Salisbury, MD —For the seventh year, Salisbury University has been named among the nation’s top producers of Fulbright Students by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
SU also has been named among the nation’s leading producers of Fulbright Scholars. The honors were announced for awards granted during the previous academic year. The Fulbright is the country’s flagship international exchange program.
“A Fulbright award is one of the most prestigious honors in higher education,” said SU President Carolyn Ringer Lepre. “The fact that our students, faculty and administrators continue to receive these awards year after year is a powerful testament to their hard work and expertise, as well as the exceptional resources and support SU provides to ensure their success.”
One of those resources is SU’s Nationally Competitive Fellowships Office, directed by Dr. Kristen Walton. The office works with competitors for the Fulbright and other awards to shepherd them through the application process, practice interviews and ensure their applications are the best they can be.
“In the past decade, more than 100 SU students have received prestigious awards including the Fulbright, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the St. Andrews Scholarship, the Boren Scholarship and many others,” said Walton. “These successes prove that our students can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with — and often far above — graduates from other campuses throughout the nation.”
Three SU students (now alumnae) received the Fulbright Student Award during the 2023-24 academic year. They included Ashlynn Burrows, a conflict analysis and dispute resolution and communication major from Edgewater, MD; Madison Cuthbert, an environmental and international studies major from Potomac, MD; and Naomi Perry, a biology and French major from Odenton, MD.
Burrows received an English teaching assistantship to the Czech Republic, where she also learned about the Czech school system, which has been cited as a key factor in the nation’s low poverty rate. She also worked to create a local basketball club, advocating for community involvement.
Cuthbert studied at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research and the University of Aegean in Greece, working with leading researchers to study the interconnectedness of science and policy in the role of minimizing microplastics in Greek surface waters. She hopes her work will contribute to future studies that could assist the mission of the United Nations and other agencies to keep the threat of microplastics from becoming more exacerbated.
Through her appointment, Perry enrolled in master’s classes at the Universté Paris-Saclay in France, pursuing an M.S. in Life Sciences and Health with plans to eventually become a spaceflight surgeon. During the program, she conducted astrobiological research that included determining biosignatures of microbes from lava tubes in the Azores archipelago in Portugal to determine analogs for life on Mars.
Two SU faculty also earned Fulbright Scholar honors for 2023-24. Through her award, Dr. Viktoria Basham, lecturer in the Glenda Chatham and Robert G. Clarke Honors College and assistant director of the Nationally Competitive Fellowships Office, is currently conducting research on regional differences in, and beliefs that led to the interpretations of, Bulgarian vampire folklore. She also is teaching a course in the mythology of vampires and similar imaginary creatures at the University of Library Studies and Information Technologies in her native Bulgaria.
As part of his Fulbright exchange, Dr. Ryan Habermeyer, associate professor of English in SU’s Charles R. and Martha N. Fulton School of Liberal Arts, is researching World War I in Poland through primary sources with the goal of writing a “true but also fictionalized” or “post-truth” account of his great-grandfather’s wartime experiences in Europe, based on an oral history recorded by his father and great grandfather. He also is teaching a course on the intersection of post-truth—an interdisciplinary academic field examining the philosophical questions surrounding the contested concept of truth—and folklore at the University of Gdańsk.
SU also has a long history of faculty, administrator and alumni Fulbrighters, and has twice before been among the nation’s top producers of those awards. Most recently, Jason Curtin, SU vice president of advancement and executive director of the SU Foundation, Inc., was selected for the Fulbright International Education Administrator Program. Last October, he spent two weeks in Germany with a U.S. cohort, conducting campus visits and forging connections with that nation’s societal, cultural and education leaders, learning about the German education system with the goal of enhancing best practices at SU.
Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 390,000 participants with the opportunity to exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. Some 1,900 U.S. students are offered Fulbrights annually, with more than 400,000 individuals participating in Fulbright exchanges since the award’s inception. The program operates in over 160 countries.
SU students or alumni who are interested in applying for any fellowships may contact Walton for assistance. For more information visit the SU Nationally Competitive Fellowships Office webpage at https://www.salisbury.edu/administration/academic-affairs/nationalfellowships.
SU faculty interested in applying for the Fulbright Scholar program may contact Dr. Dane Foust, SU vice president of student affairs and Fulbright Scholar liaison, at drfoust@salisbury.edu.
Learn more about SU and opportunities to Make Tomorrow Yours at www.salisbury.edu.
