The U.S. State Department has offered four Fulbright U.S. Scholar awards to CU Boulder faculty members for 2022–23. The prestigious fellowships, funded through Congress and administered through the Institute of International Education, facilitate teaching and research abroad.

Karl Linden (Canada)

Linden is a professor and the associate director of the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering. Linden’s research in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia will focus on learning about water quality issues faced by rural and Indigenous communities—typically concerns around algal blooms and heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic from industrial mine tailings. These are topics in which collaborators at his host institution, St. Mary’s University, have regional expertise.

Linden hopes to help communities improve their water quality through treatment innovations and to broaden his own perspective through the fellowship, meeting with community partners, local water utilities and shadowing researchers at local universities. The issues he’ll study overlap with water issues in rural areas of Colorado and in Native American communities in the southwest, and this is a chance to bring ideas back to Boulder, he said.

Rachel Rinaldo (Indonesia)

Rinaldo, associate professor of sociology and faculty director of the Center for Asian studies, will spend a year in Yogyakarta. She will be studying how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected women and work in Indonesia. Indonesia is an essential place to examine this issue because it is the world’s fourth largest country, with a large informal economy and a majority Muslim population.

Her study will help illuminate the dynamics of women and work in both majority Muslim societies and the global south more generally. Rinaldo will collaborate with an Indonesian sociologist, Fina Itryati of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, to conduct a large-scale qualitative study that will include in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of women working in different economic sectors.

Katharine Suding (New Zealand)

Suding is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. She will travel to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch to work on a project called Recovery, Resilience and the Ecology of Change. A diverse ecological community is composed of many species, all responding to environmental change, as well as interacting with each other. In this complex web of nature, predicting how biodiversity will change over time is challenging. This same challenge affects the use of monitoring information by conservation and restoration practitioners.

Suding’s project seeks to develop innovative ways to describe the temporal dynamics of multi-species communities through collaboration with renown experts in complex network dynamics at the University of Canterbury, as well as application through partnerships with scientists at the Landcare Institute.

John Gunther

A fourth faculty member, John Gunther, professor of jazz studies and director of the Thompson Jazz Studies Program, was selected for a Fulbright award but withdrew.

About the Fulbright Program

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the federal government. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as record of service and demonstrated leadership in their respective fields.

Nine CU Boulder graduate students and alumni were offered Fulbright Student grants to pursue teaching, research and graduate studies abroad during the 2022–23 academic year. One student withdrew. Additionally, five student-alternates were named.

If you have received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award for 2022–23, email the CU Boulder Today team.