Four Longhorns Receive Fulbright U.S. Scholar Awards for 2024-2025

Austin, Texas - Four scholars at The University of Texas at Austin have received Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awards for the 2024-2025 academic year. With support from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, three UT faculty members and one graduate student will teach, study or research in four countries.

Fulbright U.S. Scholars are faculty members, researchers, administrators and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. They engage in cutting-edge explorations and expand their professional networks, often continuing collaborations started abroad and laying the groundwork for forging future partnerships between institutions.

Professors J. Brent Crosson, Anthony Di Fiore and Junmin Wang will join the more than U.S. scholars, artists and professionals from all backgrounds who teach or conduct research annually in more than135 countries through the Fulbright program.

2024-2025 Faculty Fulbright U.S. Scholars from UT Austin

Brent Crosson, Ph.D., is an associate professor and cultural anthropologist who teaches courses on religion and the environment; anthropology of religion; religions of the Caribbean and more in the Department of Religious Studies in the College of Liberal Arts. He will lead a fellowship August 2024-June 2025 in Trinidad and Tobago, affiliated with the University of the West Indies - St. Augustine.

"The project I will be working on during the Fulbright Fellowship is about climate crisis in the southern Caribbean. I am essentially arguing that the key to understanding the Anthropocene … began in the Caribbean," said Crosson. "The first official conservation projects began there; the first fossil fuel-burning machines were tested there; the first oil well was dug there (by a U.S. company in 1857); and more. I am trying to tell a very different story of the current era of ecological crisis that centers on the colonial exploitation of the region but also on alternative projects of human/nature emerging currently."

Anthony Di Fiore, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts, will lead a fellowship in July and August 2024, with two additional months in summer 2025, largely centered in the Amazon rainforest at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station operated by the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Di Fiore's research aims to document the diversity of microparasites in primates of eastern Ecuador. While researching there, he also will lead workshops on statistical programming and tropical ecology research methodology.

"This Fulbright award will help me expand my research into the critically important area of wildlife parasite ecology," said Di Fiore. "As the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted, the risk of spillover of wildlife diseases into humans is real, acute, and growing.

Junmin Wang, Ph.D., holder of the Norris Endowed Professorship in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Cockrell School, received a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar award to pursue his fellowship at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

Wang's areas of research include the control, modeling, estimation, optimization and diagnosis of dynamical systems, especially for ground mobility such as electric, connected and autonomous vehicles, propulsion, human-centric automation, cyberphysical, intelligent transportation and mechatronic systems. His research and teaching in Seoul during the Fall 2024 semester will focus on ground mobility systems.

UT Austin has a storied history of alumni, faculty and staff receiving Fulbright awards to conduct research in a multitude of disciplines and attend specialized seminars across the world. Recipients join a network of more than 400,000 Fulbright recipients whose careers have been enhanced by their experience with the U.S. Department of State program.

For more information about the Fulbright Program, visit fulbrightprogram.org.

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