Make reservations now for our October dinner and for tickets to the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard University on October 6 by sending an email to the FAST office. Show tickets are $28, or $50 with dinner. Student discounts available.

Register now for the Fulbright Science Conference in Berlin, March 4-5, 2006. Online registrations can be made through our website (www.FulbrightAcademy.org), or you can contact the FAST office.

Attend our small receptions in Belgium and Morocco, so that our Executive Director can meet you. The Belgium program is scheduled for Monday, September 19, and the program in Rabat will be on Friday, September 23. A third program may be held in Paris on Monday morning, September 26. If interested in attending one of these programs, please contact the office for additional information.

Contribute to the 60th Anniversary Program.

Our bulletin is sent to educational innovators and leaders in scientific and technical fields in the US and around the world, including Fulbright grantees and their hosts, Fulbright commissions, and many others. Previous issues can be accessed by clicking on the above photo. For additional information about the Fulbright Academy and its mission, please refer to our webpage or the statement at end of this bulletin. We can be reached via email at info@fulbrighter.org

You are invited to the “Fulbrighters in Science Conference”, to be held in Berlin, Germany on Saturday and Sunday, March 4-5, 2006. Our program is designed for people in the natural and social sciences, economics, engineering, and technology, and for those whose personal or business interests relate to those fields. This conference will help you establish ties with alumni, current grantees, Fulbright hosts, and other international experts. The conference language is English.

The conference will be attended by 150 natural and social scientists, government officials, corporate executives, students, and retired professionals. One-third will be current American Fulbright grantees in Europe. Many of the other attendees will be based in Europe, but we also expect guests from Africa, Asia, North America and elsewhere. Please see our website for an updated list of individuals who have expressed interest in attending.

We chose Berlin because the German-US exchange program is the largest of the Fulbright exchanges, with over 600 grantees participating each year. Our conference will be held immediately prior to the 52nd Annual Fulbright Seminar, a program organized by the German-American Fulbright Commission. FAST Conference attendees will participate in the opening reception of the seminar, which brings hundreds of current grantees to Berlin for four days of tours, programs, and fun.

The program is being done in collaboration with the German-American Fulbright Commission and with additional financial and organizational support from other partners and sponsors. If you or your organization would like to be a sponsor, please visit the conference website for details.

The registration fee is 250 Euros, with a 10% discount for those who register before October 1. Current (2005-06) Fulbright grantees also receive greater discounts. Please note that the regular registration fee includes one night accommodation in the conference hotel, a 100 Euro value.

If you would like to present at the conference, please submit an abstract via email at your earliest convenience. Conf@FulbrightAcademy.org

The prizes will be awarded on Thursday October 6th by actual Nobel Laureates before an audience of 1,200 in Saunders Theater. The Fulbright Academy is organizing a small dinner in Cambridge for Fulbrighters and guests prior to the prize ceremony. Expected attendees include Graham Stimpson (UK Fulbrighter at the MIT Chemistry Department); James Cowling (Australian Fulbrighter, also at MIT); Maya Howard (education & environmental research in Brazil, Spain & Portugal); and Eric Howard (US Fulbrighter to Germany in 1989). We currently have a group of 10 seats reserved at Saunder’s Theater, and more can be ordered if there is demand.

The Academy also is a lead sponsor for a reception after the Ig Nobel Prize Lectures, which begin at 1:00 on Saturday, October 8 at MIT, Building #10. The public lectures are always quite interesting and are attended by 250-300 people. If you aren’t free on Thursday night, please join us on Saturday afternoon for educational entertainment and fun.

Our first annual program was held at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Some 50 people attended, including scientists and researchers from five states and eight countries. Ninety minutes after the program ended, people were still talking over cheese, crackers and beer. We are hoping that this fall’s program will be even more successful.

If you are interested in attending the dinner & prize ceremony, please contact us immediately by calling 207-799-3098, as tickets to the Prize Ceremony sell out quickly. The tickets are about $25 each, so with dinner, the cost will be around $50. The Saturday program is free and open to the public, no reservations are needed.

The newly hired Executive Director of the Academy, Mr. Eric Howard, has spent much of the summer contacting members and Academy partners and arranging funding for our growing set of programs. Starting in July, he began taking our message on the road, meeting with staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, Rockefeller University, World Learning, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Institute for International Education, the Council for International Educational Exchange, HealthSpace Cleveland, and others.

Over the next few months, we are hosting several small gatherings for members and others interested in our Fulbright science network. Mr. Howard will be in Europe in September, with a program in Belgium scheduled for Monday, September 19, and a program in Rabat on Friday, September 23. On the 24th, he will be speaking at the Annual Meeting of the Fulbright Alumni Association of Morocco. Meetings in Paris on Monday the 26th are also being scheduled. If interested in attending one of these programs, please contact the office for additional information.

In October, we have hosting two programs in Cambridge, MA (see next story), and one-on-one meetings in Washington, DC, in conjunction with our attendance at a program at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. Then in November, we will be in Baltimore, Maryland, at the Annual Meeting of the Fulbright Association, a Washington-based organization dedicated to promoting the flagship program for international educational and cultural exchange, enriching the experiences of visiting Fulbright students, teachers, and scholars, and fostering a global network of Fulbright alumni.

During 2006 we will be celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the Fulbright Exchange Program and 60 years of achievements by Fulbright grantees.

As part of the celebration, the Academy has received funding from Alfred Sloan Foundation to initiate a program for gathering personal recollections from past and current Fulbright grantees and their colleagues. Later this year, we will have a website dedicated to gathering those stories. Through these stories, you will be able to learn about the work and achievements of other grantees – and hopefully build new professional relationships.

In addition to financial contributions, we have also begun to collect personal contributions – personal stories of Fulbright experiences and the results of those experiences. For example, last month we had the honor of interviewing Dr. Joshua Lederberg, who was a Fulbright grantee to Australia in 1957 and a Nobel Prize winner in 1958.

Here is an extract from a grantee, whose psychology research over the last 23 years was changed by a single meeting during his Fulbright year in the UK:

“One of the biggest effects [of the Fulbright] was on my research. My host school sponsored my attendance at the national meeting of the British Psychological Society. I had been seeking for over a year a way to reversibly manipulate brain activation in order to alter thinking, feeling, and actions. … At the convention Elaine Walker described her research based on the theories of Marcel Kinsbourne, and I have been using the attentional manipulation techniques ever since …”

Dr. Peter Moran, a 1993 Fulbright grantee to Nepal, is the new Director of the Fulbright Commission in Nepal. Dr. Moran received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Washington in 1998. Most recently, he was managing study abroad programs in Nepal. He also helped set up the Buddhist Studies Program at Katmandu University.

Frantz Smith, who received a Master’s degree in Aquaculture at Texas A&M University with support from the Fulbright-OAS Ecology Program, is the first Belizean to win the prestigious UNESCO 2005 Man and the Biosphere Young Scientist award. His research is a project to describe the relationship between fertilizers and feed in creating algae blooms in ponds, and the management process for removing them. With the UNESCO research grant, he will direct biology students at the University of Belize in carrying out the project.

Academy Member Dr. Edmunds Bunkse of the University of Delaware writes, saying that he attended a conference in Greece last year on European Rural Landscapes (a group of which I am active member). This year he was invited to the Trondheim (Norway) University of Science & Technology to lead seminars on humanistic landscape theory and practice and to participate at the Inaugural Nordic Geographer's Meeting, held at Lund University in Sweden. Last year he was promoted to professor on the basis of my most recent book: Geography and the Art of Life (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

One of our institutional supporters is a fairly new program called the German Academic International Network (GAIN). Its goal is to bring together German scientists, regardless of where they live in the world. A collaboration of several exchange programs, it produces a regular newsletter (in German) that carries news about scientific and political developments as well as information on jobs and grants. If you have German colleagues, please refer them to GAIN: http://gain.daad.org

The Fulbright Academy is an independent non-profit organization that serves scientists, executives, and scholars worldwide. We receive organizational and financial support from institutional and individual members, selected Fulbright alumni groups and commissions, corporations, foundations, and other entities interested in developing an international network of leaders in science and technology. We are not affiliated with the Fulbright Association (US), the US State Department, or the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

The Fulbright Academy of Science & Technology uses the expertise of our network of Fulbright alumni and other leaders in science to address critical problems in education, scientific innovation and economic development. We interact with thousands of Fulbrighters and scientists around the world.

Academy projects are funded by contracts, grants, and donations from those who share our mission. Membership income is an important part of our annual budget; if you or your institution is not a member, please join today. Memberships start at $15.