham resulted in The Dynamic Welfare State, recently published by Oxford University Press. His current project is a book, Theory and Social Welfare.

Dr. Stoesz is planning on writing a sequel to The Dynamic Welfare State while at Flinders University. Tentatively titled From Welfare State to Investment State, the book will propose a future configuration for social programming among industrialized nations. In addition, he plans on lecturing at universities in Australia.

Dr. Stoesz is an avid whitewater kayaker, downhill skier, and chef. When time permits, he makes furniture and weaves.

Professor Ruth Wallace Distinguished Chair

Home InstitutionCharles Darwin University
Host InstitutionKansas State University
Award NameFulbright Distinguished Chair in Agriculture and Life Sciences, Sponsored by Kansas State University
DisciplineAgricultural Science (Biosecurity)
Award Year2016

Ruth Wallace is the Director of the Northern Institute, the social and policy research institute at Charles Darwin University. Her research interests relate to the links between identity, marginalised learners and the development of effective learning and workforce development pathways. Her work is situated in regional and remote areas of northern Australia, and predominantly undertaken with Aboriginal people in remote and regional areas. Her critical thinking is driven by informed debate on the multifaceted issues that present in the unique political and geographic frontiers of northern Australia. Professor Wallace has extended this work to examine approaches to enterprise development in regional and remote areas of Eastern Indonesia. Her work incorporates areas of economic and social change through working with Indigenous land and sea managers undertaking key biosecurity and economic development roles. The Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Agriculture and Life Sciences Scholarship will allow Professor Wallace the opportunity to go beyond these northern borders to develop distinguished professional networks with a view to developing future collaborations.

Ruth was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy by Charles Darwin University in 2011. Her research focused on marginalized learners’ identities and the intersections with educational systems in regional areas. Ruth’s academic career started when she was awarded at Bachelor of Education (Primary) at the Queensland University of Technology, and she has gone on to postgraduate studies in Adult Education, Research Management and Mathematics. Ruth holds key leadership roles nationally and in northern Australia to improve research integration and utilization, particularly in remote areas. She leads the Workforce Development research theme and focuses on collaborative approaches with community, governments and industry that are sustainable and scalable. Ruth is committed to utilizing research’s potential to improve social, cultural and economic outcomes for marginalized people and works closely with Aboriginal researchers and community groups in regional and remote areas to support engaged and effective policy and enterprise development systems.

The Biosecurity Policy at the Margins Project is a major opportunity to build on research in northern Australia and focus on engaging regional and marginalized communities in biosecurity identification and response systems, at a national and local scale. Professor Wallace will work with researchers at the Research and Extension Division at Kansas State University to understand and articulate the ways that remote communities can contribute to, and partner in, the effective delivery of plant biosecurity surveillance through engaging a wide range of decision makers and knowledge systems. The project will contribute to understanding the processes that underpin priorities and decision making in policy networks and policy implementation.

Gregory L. Alexander PhD, RN, FAAN Senior Scholars

Home InstitutionUniversity of Missouri, Sinclair School of Nursing
Host InstitutionMacquarie University
Award NameFulbright Senior Scholarship
DisciplineClinical Informatics
Award Year2016

Dr. Gregory L. Alexander PhD, RN, FAAN has a broad background with specialized education in health systems, human factors, informatics, gerontology, patient safety and quality improvement. Alexander is principal investigator of a research team that is for the first time ever, comparing nationally, nursing home (NH) quality measures and information technology (IT) implementation in the United States through an R01 funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). He co-leads a large national demonstration project funded by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS). In this research, his team is implementing a health information exchange system and monitoring adoption and use of technology designed to improve communication between healthcare stakeholders. Alexander has published widely in interdisciplinary, national/international journals including nursing, engineering, gerontology, health services research, and quality improvement. He has spoken around the world at conferences about his research and has served as a U.S. ambassador in international workshops. Alexander has hosted international graduate PhD students at his university who are interested in gerontology and informatics.

Alexander’s research will be the first international comparative assessment of IT adoption in NHs, which will include identifying types of IT used, extent of IT use and degree of IT integration. Currently, IT is not linked to key quality measurement systems. If our preliminary results, conducted in the United States, are replicated in Australia and increasing IT adoption is associated with changes in reports of quality measures used in aged care facilities, this finding would strongly support ongoing international collaborations exploring the use of NH Quality Measurement systems and IT adoption as a way to build benchmarks for resident care.

Dr. Alexander is eager to promote his work internationally as a Fulbright Scholar at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia by working with faculty and graduate students focused on using informatics to promote better clinical environments in long term care.

Professor Patricia Aufderheide Senior Scholars

Home InstitutionAmerican University
Host InstitutionQueensland University of Technology (QUT)
Award NameFulbright Senior Scholarship
DisciplineCommunication in Communication Policy
Award Year2016

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the co-author with Peter Jaszi of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago Press, July 2011), and author of, among others, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999). She has been a John Simon Guggenheim fellow and has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival among others.

She has received numerous journalism and scholarly awards, including the Preservation and Scholarship award in 2006 from the International Documentary Association, a career achievement award in 2008 from the International Digital Media and Arts Association, the Woman of Vision Award from Women in Film and Video (DC) in 2010 and the George Stoney Documentary Award from the University Film and Video Association in 2015. Aufderheide serves on the board of directors of Kartemquin Films, a leading independent social documentary production company, and on the editorial boards of a variety of publications, including Communication Law and Policy and In These Times newspaper. She serves on the board of directors of the Independent Television Service, a public TV service that produces innovative television programming for underserved audiences.

During her Fulbright program, Aufderheide hopes to share knowledge and learn from Australian scholars, media makers, industry leaders, arts management executives, and policy makers. She is interested particularly in the intersection of copyright understanding and creative decision-making in the arts; in the social impact of film and video; and in media ethics. Australian experience in making media under today’s copyright policies is of great value in understanding global challenges in copyright reform.

Professor Derek Wayne Bailey Senior Scholars

Home InstitutionNew Mexico State University
Host InstitutionCentral Queensland University
Award NameFulbright Senior Scholarship
DisciplinePrecision Agriculture in Livestock
Award Year2016

Derek grew up on a small cattle ranch in Colorado and graduated with Highest Distinction from Colorado State University in Animal Science during 1980.  He later earned an MS in Animal Science and PhD in Range Science at Colorado State University during 1985 and 1988, respectively.  After finishing his PhD, Derek worked 5 years as a rangeland management consultant in Nevada and assisted ranchers across the western US.  He then worked as a researcher with USDA-ARS for 2 years conducting gazing behavior studies, animal nutrition experiments and ecological modeling. After a short period with Cooperative Extension at University of Arizona, Derek conducted grazing management, distribution and animal behavior research for Montana State University at off-campus research center in Havre, MT. After 9 years in Montana, He began his current position at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, which includes research, teaching and administration of the Chihuahuan Desert Rangeland Research Center.

Throughout his career, Derek has strived to develop tools that cattle producers can use to make ranching more ecologically and economically sustainable. He has developed novel approaches to resolve livestock grazing issues and worked with ranches and land managers to use low-stress livestock handling and other practices to resolve on-the-ground problems.  Derek helped pioneer the use of global positioning system (GPS) tracking to measure and quantify livestock behavior on extensive and mountainous rangeland. He has authored more than 50 refereed journal publications and received over 1.3 million dollars of extramural funding for research.  Derek has conducted collaborative research with scientists across the western US as well as with researchers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Italy and Jordan.

The goal of Derek’s research is to identify livestock behaviors that may be associated with disease, welfare and grazing distribution patterns.  He and his collaborators hypothesize that behaviors that occur when livestock are watering may be useful for predicting when they are becoming ill. They will track sheep and cattle to test this hypothesis. Monitoring livestock welfare is difficult in extensive rangeland pastures, and this proposed research will be an integral part of the development of information and diagnostic software needed to remotely determine when animal welfare is comprised so that management can readily respond.

Derek will be traveling to Australia with his wife, and they are looking forward to enjoying Australia’s culture, natural wonders and outdoor lifestyle.

Dr Ralf Georg Dietzgen Senior Scholars

Home InstitutionThe University of Queensland
Host InstitutionKansas State University
Award NameFulbright Senior Scholarship, Sponsored by Kansas State University
DisciplineAgricultural Science
Award Year2016

Ralf gained his doctorate of science magna cum laude in Microbiology from the Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany in 1983. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at Cornell University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Adelaide. He migrated to Australia in 1989 to join the Queensland Department of Agriculture in Brisbane to conduct research in plant virology and biotechnology, and more recently led a large team of agricultural biotechnologists. In 2010, Ralf transferred to a new joint research institute at the University of Queensland to continue his research with a team of international students and colleagues, and as the inaugural Postgraduate Coordinator for the institute.

Ralf is a Feodor-Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has had a distinguished research career in plant virology, which included study leave at the University of California Berkeley and Davis, University of Kentucky and Okayama University. He has published widely with many eminent scholars in the fields of horticultural crop improvement, plant-virus-insect interactions and virus taxonomy. Ralf’s scientific contributions have been recognized through travel awards from the Australian Academy of Science and the Department of Industry, Science and Technology. In 2010, he was awarded a prestigious Queensland International Fellowship, as winner of the Ecosciences category.

Ralf has a strong scientific interest in understanding the molecular interactions of viruses, their plant hosts and insect vectors, aimed at finding novel ways to control plant diseases and reduce their spread. Thrips are economically important insect pests in agriculture that cause significant feeding damage and transmit viruses to hundreds of horticultural and ornamental plant species. In this Fulbright research project, Ralf aims to discover specific genes involved in thrips development and thrips-virus interactions and he will assess their potential as novel targets in thrips management.

Ralf is looking forward to spending the term of his scholarship at Manhattan, Kansas to increase his technical research skills, progress scientific knowledge and learn more about Kansas and its people. He intends to translate the scientific know-how that will be generated to achieve sustainable control of thrips pests and the viruses they transmit to reduce economic losses and increase productivity and global food security. Ralf also aims to develop a long-term collaboration between Kansas State University and the University of Queensland and the research teams involved in this Fulbright research project. More broadly, he wants to foster Australia – USA relations and mutual understanding and networking.

Professor Calum John Drummond Senior Scholars

Home InstitutionRMIT University
Host InstitutionKoch Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Award NameFulbright Senior Scholarship
DisciplinePharmaceutical Science
Award Year2016

Calum is a graduate of The University of Melbourne (BScEd (H1, 1981), BSc Hons (H1, 1982), PhD and DSc in Physical Chemistry (1987 and 2015). As the current RMIT Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Innovation and Vice President, he has a leadership role in the development of discovery and practice-based research and in building and enhancing capability in research and innovation across the University. He joined RMIT University in 2014 from CSIRO where he was Group Executive for Manufacturing, Materials and Minerals. Immediately prior to this CSIRO Group Executive appointment, he was Chief of CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering. Previously, Calum was seconded from CSIRO to be the inaugural Vice President Research at CAP-XX, an Intel portfolio company.

He is an active researcher with interests in the area of advanced materials, including application to energy storage and biomedical products. The outstanding calibre of his research has been recognised through the award of the 2015 Victoria Prize for Science and Innovation (Physical Sciences Category), CSIRO Fellow designation (2013; CSIRO’s highest award for exceptional scientists), World Economic Forum Global Technology Pioneer (2005; awarded to CAP-XX), Frost and Sullivan (USA) Excellence in Communication and Information Technologies Award (2006; awarded to CAP-XX), an Australian Research Council (ARC) Federation Fellowship (2003-2010), an ARC Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship (1990-1993), the inaugural R.J.W. Le Févre Memorial Prize from the Australian Academy of Science (1989), the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) Rennie Memorial Medal (1989), the RACI Applied Research Award (2002), the RACI Industrial Chemistry Division RK Murphy Medal (2004), the RACI Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2005), the RACI Physical Chemistry Division Medal (2006), the RACI HG Smith Memorial Medal (2015), CSIRO Medal for Outstanding Research Achievement (2004), CSIRO Medal for Business Excellence (2011), Distinguished Lecturer Award from The Colloid and Surface Chemistry Division of the Japanese Chemical Society (2011), Distinguished Paper Award of The Soap and Detergent Association (USA) and The American Oil Chemists Society (2001), both the David Syme Research Prize (2002) and the Grimwade Prize in Industrial Chemistry (1995) from The University of Melbourne, and a Rothmans Foundation Fellowship (1990; declined).

Throughout the term of his Fulbright Scholarship, Calum hopes to embed ongoing research collaboration between MIT and RMIT in the area of drug delivery. His plans include disseminating new knowledge through publishing research papers in high impact journals and presenting at international science and engineering conferences, with aims to advancing the understanding of therapeutic protein structure and function preservation (protein stability) in vitro and in vivo. While in Boston, Calum will be exchanging the latest thinking on enhancing university research and innovation ecosystems, improving university research and innovation management, and translating research beyond the academic community to deliver broader positive economic, community and environmental impact.

Professor Clinton Fookes Senior Scholars

Home InstitutionQueensland University of Technology
Host InstitutionThe City College at the City University of New York
Award NameFulbright Senior Scholarship
DisciplineEngineering (Vision & Signal Processing)
Award Year2016

Clinton is a Professor in Vision & Signal Processing and the Speech, Audio, Image & Video Technologies group within the Science and Engineering Faculty at QUT. He holds a BEng (Aerospace/Avionics), an MBA with a focus on technology innovation/management, and a PhD in the field of computer vision. Clinton actively researches in the fields of computer vision, machine learning and pattern recognition including video surveillance, biometrics, human-computer interaction, airport security and operations, and complex systems. Clinton has attracted over $15M of cash funding for fundamental and applied research from external competitive sources. He is a Chief Investigator for eight Australian Category 1 grants including six funded from the Australian Research Council and two from the National Security Science & Technology Unit of the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet for performing counter-terrorism research. He has published over 140 internationally peer-reviewed articles and has supervised more than 20 PhD students through to completion. He has been the Director of Research for the School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. He is currently the Head of Discipline for Vision & Signal Processing. He is the Technical Director for the Airports of the Future collaborative research initiatives. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of other professional organisations including the Australian Pattern Recognition Society. He is also an Australian Institute of Policy and Science Young Tall Poppy and an Australian Museum Eureka Prize winner.

For his Fulbright Senior Scholarship, Clinton will work in the Media Lab of the City College of New York. His project will investigate two critical components of large-scale video surveillance systems across technical and policy fronts. First, by working with one of the world leaders in video surveillance the project will advance a key capability missing from current state-of-the-art systems – the ability to search for people of interest. Second, by assessing the impacts, drivers, and impediments of video analytics in one of the busiest and most dynamic cities in the world, this project will explore the practical and policy reasons for the lack of adoption of large-scale video analytic systems for monitoring our cities to inform future research endeavours. During this project, Clinton will also work with some of the leading policing and defence organisations that deploy this technology and have a strong interest in its advancement.

Dr. Hillary J. Haldane Senior Scholars

Home InstitutionDepartment of Sociology, Criminal Justice and Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, Quinnipiac University
Host InstitutionQueensland Centre for Domestic and Family Violence Research, Central Queensland University
Award NameFulbright Senior Scholarship
DisciplineAnthropology
Award Year2016

Dr. Haldane earned her BA in anthropology at San Diego State University in 1996, her DipArts in anthropology at the University of Otago in 1997, and her MA and PhD in anthropology in 2007 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has conducted research on the relationship between Indigenous rights and violence against women since 1997, primarily in Aotearoa New Zealand. Prior to pursuing her PhD in anthropology, Dr. Haldane was employed for a number of years at non-governmental organizations devoted to preventing violence against women, and this experience informed her research interest in the challenges facing frontline workers. Dr. Haldane has taught at Quinnipiac University since 2007, where she directs the anthropology program. Dr. Haldane has published two books and numerous articles and book chapters on the problem of gender-based violence, as well as published policy papers for addressing violence at the international and national levels. Dr. Haldane also works in a consultancy capacity for non-governmental organizations as well as for governmental agencies.

Dr. Haldane will continue her research into the experiences of anti-violence frontline workers while at Central Queensland University in Mackay, with a particular focus on the challenges Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities face to secure the resources needed to end violence. Dr. Haldane looks forward to learning new approaches and solutions for addressing violence from her Australian peers, and plans to bring these lessons home to the U.S.

 

Professor Sundhya Pahuja Senior Scholars

Home InstitutionThe University of Melbourne
Host InstitutionInstitute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard University
Award NameFulbright Senior Scholarship
DisciplineInternational Law
Award Year2016

Sundhya is Professor of International Law and the Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the Melbourne Law School. Her research focuses on the question of global inequality and its relationship to international law and institutions, both in terms of how they may contribute to the amelioration of inequality, but also to its perpetuation. Sundhya has a strong ties with India, which find expression in her scholarly interests in the historical legacies of imperialism and anti-imperial struggles, expressed in legal and non-legal terms. One example is her book, Decolonising International Law: Development, Growth and the Politics of Universality which won the American Society of International Law prize in 2012, and the Woodward Medal in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2014.

From 2012 – 2015, Sundhya concurrently held a Research Chair in Law at SOAS, University of London. She has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, Birkbeck, New York University, University of British Colombia and Sydney University. She serves as Global Faculty at the Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy and is Affiliate Faculty of the European Collaborative Doctoral Programme in Globalisation and Legal Theory. In 2014, Sundhya was invited to serve as the Director of Studies in Public International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law, co-located at the Peace Palace with the International Court of Justice.

Before becoming an academic, Sundhya worked as a commercial lawyer in Melbourne, a research associate in international law and human rights at the EUI in Florence, and for several years chaired the Committee of Management at the Darebin Community Legal Centre. She is a founding member of the trilingual French/English/Spanish network, Global Justice/Injustice. In her spare time, Sundhya likes to walk, read and cook, and has recently been working on Indianish, a book of family recipes and stories.

Sundhya will take up her Fulbright Senior Scholar Award at the Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy. There she will draw on an unrivalled collection of archival materials to begin a study of the place of the corporation in international law from the early modern period to the present day, and the implications of that history for today. The Institute is at the centre of the world’s largest network of scholars interested in heterodox approaches to international law and global problems. While she is there, Sundhya will develop links for junior and senior scholars from both Australia and the US to collaborate on innovative research around the pressing global questions of our time.

Professor Anya Reading Senior Scholars

Home InstitutionUniversity of Tasmania
Host InstitutionCenter for Imaging the Earth's Interior, University of Colorado at Boulder
Award NameFulbright Tasmania Senior Scholarship
DisciplinePhysics (Geophysics)
Award Year2016

Anya Reading leads the Computational Geophysics and Earth Informatics research group at the School of Physical Sciences (Earth Sciences), University of Tasmania as a Professor in the Science, Engineering and Technology Faculty. As an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh, UK, she studied astrophysics and took her Honours year in geophysics. Through PhD research at the University of Leeds, UK, focused on New Zealand seismology, she began a journey of discovery of the southern hemisphere continents, their tectonic origins and evolution. She held a postdoctoral research position with British Antarctic Survey and moved to Australia in 2000 to take up a research fellowship with Australian National University. In 2007, she joined the academic faculty at University of Tasmania, Hobart: Australia’s international hub for Antarctic and Southern Ocean science and logistics.

The innovative approaches to data science for the natural, physical world that Anya pushes forward are built on a foundation of experimental field seismology in challenging regions such as Antarctica and outback Australia. Her group carries out research in both fundamental, global geophysics and in applied topics with a strong element of technology transfer. Fundamental research areas include using seismic energy to form 3D images of the southern hemisphere continents. The Antarctic research areas are strongly interdisciplinary, focused on interactions between the deep Earth and changes in the major ice sheets. Applied research areas are focused on computational strategies for data-driven knowledge discovery with wide industry and environmental applications.
Anya’s wide interest areas include art-science data visualization, and public engagement with science, mathematics and the natural world. An experienced educator and student research advisor, she makes numerous service and policy development contributions to scientific research at university, state, national and international levels. She enjoys mountain/watersports, and playing/listening to music.

Anya will focus her scholarship research on advanced computation-based approaches to make best use of diverse, incomplete datasets relating to the deep 3D structure of the Antarctic Continent.  This structure, often surprisingly variable, is the dynamic foundation for many interdisciplinary studies including ice sheet and sea-level changes.  Results will include insights into where to target future geophysical field campaigns for optimum benefit.  Anya hopes these findings will galvanize the strong US Antarctic seismology community to partner with Australia in a new chapter of discovery through practical and fruitful future collaboration.

Bradley Zebrack, PhD, MSW, MPH Senior Scholars

Bradley Zebrack
Home InstitutionUniversity of Michigan School of Social Work, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Host InstitutionCanTeen Australia
Award NameFulbright Senior Scholarship
DisciplineSocial Work in Oncology
Award Year2016

With clinical social work experience in both pediatric and adult oncology, Dr. Brad Zebrack is keenly aware of the supportive care needs of cancer patients and their families, as well as the under-developed systems that are unable to adequately respond to the multiple and varied needs of cancer patients and families in a large, multicultural society.

Dr. Zebrack’s funded research examines how a cancer diagnosis and treatment affects the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual well-being of cancer patients, and how these effects vary depending upon the time in life at which cancer is diagnosed. He is particularly interested in the effects of cancer on the psychosocial growth and development of adolescents and young adults. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Zebrack has been an investigator on numerous research and health professional training initiatives funded by the United States Department of Health and Human Services National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the Lymphoma Research Foundation, LiveStrong Foundation, and HopeLab, Inc. His most recent research focuses on evaluations of supportive care service delivery in cancer treatment programs across the United States.

Dr. Zebrack is a long-term survivor of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, diagnosed in 1985 at the age of 25.  Following the end of his cancer treatment in 1989, Brad and his wife Joanne completed a one-year 11,000 mile bicycle trip around the United States to promote cancer survivorship.

Dr. Zebrack aspires to enhance the care and support of cancer patients and their families. Through implementation and evaluation of cancer support services, programs, and policies administered by CanTeen and the Youth Cancer Services of Australia, Dr. Zebrack hopes to bring lessons learned in Australia back to the USA to improve the quality of cancer care.

Hichem Demortier Professional Scholars

Home InstitutionNational Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre
Host InstitutionHarvard Humanitarian Initiative
Award NameFulbright Professional Scholarship in Non-Profit Leadership, Sponsored by the Origin Foundation and Supported by the Australian Scholarships Foundation
DisciplineHumanitarian Aid
Award Year2016

Hichem is currently Director of Strategy and Corporate Services at the National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre (NCCTRC), the government agency responsible for Australia’s health emergency response.

As the child of a French public servant and an Algerian Muslim mother who worked as a teacher and social worker, Hichem has developed a strong social conscience and a belief that respect and curiosity can reconcile people.

After his Masters in Management from the Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP- Europe), Hichem worked in audit and mergers and acquisitions, before shifting to the not-for-profit sector in 2000. He first worked for the French Development Agency for five years, and then joined Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) from 2004 to 2006. During this period, he coordinated and evaluated development and emergency projects in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Hichem then returned to France as Deputy Director of a large social enterprise. In 2009, he came to Australia and continued his not-for-profit journey in structures supporting Indigenous health and employment, before joining the Global and Tropical Health division of Menzies School of Health Research.

In addition to his current role with the NCCTRC, Hichem is also a director of the board of MSF Australia, a representative of MSF Australia on several international platforms, and contributes to impact investment projects in France.

Hichem will use his Fulbright not-for-profit scholarship to spend four months at Harvard University and will establish a formal partnership between the NCCTRC and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. This partnership, as well as the existing partnership with the World Health Organisation, will position the NCCTRC and Northern Australia as the regional centre for health emergency response in the Asia-Pacific region.

Hichem will use his time at Harvard University to create new professional networks in the humanitarian field, to consolidate his humanitarian expertise and will study leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Dr Chris Dixon Professional Scholars

Home InstitutionThe University of Queensland
Host InstitutionEdward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies,The University of Texas at Austin
Award NameFulbright Professional Scholarship in Australia-United States Alliance Studies, Sponsored by the Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
DisciplineHistory
Award Year2016

Chris is a Reader in History at the University of Queensland’s School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts (Honors) and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Western Australia he completed his PhD at the University of New South Wales. Prior to his appointment at the University of Queensland, he held academic positions at the University of Sydney, Massey University, and the University of Newcastle. He has served two terms as President of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association.

Believing passionately that history provides a window to the world, present as well as past, Chris has sought, through both his teaching and his research, to help others gaze through and open that window. As well as teaching undergraduate courses on US history, he has supervised 15 PhD and Masters students, and over 60 Honors students, to successful completion. He has also served as his Faculty’s Associate Dean, with particular responsibility for Research Higher Degree matters.

Chris’s own research focuses on two themes: the history of race relations, especially African American history; and the Pacific War. Having completed Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour (co-authored with Professor Sean Brawley) he is currently writing African Americans and the Pacific War for Cambridge University Press.

When he’s not pursuing his interests in American history and politics, Chris enjoys supporting the mighty Hawthorn Football Club. A keen runner, he has completed 50 marathons, including the Boston Marathon and the 90 kilometer Comrades Ultramarathon in South Africa. Chris has traveled widely and in 2009 trekked the Kokoda Trail with his twelve year-old son, Sam.

The Fulbright Professional Scholarship in Australia-U.S. Alliance Studies will enable Chris to explore the experiences of the 100,000 African-Americans who spent time in Australia during World War Two. This project will shed light on the social and cultural bases of the wartime relationship between the US and Australia – which was the platform upon which the postwar ANZUS alliance was forged. The University of Texas at Austin’s Edward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies provides an ideal base for conducting this research, and will also enable Chris to work with the University’s internationally-renowned scholars in History and African American Studies. In deepening our understanding of the alliance between Australia and the US, Chris’s project will also foster closer scholarly relations between the two nations.

Professor Peter Hudson Professional Scholars

Home InstitutionSt Vincent’s Hospital and The University of Melbourne
Host InstitutionCentre to Advance Palliative Care, New York USA
Award NameFulbright Professional Scholarship
DisciplinePublic Health
Award Year2016

Peter is the Director of the Centre for Palliative Care which is a statewide academic unit based at St Vincent’s Hospital and a Collaborative Centre of The University of Melbourne, Australia. He holds an honorary professorial position at The University of Melbourne and is Professor of Palliative Care at Queen’s University, UK.  Peter’s role at the Centre for Palliative Care is to oversee education initiatives and the development of research programs incorporating palliative care service delivery, psychosocial support and symptom management. The focus of Peter’s role at Queen’s University (UK) is to assist the University with its palliative care research strategy, supervise higher degree students and conduct collaborative international research projects. Peter is a registered nurse with more than twenty-five years experience in palliative care practice, education and research.  He is Vice President of Palliative Care Australia and was a Director of the Board of The International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care. Peter is the Chair of the European Association for Palliative Care’s International Palliative Care Family Caregiver Research Collaboration and he is an international expert advisor to the All Ireland Institute of Hospice and Palliative Care. He has authored numerous international journal publications and has attracted over 10 million dollars in research grant income, including from the National Health and Medical Research Council. Peter is a past recipient of the Premier’s Award for translating evidence into practice.

The World Health Organization advocates that palliative care should improve the quality of life of patients with advanced disease and their family caregivers. However, the provision of support for family caregivers is typically suboptimal resulting in wider negative implications for society. The purpose of Peter’s Fulbright scholarship is to develop a comprehensive strategy to systematically improve support for family caregivers of palliative care patients. This will be achieved by working with Dr Diane Meier, the Director of the USA Center to Advance Palliative Care based in New York. Peter will also collaborate with and visit other key USA stakeholders and universities. It is envisaged that the outcomes of Peter’s Fulbright scholarship will be mutually beneficial for the provision of palliative care in the USA and Australia (and potentially more broadly).

Dr Sally Ursula Jane Salmon Professional Scholars

Home InstitutionThe University of Western Australia
Host InstitutionSchool of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, Stanford University
Award NameFulbright Professional Scholarship in Nuclear Science and Technology, Sponsored by The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO)
DisciplineNuclear Science
Award Year2016

Ursula’s research is into providing quantitative, scientific bases for environmental management decisions, particularly regarding issues of water quality and water resource sustainability. Ursula started on this path through studying Chemical Engineering at the University of Sydney. After a final year exchange in Sweden, Ursula entered into postgraduate studies in a multidisciplinary Swedish research program on the environmental impact of mining. In 2004 Ursula returned to Australia to take up a postdoctoral project on the acidic lakes that can form after open cut mining. Since this time, Ursula has worked on a range of research and contract projects, usually in close collaboration with industry and government stakeholders, and in all cases with the aim to quantify how surface waters, groundwater, and/or soils will evolve, under either continued current conditions or changed external forcing.

Since mid-2012, Ursula has worked on incorporating environmental isotopes into regional groundwater models for water resource assessment. The large and inaccessible nature of aquifer systems means that they are difficult to characterize; this in turn introduces uncertainty into flow models. Environmental isotopes that decay or accumulate over time, such as radiocarbon (14C), are widely used as tracers of groundwater “age”. Ursula has been working on ways to incorporate the isotopic tracers directly into groundwater models. If successful, this will result in improved groundwater model predictions and resource management tools. Furthermore, as the age-ranges that environmental isotopes are valid for can be tens or hundreds of millennia, the same tools allow investigation into what climatic conditions must have been in the past in order to create the isotopic concentrations that exist today.

Ursula will work with Prof. Steven Gorelick and colleagues at Stanford to incorporate additional environmental tracers into a modelling framework that has already been developed, in order to make the method more robust. This modelling tool will then be used to produce an analysis of paleoclimate, over the last 40,000 years or more, using data from a relatively data-rich Australian case study site. The time at Stanford and visits to other institutions will link Ursula to forerunners in the relevant fields in America, and facilitate continuation of collaboration on this and other topics upon her return to Australia.

Kristian Wale Professional Scholars

Home InstitutionShaftesbury Centre
Host InstitutionSchool of Social Transformation, Arizona State University
Award NameFulbright Professional Coral Sea Scholarship (Business / Industry)
DisciplineJuvenile Crime Prevention/Rehabilitation
Award Year2016

Kristian has been working with vulnerable young people for over 25 years. Having first started working on the streets of Brisbane with homeless young people in the early 1990s, he soon realised that education was a key factor in the prevention of youth disengagement. As a registered teacher and a former outdoor education worker, he has pioneered a number of alternative education programs and Special Assistance Schools across Queensland. Kristian has worked extensively in the not for profit sector with organisations such as Teen Challenge and Youth for Christ. He was seconded to Singapore in the mid 1990s to establish programs that targeted disenfranchised young people. In 1998, Kristian joined the Shaftesbury Centre as an educator and in 2007 was promoted to the position of Chief Executive Officer. In his role as CEO, Kristian has developed an innovative independent school named Arethusa College that caters for disenfranchised students from mainstream schools. Utilising unorthodox educational and learning methods such as bull-riding, animal assisted learning, building and riding skateboards made from imported Canadian maple, Arethusa College now has five campuses located in Queensland and is currently founding its sixth campus in Tasmania.

Kristian is an active member of his local community and has participated in everything from constructing orphanages in Mongolia to feeding the homeless across the state. A Rotarian for over 15 years, he is committed to contributing to positive change in the local community in a wide range of areas. Kristian was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship in 2009 and a Paul Harris Fellowship in 2013 in recognition for his work in the community.

Kristian is a strong advocate for working with Indigenous young people caught up in the juvenile justice system in Queensland. He has initiated a number of educational, agricultural and social enterprise programs that assist young people to acquire adequate skills in literacy and numeracy and transition into the workforce. As a Scholarly Visitor to the Centre for Indian Education housed within Arizona State University’s School of Social Transformation, Kristian will conduct research on strategies used in Native American Reservations that target adolescent disengagement. An outcome of the proposed research is that Indigenous communities in Australia will benefit from some of these strategies being used in the United States and that this may assist in addressing the oversubscription of young Indigenous people being incarcerated.

Kristian will be accompanied by his wife and youngest daughter for the 12 week visitation to the United States.

Dr Marcel David Zimmet Professional Scholars

Home InstitutionSydney Children Hospital’s Network and University of Sydney
Host InstitutionUniversity of California and University of Washington
Award NameFulbright Professional Scholarship
DisciplineMedical Science (Pediatrics)
Award Year2016

Dr Marcel Zimmet is a paediatrician specialising in developmental and behavioural disorders including Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD).

Marcel works at the FASD Diagnostic and Assessment Clinic at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney. This will soon become part of the new Centre for the Prevention of Harm to Children and Adolescents from Drugs and Alcohol, with a remit for clinical care, training, research, advocacy and capacity building across New South Wales.

Marcel is a member of the Expert Panel that has developed the Australian FASD Diagnostic Instrument, including the national diagnostic guidelines and online training modules for health professionals. He is currently a chief investigator for national FASD case surveillance through the Australian Paediatric Surveillance, and for research into the impact of FASD on Australian children and families.

Marcel also works at Royal Far West in Manly providing developmental-behavioural paediatric care and parent therapy for children in rural and remote NSW, both face-to-face and via Telehealth. Marcel commenced his paediatric training at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, where he was a Fellow at the Centre for Community Child Health. He became a consultant paediatrician in Darwin, where he established a successful practice.

Marcel’s interest in FASD arose during his five years in the Northern Territory, where he saw the impact alcohol had on children and communities both non-Indigenous and Indigenous. It was not until he returned ‘down south’ that he became aware of the widespread misunderstanding and under-detection of FASD – one of the only preventable developmental disabilities – even within the health professions.

David P Bishop Postdoctoral Scholars

Home InstitutionUniversity of Technology Sydney
Host InstitutionDavid Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles
Award NameFulbright New South Wales Postdoctoral Scholarship
DisciplineChemistry
Award Year2016

David obtained his bachelor degree in Applied Chemistry with Honours from the University of Technology Sydney. He continued his studies at UTS, obtaining his PhD in Analytical Chemistry in 2012. David was a founding member of the Elemental Bio-imaging Facility at UTS, which contains one of the finest collections of high-tech analytical equipment in Australia. He was employed from 2010-2014 as its Laboratory Manager during which time he developed his skills in novel applications of advanced analytical instruments and management. This experience also provided him with insights into diverse fields of research, ranging from biochemistry to nanomaterials, providing him with excellent cross-disciplinary understanding.

During his PhD and in the ensuing years, he became involved in projects which looked at the effects of metals in human health and in particular degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases and more recently muscular dystrophy. David commenced a post-doctoral fellowship in 2015 with the aims of using his knowledge of instrumentation to develop novel analytical techniques to further investigate the roles of bio-metals in physiology and to use metal tags to quantify biomolecules that may be indicative of disease.

The Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship will allow David to develop a novel approach to quantitatively determine dystrophin levels in mouse models of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a debilitating disease that primarily affects young people. This research will take place in the laboratory of Dr Wanagat in the Division of Geriatrics at the University of California Los Angeles. This research will enable measurement of small changes in dystrophin levels, which may be indicative of an effective treatment. Changes as small as 10-15% may provide extended and/or improved quality of life, but cannot currently be well quantified. The strategies developed during this project will be applicable to numerous disease states which currently rely on qualitative histological assessments.

Dr Kathryn Crowe Postdoctoral Scholars

Home InstitutionResearch Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education, Charles Sturt University
Host InstitutionCentre for Education Research Partnerships, Rochester Institute of Technology
Award NameFulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship
DisciplineEducation (Special Education)
Award Year2016

Kathryn is a postdoctoral researcher at Charles Sturt University and a project officer on an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant addressing children’s speech and literacy development. Previously Kathryn has worked as part of the Longitudinal Outcomes of Children with Hearing Impairment (LOCHI) study, and as a speech pathologist at the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children. Kathryn is a university medalist and holds a Bachelor of Speech Pathology (Hons) and Bachelor of Arts, majoring in linguistics, and a Master of Special Education (Sensory Disability) from the University of Newcastle. In her PhD studies at Charles Sturt University she examined cultural and linguistic diversity in children with hearing loss in Australia and their families, and how caregivers made decisions about which language/s and communication modalities their children with hearing loss would use. Kathryn also holds a Diploma in Interpreting Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and English. As a speech pathologist, educator, and researcher Kathryn is working towards a world in which Deaf and Hard of Hearing learners will have equitable access to education, and show language and academic outcomes on par with those of their hearing peers.

Outside of her work Kathryn is a passionate figure skater having skated in national and international competitions in the discipline of synchronized skating. She is an accredited coach teaching beginner skaters at her home rink and with her home team Fire On Ice. Kathryn also enjoys travelling and is always on the lookout for something tall to conquer. Her latest adventures were hiking to Upper Yosemite Falls in California and trekking over the icy Fimmvörðuháls pass in Iceland, including over the new craters and lava from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities calls for inclusive education for learners with disabilities. Inclusion cannot mean merely placing Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) learners in hearing classrooms, but understanding differences in the learning needs of DHH and hearing students. For her Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship, Kathryn aspires to develop pedagogies that take these differences into account so that DHH learners can achieve greater levels of language and literacy skills. Kathryn will work with Professor Marc Marschark to examine how DHH university students process, store, and retrieve words/signs in memory. Kathryn will conduct projects which will investigate the relationships between words/signs in memory (semantic networks) and how networks vary between DHH and hearing students, and students who use English and/or American Sign Language.

Dr Laura Eadie Postdoctoral Scholars

Home InstitutionSAHMRI (South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute)
Host InstitutionSt. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Department of Pathology
Award NameFulbright South Australia Postdoctoral Scholarship
DisciplineMedical Science
Award Year2016

Laura is a postdoctoral researcher in the Cancer Theme at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) in Adelaide. Laura graduated from the University of Adelaide with a Bachelor of Science (Biomed) and first class Honours in 2006 and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Medicine in 2013. Laura’s thesis received a Dean’s Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence and her PhD studies made significant contributions to understanding the impact of cellular drug transporters on the efficacy of tyrosine kinase inhibitors (eg: imatinib) used to treat chronic myeloid leukaemia. Most recently Laura’s research highlighted the clinical significance of overexpression of the efflux transporter ABCB1 in predicting response to imatinib therapy.

For her Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship, Laura will work in the laboratory of Professor Charles Mullighan at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital learning engineered and xenograft mouse models to facilitate translational studies of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL). Relapsed ALL is the leading cause of childhood non traumatic death. Genomic analyses identified a new subtype of high-risk ALL (Ph-like) which can be treated with clinically available drugs with known safety profiles. Use of these drugs in other diseases results in improved outcome, but resistance still occurs and in high risk ALL patient outcomes are less robust. Laura’s project will assess drug efficacy and mechanisms of resistance to understand key drivers of response and resistance. Findings will inform clinical practice and therapeutic strategies will be optimised to ensure the best chance of cure for patients with the highest risk forms of childhood ALL.

When Laura is not in the laboratory she enjoys travelling, most recently to South America where she trekked the Inca Trail and explored Machu Picchu. When visiting new places Laura also likes to incorporate her love of eating, trying the local cuisines and partaking in cooking classes. On the weekends she typically spends her time riding her bike or hiking, reading and laughing with friends, usually about the latest unfortunate incident to befall her on the daily commute to work.

Dr Kathryn Gilbey Postdoctoral Scholars

Home InstitutionUniversity of Southern Queensland
Host InstitutionCalifornia State University and University of California, Santa Cruz
Award NameFulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship in Cultural Competence, Sponsored by the National Centre for Cultural Competence at The University of Sydney
DisciplineCultural Competence
Award Year2016

Kathryn is a Lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland in the College of Indigenous Studies, Education and Research. She has worked in the higher education sector for approximately 15 years and during this time has been able to establish strong professional networks across the nation. She came to higher education after working as an Artistic Director for Aboriginal Youth Arts in Adelaide, South Australia. She has carried her passion for teaching into the university where her work has primarily concentrated in the field of Aboriginal education. She applies her knowledge to think creatively about the ways in which a university education is to be framed within Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing and being to have meaning for Indigenous students. Additionally her interests extend to how Aboriginal practices can be expressed within the creative arts and how this maintains and represents customs and traditions.  In particular, Kathryn is interested in the way in which narrative as a theoretical tool connects to Aboriginal storying to tell about country (understood as home from which Aboriginal identification is derived), people and events. She sees this work as critically important given that the Aboriginal voice is rarely heard and largely ignored in mainstream Australian dialogue.  Kathryn ‘s work at USQ and at Bachelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education has and continues to focus on engagements with Aboriginal communities. Kathryn importantly embodies this engagement through her identification as a descendant of the Alyawarre nation. Through her teachings the concepts of pride and the sharing of space come to be understood as essential requirements for Aboriginal voice and speaking back to power. Kathryn’s passion is infectious and her work is solid, shining back on the glory of Aboriginal peoples and communities.

The Fulbright scholarship allows Kathryn to develop collaborations between Aboriginal women in Australia and Chicana women from California who share experiences of settler colonialism and though different is felt and lived in many similar ways. A key aspiration of this collaboration is to unite and bring to the fore the voices of radical women of colour across the Pacific in the production and sharing of narrative work forms. A further aspiration is based on sharing knowledge on how representation within a university can happen effectively for First Nations Peoples. Kathryn will teach Indigenous knowledges through structured conversations, lectures and workshops.

Dr Simon Graham Postdoctoral Scholars

Home InstitutionThe University of Melbourne
Host InstitutionCenter for HIV Educational Studies & Training (CHEST), Hunter College of the City University of New York
Award NameFulbright Indigenous Postdoctoral Scholarship
DisciplinePublic Health
Award Year2016

Simon is a McKenzie postdoctoral fellow and Poche associate at the University of Melbourne. In 2008, he completed a Master of Applied Epidemiology at the Australian National University and in 2014, a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in epidemiology and sexually transmissible infections from the University of New South Wales.

His PhD evaluated a clinical sexual health and viral hepatitis intervention with Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services in New South Wales known as SHIMMER. The intervention tripled sexual health and hepatitis testing, improved the management of these infections and established a systematic approach to testing, treatment and management. This included identifying asymptomatic infections and providing prompt treatment or management to reduce the incidence of adverse outcomes from these infections.

For his Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship, Simon will be based at the Center for HIV Educational Studies & Training (CHEST) at Hunter College, City University of New York. His research will focus on developing community based sexual health strategies that could be used with clinic based approaches to decrease rates of sexually transmissible infections particularly for young people. The research aims to use social media and mobile phone applications to support young people to take control of their health and to make informed sexual health decisions that will lower their risk of infection.

Previously, Simon spent a number of years in Thailand and Vietnam working for non-government organizations. His role included, training large multinational company employees about the risks of sexual infections and support for employees living with HIV. He worked with executive board members to improve the human resources policies relating to employment and job promotion for people living with HIV. This role also involved assisting families affected by HIV in poor areas of Bangkok to access medical services and treatment.

Simon aims to broaden his approaches to sexual health and young people through working with American colleagues who have developed innovative ways to engage with and empower young people from a range of cultural backgrounds to decrease their risk of sexually transmissible infections.

Dr Brendan Quinn Postdoctoral Scholars

Home InstitutionBurnet Institute and Monash University
Host InstitutionCenter for Behavioral & Addiction Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles
Award NameFulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship
DisciplinePublic Health (Epidemiology)
Award Year2016

Brendan is an epidemiologist based within the Burnet Institute’s Centre for Population Health in Melbourne, Australia. He is a public health specialist and continues to augment his knowledge and skills in the area of licit and illicit drug trends, justice health issues and infectious diseases in Australia and internationally via work on multidisciplinary research projects. Specifically, following two years with Turning Point Alcohol & Drug Centre’s Epidemiology department (2006-2008), in 2010 he established Melbourne’s first community-recruited prospective cohort of methamphetamine users for his primary PhD project (completed with Monash University’s Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine). This study investigated the epidemiology of methamphetamine use in Melbourne and barriers and enablers to treatment utilisation among methamphetamine users. In 2015, Brendan was the primary supervisor of a Monash University Honours student who followed-up his PhD cohort of methamphetamine users. This makes it the longest prospective study of methamphetamine use conducted in Australia. Consequently, Dr Quinn is an emerging Australian authority on methamphetamine-related issues and continues to research and provide expert commentary on this area.

In recent years Brendan’s involvement in various projects, including consultancies for the World Health Organization, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Save the Children and United Nations Children’s Fund, has facilitated the expansion of his professional interests to areas such as HIV, viral hepatitis and gender-based violence. For example, in early 2015, Brendan assisted in designing baseline research to evaluate an intervention for increasing HIV testing and treatment uptake among marginalized, at-risk youth in Bandung, Indonesia, including men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs, female sex workers and transgender individuals. He continues to collaborate on diverse projects with Australian and international researchers.

The incidence of methamphetamine-related harms affecting Australian individuals, families and communities continues to rise. In consideration of this, Brendan will travel to the United States to learn from, and work alongside, Dr Stephen Shoptaw, a world-renowned researcher of methamphetamine and other substance use issues. Dr Shoptaw’s team at the Center for Behavioral & Addiction Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, is conducting innovative research on methamphetamine, including novel prevention and treatment responses, unlike any current studies in Australia. The experience will augment Brendan’s knowledge, skills and experience of researching drug and alcohol issues and countering related harms, to inform necessary translational studies and evidence-based policy and preventative measures for defining and appropriately addressing the significant issue of methamphetamine use in Australia.

Dr Matilda Anderson Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionWestern Health
Host InstitutionHarvard University
Award NameFulbright Victoria Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplinePublic Health
Award Year2016

Matilda is currently working as a general surgery trainee doctor at Western Health in Victoria. After pursuing musical interests early completing a Bachelor of Music (Jazz Composition) at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) she changed paths to complete a postgraduate Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery (Hons) at the University of Sydney. Since completing her degree, she has pursued her interest in surgery and been accepted onto the general surgery training program through Western Health, Victoria.

Matilda has followed a strong interest in research into system-based change in health care. Her interest stemmed from her Honours project at the Kids Research Institute at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, which investigated the social effects of living with rare diseases on the daily lives of paediatric patients and their families. Since graduating she has pursued research projects that focus on small system based changes to improve patient outcomes. Her work recently has been through the Trauma Department at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, developing a simple checklist to aid doctors performing procedures in acute trauma settings to reduce simple errors and improve patient outcomes.

Matilda has kept up her musical interests, playing cello in the Melbourne Doctor’s Orchestra Corpus Medicorum and saxophone in small ensemble jazz gigs. She has performed in many different countries including the United States. She plays basketball for Melbourne University Ladies team and is a keen boxer. Matilda aims to make a difference not only through her individual work as a doctor but improving the system as a whole, especially within the surgical field.

Matilda aims to complete a Masters of Public Health at Columbia or Harvard University in the USA.  Knowledge gained from these exceptional institutions will guide her research interests as well as her future career based around clinical practice, surgical academia and involvement in health policy and systems.

Specifically, Matilda will focus on studying health behaviours and social determinants of health, in order to better understand what drives levels of health engagement and health literacy in different populations, with the aim to improve overall health care delivery to our diverse community.

Rachelle Peta Cole Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionGlenroy College, Victoria
Host InstitutionStanford University
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineEducation
Award Year2016

Rachelle is a language teacher, community leader and commentator who works on educational disadvantage, second language learning and Australia’s relationship with Asia. She is currently the Head of Languages at Glenroy College in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, having recently completed Teach for Australia, a program that attracts high achieving graduates into the teaching profession to teach at disadvantaged schools. In addition to teaching, Rachelle has taken on leadership positions in a number of community organizations. She is an Advisor to the Language Barrier, a not-for-profit organisation promoting second language learning through web stories, and the co-founder of the Australia Indonesia Youth Association, an organization to help build links between young people from Australia and Indonesia (AIYA). Under her stewardship AIYA grew to become the leading organization for youth links between both countries, with representation in eleven cities across Australia and Indonesia. In addition to teaching and her community activities, Rachelle also regularly writes about education policy and Australian youth engagement with Indonesia, a country in which she has lived for several years. She has degrees in International Relations and Asian Studies with first class honors from the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, as well as a Graduate Diploma of Teaching (Secondary) from the University of Melbourne.

During the term of her Fulbright Scholarship, Rachelle is planning on studying a Masters of Arts (Education) at a leading education school in the US. She plans on studying with scholars who work on language teaching, both English as an additional language and second languages. During the term of her Fulbright, Rachelle plans to focus on the role that technology and innovative teaching methods can play in improving engagement and proficiency in second language learning, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. She will return to Australia following her scholarship year and utilize her skills in a leading teaching position with the long-term objective of advising government on language and education policy.

Millicent Cripe Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionYale University
Host InstitutionCentre for Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR), University of Sydney
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplinePublic Policy
Award Year2016

Millicent Cripe graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in May 2016 with a B.A. in Sociology with a concentration in Health and Societies. Originally from Indianapolis, IN, Millicent entered Yale with the class of 2015 as a prospective political science major. After her freshman year, she interned at the White House Office of Public Engagement (OPE), which convinced her to take a leave of absence in the Fall 2012 semester to work to re-elect President Obama. She moved to Columbus, Ohio and was a field organiser with Obama for America. She took the Spring 2013 semester off after a serious accident and returned to Yale in the Fall 2013 semester as part of the class of 2016.

Millicent’s lifelong interest in domestic policy narrowed to a specific passion for U.S. healthcare policy after taking the course “Healthcare Economics & Public Policy,” where she became captivated by the challenge of curbing the large and growing percentage of US public dollars that are spent on healthcare, which leave less money for the other domestic investments that Millicent believe are important: education, criminal justice reform, and job training, to name a few. She believes that public policy can be used as a tool to shape a healthcare system that is ethical, equitable, and economically sustainable.

In the time between graduating from Yale and travelling to Australia in January, Millicent went back on the Presidential campaign trail for former Secretary Hillary Clinton. She is the campaign’s Regional Training Director in Virginia, a battleground state.

Millicent believes that the U.S. healthcare system can derive valuable lessons from the example of Australia’s health care system, which is also a mixed public-private system. For her Fulbright, Millicent is conducting a comparative case study of two of Australia’s Primary Health Networks, which seek to harness the efficiency of the private sector towards publicly defined goals, a model increasingly being piloted in the US as well.

In her year in Sydney, Millicent hopes to see as much of Australia as possible, exploring both the mountains and the beaches on weekend trips.

Jenna Margaret Crowe-Riddell Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionUniversity of Adelaide, School of Biological Sciences (Genetics and Evolution)
Host InstitutionUniversity of Florida
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineBiological Sciences
Award Year2016

Jenna is a PhD candidate in Genetics and Evolution at the University of Adelaide where she researches vertebrate sensory systems.

Jenna grew up in Canberra and received a Bachelor of Science from the Australian National University in 2011. She started volunteering for turtle conservation research and began to SCUBA dive. In 2012, she was invited to participate in field expeditions to Ashmore Reef in the Timor Sea. Unfortunately, these once pristine environments had recently experienced a drastic and inexplicable decline in sea snake populations. This motivated Jenna to undertake research into this extinction event in the following year, receiving First Class Honours from the University of Adelaide in 2014.

To achieve conservation goals, Jenna believes that there must be an open channel between science and society, and that conservation in the inevitable byproduct of a society that is engaged with science and the living world. A passionate communicator, Jenna is an up-and-coming stand-up comedian, detailing the oddities of the biological world on stage. She plans to use these skills to foster scientific literacy and enthusiasm in the community. She has been invited to speak at the Natural History Museum in London and at university Open Day events, and hopes to be one of Australia’s foremost science communicators.

Sea snakes are poorly understood but fascinating examples of evolutionary transitions. Jenna aims to uncover novel sensory abilities in these animals, taking a multidisciplinary approach that builds a picture of the sensory system at every level: from genetic, to population, to species, and the ecosystem. The Fulbright scholarship will allow Jenna to research alongside world experts in reptile evolution, behaviour and physiology. Once complete, the project can serve as a model for integrative biological research that can be easily transferred to other species upon return to Australia.

Travis Blake Franks Postgraduate Students

Travis Franks
Home InstitutionArizona State University
Host InstitutionUniversity of Queensland
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineLiterature, Culture and Australian Studies
Award Year2016

Travis earned his B.A. (History and English) and M.A. (English) at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. As an undergraduate, he was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, served as president of Sigma Tau Delta, and was elected Most Outstanding Graduating Senior in both the History and English Departments. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in literature at Arizona State University, Travis teaches advanced freshman composition and survey courses on American literature and serves as the nonfiction editor of RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Humanities.

Outside of the classroom, Travis has worked extensively as a writing and reading tutor, and has presented at several national conferences, including the National Conference for Peer Tutoring in Writing and the American Literature Association Conference. Recently, his article on Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner, titled “Talkin about Lester; Community, Culpability, and Narrative Suppression in Child of God,” was published in Mississippi Quarterly. He is currently at work on his dissertation, tentatively titled “Settler Nativism: The Colonial Origins of Anti-Immigrant Nationalism”, which is a comparative analysis of how creative texts from the U.S. and Australia shape ideas of belonging around race and property. Travis’s work often involves novels, films, and music set in his home state of Texas, particularly in how they depict relationships between Indigenous, settler, and immigrant/migrant populations. He is also a third-generation musician who plays guitar, sings, and writes music. He is a founding member of the rotating ensemble band New Heroes of the Old War.

Travis is thrilled to be undertaking his unique project in Queensland, which will see him interning as a digital archivist for the AustLit database and serving as a research assistant for a historian at the Texas Heritage Centre in Texas, Queensland. He looks forward to the many relationships he will build in academic and non-academic communities and is grateful that he will have an opportunity to share his music at the Texas Country Music Roundup, held every September in Texas, QLD. He wishes to acknowledge the Indigenous communities whose land he will visit and to pay his respect to elders, past and present.

Raechel French (Schneider) Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionDepartment of Design and Environmental Analysis, Cornell University
Host InstitutionLearning Environments Applied Research Network, University of Melbourne
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineEducation in Learning Environments
Award Year2016

Raechel has spent the past three years as an educational planner at an architecture firm in Austin, Texas helping plan and design schools across the United States. She earned a B.E.D. in Architecture and a B.S. in Psychology from Texas A&M University and a Master’s in Human-Environment Relations from Cornell University, focusing on Facility Planning and Management with a minor in Organizational Behavior. In addition to her role as Educational Planner, Raechel helps lead her firm’s K-12 research initiatives.

Many schools desire innovation and turn to their facilities as catalysts for change. However, there is often a disconnect between the vision of a facility and its subsequent use. Recent shifts in Australian education policy and economic priorities have resulted in an influx of innovative learning environments that subsequently require new methods of teaching and the gap between design and use is apparent. While in Melbourne, Raechel will be working on the Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change (ILE+TC) project to identify relationships between quality teaching and the effective use of these innovative spaces. The goal is to help bridge the gap by developing a mechanism to change teacher mind frames and teaching practices.

During her Fulbright, Raechel will participate in Phase One of the ILE+TC project, working with the research team to collect and analyze data on the design affordances of innovative learning environments. She will also be visiting schools throughout Australia, interviewing educators about their experiences. She will work towards a peer-reviewed paper with members of the research team and present her findings and experiences throughout the United States. Additionally, Raechel will spend time with Hayball Architects to better understand their perspective of the design process. Her ultimate goal is to create an ongoing discussion between the US and Australia regarding school design, utilization, and organizational change.

Following her Fulbright, Raechel plans to help expand the role of school architects and planners. She finds that the design process as it is often only touches the physical structure, not the entire operational and organizational system it supports. This is especially troublesome as more and more schools hope to deviate from the traditional models of teaching and learning and rely upon the building itself to create the shift. Raechel sees a new paradigm in which there is a strategic organizational alignment process integrated within design work to help school clients holistically realize their vision.

Raechel will be joined in Australia by her husband Michael. You can follow her Fulbright experience at www.schoolsandtravel.com

Vafa Darren Ghazavi Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionDepartment of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
Host InstitutionJohn F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Award NameFulbright-Anne Wexler Scholarship in Public Policy, Sponsored by the Australian Government, Department of Education and Training
DisciplinePublic Policy
Award Year2016

Vafa Ghazavi is an international cyber policy adviser at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. At Harvard, he will focus on global policy innovation in the digital age, ethics, and behavioural economics.

Vafa is a former Australian diplomat with postings to Afghanistan (2009-2010) and the Australian Embassy and Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Vienna (2011-2014). In Vienna, he was responsible for Australia’s relations with the United Nations, focusing on transnational drugs and crime issues, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He also led diplomatic engagement with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo during Australia’s term on the UN Security Council. At the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Vafa was a policy officer on the Iraq Task Force, a negotiator on the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, and in the secretariat of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament.

Previously, Vafa volunteered in the cabinet office of José Ramos-Horta, then Foreign Minister of Timor-Leste, and served as an election monitor during Timor-Leste’s 2007 parliamentary elections.

Vafa is passionate about Indigenous education. He tutors Indigenous students at the Australian National University and worked at a language centre in the East Kimberley through the Jawun secondment program. In Sydney, Vafa mentored high school students through the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience and volunteered with the Police Citizens Youth Club in Redfern.

Vafa has a Bachelor of Economic and Social Sciences with First Class Honours and the University Medal from the University of Sydney. He served on the university’s Academic Board, was a co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Sydney Globalist international affairs magazine, and was president of the Politics Society, through which he founded the Hedley Bull Memorial Lecture.

Vafa is an avid traveller and enjoys new media, old books and Australian art.

Vafa’s studies at Harvard Kennedy School will focus on global policy in the digital age, ethics, and behavioural economics. He will explore innovative policy responses to transnational challenges, including how to harness big data for the public good, and policies designed to ensure a free and open internet. Vafa will look at how policymakers can promote the development of technologies that help address global challenges such as poverty, gross human rights violations, and armed conflict. He will also examine how countries can prevent conflict and support political transitions that advance human rights and effective governance.

Shruti Gujaran Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionUniversity of Maryland
Host InstitutionUniversity of Melbourne
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineMicrobiology & Immunology
Award Year2016

Shruti received a B.S. in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore Country in 2016, graduating Summa Cum Laude. During her time as an undergraduate, she participated in research opportunities at several institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the University of Maryland, School of Medicine (UMDSOM). While at the NIH, Shruti assisted on studies aimed at uncovering inhibitors for topoisomerase I and II as novel anti-cancer targets. At UMDSOM, she worked as a research affiliate studying the dopamine reward system in animal models.

In addition to her research, Shruti took part in local and international volunteer opportunities in areas concerning health care disparities, degenerative disease, and civic engagement. She also completed part of her degree abroad at the University of Barcelona in Spain, igniting a passion for travel and world culture that constantly keeps her on her feet. In Barcelona, Shruti learned much about international cuisine, and is now an avid experimenter in the kitchen. Her experience abroad also resulted in her pursuit of international opportunities.

Before her senior year in college, Shruti volunteered at a Mumbai hospital, a pivotal moment in her career. There, she was exposed to hospital medicine and inspired to study antibiotic resistance in patients, and chose to further pursue immunological research and infectious diseases as her main focus in medicine. Shruti will also apply to medical schools in the United States with hopes to gain entry into a program with a strong focus on both local and global medicine. Her goal is to practice both in the United States and internationally, with a focus on enabling access to quality health care and education worldwide.

Drug resistance has created an excess of one billion dollars in health care costs in the United States alone, with the number growing even larger with the discovery of more resistant bacterial species worldwide. With her background in research and interest in drug resistance motivating her, Shruti will use her time in Australia to contribute to the growing database of knowledge surrounding antibiotic resistance by studying the effect of secreted capsule polysaccharides on acquired resistance in bacterial cells walls at the University of Melbourne. She hopes that this research will be used within the Doherty Institute to learn about novel mechanisms to avoid or reduce developed resistance in patients. Additionally, she hopes that her time in Melbourne will be spent experiencing the vibrant culture that the city has to offer.

Sophie Faustine Hollingsworth Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionNYU
Host InstitutionUniversity of Sydney
Award NameFulbright Anne Wexler Scholarship
DisciplinePublic Health in Health Security
Award Year2016

Sophie Hollingsworth is the recipient of the 2016 Fulbright-Anne Wexler Scholarship. Hollingsworth graduated from NYU with a Bachelors in Environmental Science and double minor in Global Public Health and Psychology. In 2017, she will commence her Master of Health Security at University of Sydney. Health security is concerned with the areas in which national security and public health overlap. In today’s globalized world, safeguarding the health of the public can no longer be a solely domestic concern. The University of Sydney developed a cutting edge multidisciplinary postgraduate program to train a new generation of health, policy- maker, and security sector personnel with responsibility for human, animal, and national health security. As the first globally recognized health security masters, there is no other program like it in the world.

Hollingsworth’s paramount focus will be on shared political interests and cooperation between the US and Australia in trade, security, and development related to health security. Under the Anne Wexler Masters Award in Public Policy Hollingsworth will enroll in graduate courses at the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Disease and Biosecurity where she will undertake four core units of study: health security, policymaking power and politics, leadership in organizations and public relations management, and conflict resolution. From there she will follow a concentration in biodefense and biosafety.

One of Hollingsworth’s principal goals will be to acquire the knowledge and skill set to develop and implement international health security policy. Through the University of Sydney, she will deepen her complex analysis, quantitative, and technical skill set in international health policy. Furnished with these skills, Hollingsworth will foster effective and meaningful collaboration between Australia and the United States.

Outside of academia, Hollingsworth is a modern female explorer.  She has sailed across the Pacific Ocean, transected Madagascar, and holds a 200-ton captains license. At the time of certification, Hollingsworth was the youngest female to obtain a 200-ton MCA Yachtmaster Captains License. For the past five years has worked as the Founder and Director of Operations of AquaAid International – an organization establishing sustainable sources of clean drinking water and basic sanitation in remote Central American jungles.  Hollingsworth is currently apart of a world first expedition to document and conduct the only ethnographic study of the female chiefs of Maewo Island, Republic of Vanuatu. Hollingsworth is a proud member of The Explorers Club, The Royal Geographical Society and Flag Carrier of WINGS Worldquest.

Monique Hurley Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionNorth Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency
Host InstitutionColumbia Law School
Award NameFulbright Northern Territory Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineLaw
Award Year2016

Monique holds a Bachelor of Laws (First class honours) and Bachelor of Arts (Politics) from Monash University.  During her university studies, Monique interned at the Parliament of Victoria, the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law and Justice Connect (formerly the Public Interest Law Clearing House). Monique went on complete her Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice with the College of Law and was admitted to practice in December 2012.  She worked for two years as a lawyer at Clayton Utz, working across the firm’s corporate, litigation and administrative law practices.  She went on to spend one year working as an Associate to the Honourable Justice Sloss at the Supreme Court of Victoria.  Monique has volunteered as a lawyer with the Homeless Person’s Legal Clinic, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Mental Health Legal Centre and Prahran Citizen’s Advice Bureau.  She has also co-authored a report on the methodology used by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to assess the age of minors in immigration detention, which was published by leading civil liberties organization, Liberty Victoria, in September 2015.  Monique currently works as a solicitor for the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency in Katherine where she travels to remote communities to provide civil law advice and representation to Aboriginal clients.  Monique advises clients on a diverse range of areas, including employment and discrimination matters, the applicability of statutory compensation schemes, complaints against the police and health care complaints.  She also represents clients in adult guardianship, child protection and alcohol mandatory treatment proceedings.  Outside of work, Monique is an avid supporter of the Geelong Football Club and enjoys traveling, reading and spending time with family and friends.

For her Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship, Monique hopes to study a Masters of Law (LLM) in America. She would like to build on her previous studies and practical legal experience by focusing her overseas LLM studies on international and human rights law.  Monique would like to learn from the American and international experience at a leading university to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of how the law can be used as a mechanism to help empower disadvantaged individuals and groups of people.

Shraddha Kashyap Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionThe University of Western Australia
Host InstitutionNew York University and Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture
Award NameFulbright Western Australia Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplinePsychology
Award Year2016

Shraddha is currently a PhD candidate and a Provisionally Registered Psychologist completing a Master of Clinical Psychology, at the University of Western Australia. Shraddha’s doctoral study involves the translation of psychological research into clinical practice. Her work in the School of Psychology at the University of Western Australia has involved a collaboration with Perth Clinic; a private mental health facility. She found that continuously measuring individuals’ psychological distress during treatment, rather than once at the beginning and once at the end of treatment, can improve precision in predicting adverse health outcomes, such as risk of self-injury. For example, it is often thought that all individuals who report high initial distress would be at the highest risk of self-injury. However, she has published work finding that individuals who report an early improvement in psychological distress are at a lower risk of self-injury despite beginning with high initial distress. This novel approach of continuous monitoring has the potential for more individualized, nuanced and precise risk assessment techniques that extend beyond inpatient mental health facilities and could be used to enhance mental health outcomes more broadly. Shraddha grew up in Kenya, and had lived in Jordan for one year before migrating to Australia with her family in 2002. Prior to commencing her PhD, Shraddha won a scholarship to study in Lille, France, and has since travelled around Europe, South America, North America and Asia.

Shraddha has a keen interest in refugee mental health, and hopes to find meaningful ways of helping displaced peoples begin new lives despite suffering from previous trauma.  The Fulbright Scholarship will allow Shraddha to apply her doctoral research to an asylum seeker and refugee population.  She will investigate resilience among individuals undergoing treatment at the NYU/Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture.  Specifically, she will examine whether multiple measurements of psychological distress over time can help pinpoint groups of individuals who may improve more rapidly than others, and study factors associated with this resilience.  These factors would include a combination of individual and community characteristics, as well as factors related to their treatment.  Identifying these factors through quantitative and qualitative measurements would allow clinicians to isolate the most helpful aspects of treatment, and improve outcomes for more individuals.

Craig William McCormack Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionThe University of Western Australia
Host InstitutionSasakawa International Center for Space Architecture, University of Houston
Award NameFulbright Western Australia Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineArchitecture (Space Architecture)
Award Year2016

Craig is a PhD candidate at The University of Western Australia (UWA), in Perth, Australia. He holds an Australian Postgraduate Award, allowing him to research the discipline of Space Architecture and how the built environment in outer space is situated within and impacts the terrestrial discipline of architecture. Craig received an NVQ Level IV in Music from The London Music School in 1999, a Bachelor of Arts (Art) from the Curtin University of Technology in 2006, a Bachelor of Environmental Design from UWA in 2009, and a Masters of Architecture with High Distinction from UWA in 2011. As well as teaching and lecturing at UWA for the past six years Craig is also a director of felix. laboratories, a multi-disciplinary architecture and design practice that, as part of Felix, Giles, Anderson & Goad, were creative directors of the Australian Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition, Augmented Australia 1914-2014, utilised augmented reality technology to realise significant, yet unbuilt contemporary and historical Australian architecture.

When not teaching and researching at university or designing within felix., Craig enjoys the outdoors leading an active lifestyle, and is an avid runner and climber. Widely travelled, he has climbed Mont Blanc and Mount Kilimanjaro in recent years. He believes that as an academic and a designer it is important to be active and involved in the world in order to design for it and write about it. Recently Craig has taken up the sport of motorcycle racing where he intends to qualify for his race license in the near future and add a little adrenaline to his weekends.

For his Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship, Craig will conduct research at the University of Houston, in the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture. The project will examine the feedback loop between the space industry and popular culture, such as film, through a study of relevant institutional and private archives, to articulate the cultural role that space exploration has played upon modern culture, and reciprocally, the impact that ideas stemming from popular culture as the ‘imagining’ of a future, or multiple futures has had upon programs of scientific research into manned exploration of space, and which has spawned new fields of research, such as ‘space architecture’. Combining archival, primary, and contemporary research through an ambitious theoretical framework, Craig intends to conceptualise the ‘space project’ within Western culture’s tradition of utopian thought.

Daniel McNamara Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionAustralian National University
Host InstitutionSchool of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineComputer Science
Award Year2016

Daniel is a PhD candidate in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. He is an external student based in the Machine Learning Research Group at Data61, the digital innovation unit of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Daniel’s research focuses on the development of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions about data. In particular, he investigates methods for learning representations of data that can be used to demonstrably improve prediction performance. The success of machine learning algorithms is highly dependent on the features they receive as inputs, which have traditionally been handcrafted by human experts. However, cutting edge techniques allow the algorithm to learn such features itself from raw data, similar to the way that humans learn more abstract representations of complex sensory inputs. This has led to state-of-the-art results in applications such as natural language processing and computer vision. Daniel’s research focuses on the theoretical foundations behind such methods in order to better understand and improve upon them.

Daniel has authored academic publications from previous research projects in data mining and the digital humanities. He completed his Honours year in Computer Science at ANU, for which he received a University Medal. He holds a Bachelor of Science/Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne, which included receiving the Google Computer Science Prize. He also has experience in the intelligent use of data in professional contexts, including at the online analytics platform Kaggle, the management consulting firm Nous Group, and the Australian Labor Party. He is the founder of the website lovemetender.com.au, an open democracy project allowing individuals and businesses to visualise government spending on commercial tenders.

Daniel will be spending several months at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh. During his stay he will be hosted by A/Prof Maria-Florina Balcan and will be based in the Machine Learning Department within the School of Computer Science. CMU sits in the elite tier of universities worldwide for computer science, and is particularly known for its strength in fundamental theoretical research in machine learning. Daniel is looking forward to the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with CMU academics and students. Following his return to Australia, he will use the skills gained from the visit within academia and industry.

David Ian Rawson Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionSt Ursula's College, Toowoomba
Host InstitutionHarvard Graduate School of Education
Award NameFulbright Queensland Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineEducation
Award Year2016

David graduated from the University of Queensland in 2012 with dual degrees in Arts and Secondary Education, majoring in English and French. His Honours study in the field of Communication and Cultural Studies saw him named valedictorian and a recipient of a University Medal.

Now in his fourth year of teaching at St Ursula’s College, Toowoomba, a Catholic girls’ school in the Ursuline tradition, David’s passion for education has seen him make a significant impact in the learning and lives of his students. He coaches debating, works to promote the status of language learning and cultures within the school and mentors the student leadership council. He has marked the Queensland Core Skills (QCS) Test for tertiary admission and moderates Senior French Work Programs and assessment on his district’s review panel. He furthered his language study in the south of France as part of an Endeavour Language Teacher Fellowship, awarded by the Commonwealth Government (2014).

David’s research into adolescent brain development and Middle Schooling Philosophy was instrumental in providing a theoretical underpinning for his school’s Year 7 Program ahead of Queensland’s shift to Year 7 into secondary in 2015. For these endeavours, he was awarded the Dr Roger Hunter Excellence in Beginning to Teach Award (2014). David was selected to have his pedagogy showcased as part of the Queensland College of Teachers’ ClassMovies Project. His finished documentary serves as a fine model for other early-career practitioners with clear strategies identified for addressing The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.

David is the Chairperson of his College’s Assessment Review Steering Committee, which enables him to explore his special interest area of, and deep passion for, assessment. He leads a team of six teachers to review current practice and to develop a College-wide blueprint that will present more effective ways of assessing students’ learning.

David’s research in the United States of America aims to better understand how re-conceptualising assessment might bring about broader school improvement. In particular, he wishes to develop more engrained and sustainable mechanisms for fostering effective teacher collaboration in Queensland schools. In this way, David hopes to develop a strategy for supporting teachers to engage more routinely with peer-reviewed research and integrate it into their praxis. He sees it as important to address the disjunct between educational theory and practice, which has emerged alongside the growing demands on teachers and their time.

David is looking forward to engaging in cross-cultural conversations with other engaged and dynamic teachers, developing a deeper knowledge of curriculum and educational leadership.

Sean Patrick Reilly Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionSanta Clara University
Host InstitutionThe Djunbunji Land and Sea Program
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineEnvironmental Science
Award Year2016

Sean Reilly graduated summa cum laude from Santa Clara University in 2016 with a B.S. in Environmental Science and Biology. During his time at Santa Clara, Sean was a Presidential scholar and recipient of the Johnson and Hayes grants, which allowed him to pursue research on the event dynamics driving the stable isotopic composition of precipitation from atmospheric river storm systems. While studying abroad in Australia in 2014, Sean received the Distinguished Student Researcher Award from the School for Field Studies for his research on how Aboriginal groups maintain cultural authenticity and healthy ecosystems while engaging in tourism. In 2016, he was awarded Santa Clara University’s Environmental Science Research Award and the Orella Prize for outstanding academic achievement.

Also while at Santa Clara, Sean spent considerable time promoting environmental awareness. As the president of one of the largest environmental groups at Santa Clara University, he worked to educate students and faculty about local and global issues threatening our planet in an effort to promote a culture of ecological mindfulness on campus. In recognition of his efforts, Sean and his organization received three Sustainability Champion awards from the school’s Center for Sustainability.

Following the conclusion of his time in Australia, Sean intends to pursue a PhD. In his graduate studies, he plans to combine his interests in ecology and atmospheric processes by studying the interplay between the two and, specifically, how human actions are effecting these interactions.

Sean will be spending his time in Australia assisting the Aboriginal rangers of the Djunbunji Land and Sea Program in their efforts to manage the pond apple, an invasive tree species from Florida that devastates wetland habitats. He will be mapping the current pond apple distribution, monitoring ecosystem recovery following its removal and developing management options that address the rangers’ resource limitations, unique cultural location and the scale of the threat posed by the invader.

Hannah Ryan Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionFederal Court of Australia
Host InstitutionHarvard Law School
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineLaw
Award Year2016

Hannah is a lawyer interested in the protection of civil liberties. She currently works as an Associate to a Judge of the Federal Court of Australia, and was previously a tipstaff in the New South Wales Supreme Court’s Court of Appeal.

Alongside this work, Hannah is Vice President of the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties. In this role, she has devised policy, coordinated and written submissions to government inquiries, appeared before a parliamentary committee, and organised public forums, addressing issues including Australia’s counterterrorism laws, press freedoms, whistleblower protections, and privacy.

As an undergraduate, Hannah was elected to edit Australia’s only weekly student newspaper Honi Soit. She has written on legal and civil liberties issues for publications including Sydney Morning Herald, Guardian Australia, Legal Tweaks and New Matilda.

Hannah’s experience in journalism led her to focus her undergraduate law studies on the intersection between law and journalism. She has published academic work on the protection of journalists’ sources in courtrooms.

Hannah’s academic ability was recognised by numerous prizes and scholarships throughout her undergraduate studies. She was also a finalist for the University of Sydney’s Convocation Medal.

Hannah has also been a successful mooter. As a student at the University of Sydney, she won the national championship of the prestigious Philip C Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition.

Hannah has previously worked as a research assistant at the University of Sydney.

Hannah intends to use a Master of Laws at a US university to explore the protection of freedom of expression and the free press in the digital age, particularly as those values are affected by national security lawmaking.

She sees the internet as both an unprecedentedly powerful tool enabling citizens and journalists to express and exchange ideas, and as a key instrument for governments seeking to monitor, and suppress, ideas and communication. Accordingly, freedom of expression is enjoying new forms, but also facing new threats, which must be addressed legally. She is particularly interested in conducting research into the legal protection of whistleblowers.

Hannah hopes her research will contribute to level-headed policy-making in Australia, which protects our security but also properly appreciates the civil liberties interests at stake.

Gideon Singer Postgraduate Students

Gideon Singer
Home InstitutionPurdue University
Host InstitutionCQ University Appleton Institute
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplineHuman, Health and Social Sciences
Award Year2016

As an anthropological archaeologist, Gideon Singer investigates the dynamic relations between society and the artifacts which have been designed, manufactured, used, and discarded by us. Gideon’s goal is to become a global advocate for societal, economic, and ecological sustainability. His focus? E-waste, or electronic waste, which is generated by growing demands for technology and the societal benefits they may provide. In May 2016, Gideon completed his Master of Science in Anthropology and NSF IGERT Fellowship in Sustainable Electronics at Purdue University. Gideon is currently a PhD student at Purdue and active member of the Mellon Foundation funded Purdue Electronic Life Histories Project. At Purdue, Gideon has worked with many interdisciplinary teams consisting of scholars from engineering, the humanities, the social sciences, and design. Dr. Riall Nolan, Professor of Anthropology at Purdue, describes Gideon as “a remarkably poised, self-directed individual” and “one of the newer generation of anthropology students whose desire to come to grips with global problems represents a major departure from business as usual in our discipline.”

Prior to graduate school Gideon earned his Bachelor of Arts with honors at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where he conducted his senior thesis research on zooarchaeological artifacts recovered from Atlantic Trade era sites in the Gambia and participated in community-based archaeology in Dominica. In 2011, he was a member of the Tropical Archeology Research Lab at James Cook University in Australia, where he conducted laboratory research on Indigenous diet and helped teach archaeology to primary school children. While serving on archaeological digs around the U.S., Gideon became increasingly concerned with the ubiquitous presence of garbage littering roadsides and ditches across the Mid-Atlantic and the challenges of involving community members in waste management and resource recovery. These concerns continue to shape his research on electronic waste in the United States and Australia.

As a Fulbright postgraduate scholar, Gideon will conduct research on electronic waste in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. Partnering with the Appleton Institute at Central Queensland University, he will integrate ethnography and geographic information systems (GIS) to investigate local responses to the rapid increase of e-waste and design community-based resources to unmake that waste. He also plans to create educational resources and teach students there how to use an online Story Mapping Template to visualize their own consumption and discard practices. Gideon is looking forward to residing in Alice Springs, collaborating with local government, and exploring the red centre of Australia.

Caitlin Blanche Trethewy Postgraduate Students

Home InstitutionGHD Group
Host InstitutionHarvard Kennedy School of Government
Award NameFulbright Postgraduate Scholarship
DisciplinePublic Policy (Renewable Energy)
Award Year2016

Caitlin Trethewy has a Bachelor of Engineering in Renewable Energy and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of NSW. Her academic achievements include the UNSW Renewable Energy Thesis Prize for highest mark in the cohort and the Malcolm Chaikin Overseas Exchange Scholarship which enabled her to study at the University of California.

At University, Caitlin volunteered with the UNSW Solar Racing Team for two years contributing to the design, construction and race campaign of the car Sunswift IV. In 2009, she was part of the race team that won Silicon Class at the World Solar Challenge. In 2011 Sunswift IV broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest solar powered vehicle. Caitlin also held executive positions in the UNSW Photovoltaic Society, UNSW Women in Renewable Energy and UC Santa Barbara International Students Association.

Caitlin is a member of Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB). In 2012 Caitlin completed her undergraduate thesis in collaboration with EWB on the feasibility of using international carbon credits to finance its overseas projects. In 2014 and 2015 she worked in a small project team to deliver training on understanding electricity bills and saving energy in the home to the Aboriginal community at La Perouse in Sydney. For the last year she has worked in a small team to integrate a flagship partnership management and mentoring program within the organisation’s international development work.

Caitlin is a green star accredited professional with experience working in solar energy and ecologically sustainable design. She has worked at Global Sustainable Energy Solutions where she contributed to several publications on solar energy, and Lendlease as a sustainable design engineer. She is a consultant at GHD Group where she has worked on the National Infrastructure Plan and Emissions Reduction Fund. Caitlin is currently on secondment to the Department of Defence until June 2016 where she works within the Directorate of Energy Efficiency, Environmental Resource Management & Sustainability.

Caitlin is seeking a Master of Public Policy to gain skills in leadership and economics that will complement her renewable energy experience and allow her to influence positive change in the energy sector. The Fulbright Scholarship will place Caitlin at the forefront of technical and policy developments in the energy sector as the U.S. has fostered development and early adoption of many innovative technologies. The degree program will enable her to gain an international network of people working in climate, energy security and community resilience. Throughout her career this network will enable her to facilitate knowledge transfer between Australia, the U.S. and others on best practice.