UMass Faculty Members Receive 2025-26 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Awards

Faculty members from multiple disciplines across campus have received Fulbright U.S. Scholar Awards for the 2025-26 academic year. As Fulbright U.S. Scholars, they will be engaging in teaching partnerships and collaborative research and projects at host universities in Taiwan, South Korea, Kenya, Denmark, France and India.

Established by Congress in 1946, the Fulbright Program is the U.S. government's flagship program of international educational and cultural exchange. The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program annually offers over 400 awards for U.S. citizens, faculty members and administrators to teach, conduct research and carry out professional projects in more than 135 countries around the world.

Support for faculty members preparing Fulbright applications is provided by the Office of Global Affairs and the Office of Faculty Development. Kimberly Stender, senior administrative coordinator to the senior vice provost for Global Affairs, serves as the Fulbright U.S. Scholar liaison for the UMass Amherst campus.

2025-26 Fulbright U.S. Scholars

Christine Ho, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture, College of Humanities and Fine Arts

Christine Ho's project examines the formation of public art in Taiwan during the martial law years (1948-87), and asks: "What was public art during a time when the concept of the public was tightly regulated and controlled?" At Academia Sinica in Taipei, she is working with the foremost historian of Taiwanese art, Yen Chuan-ying, to study murals in situ, conduct interviews and research in archives.

"As a scholar of Cold War art and visual culture, there is no more exciting place to be at the present than in Taiwan, which was and continues to be central to the United States' relationship to Asia," Ho said.

Panayotis Kevrekidis, Distinguished Professor, Mathematics and Statistics, College of Natural Sciences

Panayotis Kevrekidis will travel to South Korea to work with the well-established collaboration of JK Yang and his team at Seoul National University as they enter a prolific new phase of exploring extreme wave structures such as rogue waves and dispersive shock waves. Simultaneously, they will train a new generation of scientists in applied mathematics, physics and materials science. The collaboration also aims to strengthen educational exchange and ties in alliance with the US-Korea Presidential STEM Initiative established in 2023.

"It is an honor and a privilege to receive this Fulbright award to visit the broad and diverse mechanical metamaterials group of Professor JK Yang at Seoul National University," Kevrekidis said. "I genuinely hope to make the most of this exciting opportunity to build collaborative ties, research links and avenues for student exchanges between my group, but also more broadly the Math & Stat department and UMass Amherst and nonlinear science groups in South Korea, both in Seoul and elsewhere."

Nick Tooker, Senior Lecturer, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Riccio College of Engineering

Nick Tooker will teach courses on water and wastewater treatment at the University of Nairobi (UoN) and develop a new course for engineering students at UMass Amherst and UoN. The course is intended to bring students from both universities together to learn from each other and strengthen ties between the institutions.

"The fundamental principles of chemistry, math, fluid dynamics and microbiology are the same at UMass Amherst as they are at the University of Nairobi. But there are differences in regulations, cultural norms, and available resources, which means we need to consider how we design our engineered systems in a different way," Tooker said.

He adds, "I am excited to explore similarities and differences in how we approach engineering design here in the U.S. compared to Kenya, with the hope of cultivating engineers of the future who are more empathetic designers."

Margaret Vickery, Undergraduate Program Director and Lecturer, History of Art and Architecture, College of Humanities and Fine Arts

Margaret Vickery's research will focus on Danish infrastructure, and its historical and contemporary approaches, which not only produce clean water or power but also include community outreach and education in innovative and sometimes playful ways. Recent projects include children's play spaces which mirror the processes at work within that infrastructure. Her goal is to better understand the environmental and social benefits of a people-centered infrastructure and how play connects children with those systems and the natural world.

"I am thrilled to have the opportunity to do extensive research in Denmark on these unusual infrastructure projects," Vickery said. "Working with and learning from my colleagues in landscape architecture at the University of Copenhagen will help me better understand the intersections of landscape, infrastructure and play in the Danish context."

Ina Ganguli, Professor of Economics, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Ina Ganguli's project will investigate the impact of French immigration policies on the mobility and retention of international STEM doctoral students and their contributions to local science and innovation. Collaborating with researchers at the Bordeaux School of Economics, Ganguli will work with newly assembled data on French doctoral theses and scientific publications to estimate the impacts of policies. The project will provide insights into how immigration policies shape talent retention and innovation and help inform future policy discussions in France, the U.S. and worldwide.

"I'm excited to collaborate with researchers at the Bordeaux School of Economics on this timely topic and to explore new data sources and immigration dynamics beyond the U.S.," Ganguli said. "With policies in flux worldwide, I am eager to contribute to evidence on how mobility shapes science, innovation and scientific careers."

Emily Kumpel, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Riccio College of Engineering

Emily Kumpel, a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, will focus on intermittent water supply, also known as water rationing, the effects of which can lead to broad negative impacts on water quality, human health and household finances. She will collaborate with Pradip Kalbar and faculty in the Environmental Science and Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay.

There Kumpel will study water supply reliability and interruptions, as more than one billion people in the world receive intermittent water supply, including the U.S., which also experiences water outages. Her work will build definitions and metrics to measure and then improve water supply interruptions.

"I am incredibly excited for the opportunity to work alongside world-class scholars and gain better understanding of a common issue experienced in both the U.S. in India-water supply interruptions-at a time when our world's water systems are under stress," Kumpel said. "There's so much that we have to learn from each other."