Report: 30 Diaspora fellows to conduct projects with Greek universities

The Institute of International Education in collaboration with the Fulbright Foundation in Greece, announced that the Greek Diaspora fellowship program selected 30 fellows to visit Greece to conduct projects with their peers at Greek universities.

The Greek- and Cypriot-born scholars hail from a cross-section of twenty-eight renowned United States and Canadian universities.

They will work in topics that range from medical physics to curriculum co-development in clinical neurophysiology, and from Anglo-American Modernist Poetry to educational psychology.

Thirteen Greek universities were chosen to host the fellows for collaborative projects that meet specific needs at their institutions and in their communities, based on proposals submitted by faculty members and administrators at the Greek universities.

The Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program aims to help avert Greece’s brain drain and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Greece and the United States and Canada.

Launched in 2016, the Fellowship Program is managed by the Institute of International Education in collaboration with the Fulbright Foundation in Greece, and funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Projects supported by this round of Fellowships include:

The University of Crete will host a Fellow from St. Mary’s University and Queens College, City University of New York. This collaborative research project will focus on the sociology of culture and the sociological study of earlier and contemporary Greek migratory exodus to the U.S. and Canada. The project will also incorporate graduate student teaching/mentoring and curriculum co-development.
A Fellow from the University of Kentucky will visit the National Technical University of Athens to work on graduate student teaching and mentoring and collaborative research in addressing nighttime road safety issues.
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki will host a Fellow from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, to assist with collaborative research and graduate student teaching in the area of process systems engineering. The project will focus on product and process synthesis and design, process operations in a dynamic environment and the modeling and optimization of biological systems.

“One of the main goals of the Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program has been to engage productively one of Greece’s most important assets, its diasporic academic community,” noted Stelios Vasilakis, Director of Programs and Strategic Initiatives at SNF.