Many of our members work in academic institutions, and so this is a busy time of the year for them. Reading term papers, preparing for exams, advising students about their options for the future.

It is also a busy time of year for the Fulbright Exchange Program. The application process begins in the spring, and the completed applications are due in the late summer or fall for travel the following fall. So right now the program is starting to look for candidates who will go overseas in the 2007-08 academic year.

A completed Fulbright application would include letters of recommendation and a high quality project proposal. High quality means that the candidate must demonstrate why their project is great, why it needs to be done in a particular country, and why they have the right personal and professional qualifications to be a "Fulbrighter."

While the Fulbright Academy of Science & Technology is not involved in the recruiting, selection or management of Fulbright grants, many students and faculty members contact us with questions. That is what makes us busy, and because we work with alumni of the program, we have a strong interest in having the best people in the applicant pool.

We also are busy because the current crop of student Fulbright grantees are nearing the end of their grant period. Many of them are looking for jobs - summer jobs to do before going to graduate school or permanent jobs. One of our goals for the future is to help with this transition. That will be done by increasing the size and scope of the Academy's network of corporate, governmental, non-profit and individual members.

Nearly 6,000 new grants are awarded each year - about half of them are in science and technology-related disciplines. Many are working at institutions and have local hosts who are critical to the success of their Fulbright experience (in many fields it is hard to do research without access to a lab or equipment). This means that the Academy also has the challenge of keeping track of people as they move from job to job.

If you are a Fulbrighter, please go to our webpage and enter your current contact information in our database. www.FulbrightAcademy.org

This has been an extremely busy week.

We hired three people to work on different projects. The first two are current Fulbright grantees to the United States, and they will be at the Fulbright Academy in Maine for three months this summer. The third will work for a month on one of our projects based at Indiana University-Bloomington.

The first has two law degrees – from the University of Wroclaw, Poland and from the University of Berne, Switzerland. For the past year, she has been at the European Legal Study Center at Columbia University, examining patent protection for inventions in the field of industrial biotechnology, particularly related to bio-fuel. At the Academy, she will be involved in activities relating to intellectual property, technology transfer, and energy issues.
The second earned a Master of Law degree from Ghent University. As part of her Fulbright in the US, she has been an intern at the United Nations in New York, conducting research on global development and peacekeeping issues. Some of the work has been with the UN Delegation from Fiji, and because they have a very small delegation, she has been able to attend some interesting high-level meetings. At the Academy, she will be working on some of our international projects.

The third is graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington. FAST is part of a three-year $500,000 project based in Bloomington and funded by the National Science Foundation. Our portion of the project is to help educate the public on the benefits of bacteria - that bacteria are in and around us every day, and so anti-bacterial products are not necessary. One of the principal investigators is at IU, and we needed a talented local person to help out with some background research this summer.

The hiring process for the summer interns started with an internet posting to a listserv used primarily by current Fulbright grantees. We had seven candidates based at universities in Ohio, Texas, Florida, and New York. It was a strong pool, so we conducted two rounds of telephone interviews. While we could not have them all come to Maine as interns, all of the candidates were given complimentary memberships in the Academy, and several expressed an interest in working on projects from their home base, where ever that may be.

My only problem now is that I do not yet have all of the funds in place to pay for their housing and their stipends. So seeking individual or corporate sponsors has risen to the top of my to-do list.

On the more personal side, I had a very interesting afternoon on Wednesday - I volunteered to be a participant in a research study of cognitive, perceptual and biological functioning and physical features in families. It is a long-term study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). As a participant in the study, I got to take the famous Rorschach Ink-blot Test (what do you see in this amorphous blob). There also was a multiple choice questionnaire, a computer-based test to examine the speed of my thought processing, and an interview that followed the standard psychology evaluation methodology. I could not do a second computer-based test which measures eye movement - the equipment is in Greece getting repaired - so I have to go back in a month or two.

My participation was quite relevant to FAST - we received funding earlier this year to participate in an international research project on clinical research ethics. What are the appropriate guidelines that scientists should use when conducting research on human subjects? The consent form for my participation in the study at McLean Hospital was nine pages long, and then there was another eight page notice on how the information collected may be used or disclosed.

These forms bring up many interesting legal and policy questions, starting with educational background. Would a high-school dropout understand such forms, as well as the benefits and risks of participating in a study? (There are no particular downsides to this study, but other studies can damage your physical or mental health). If this was an international project with researchers from the US, Europe and Africa, whose informed consent guidelines would be used? In countries where husbands and wives do not have equal rights, could a wife give consent to participate herself or consent to her child's involvement in a scientific study?

You can learn more about the Fulbright Academy's project at www.ClinicalResearchEthics.com.

My trip to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) has been a great success. On the flight from Chicago, I sat with a very successful salesman of industrial boilers. Since part of my job is sales (selling FAST to potential members, partners and donors), I asked for the secret of his success. It is asking the right questions and then listening to understand their interests and needs. There are many reasons why a company may want a new boiler (legal regulations, public image, energy efficiency, safety, company growth), and you need to present the advantages of your boiler in their terms.

I thought about this during my two days of meetings with deans and faculty at UNL. As a new organzation, the Fulbright Academy can go in many directions - and so I need to balance our vision with the needs and interests of our members. UNL has nearly 22,000 students, and so there are many different avenues for collaboration between our organization and members and their factulty and students. They have a strong Office of International Affairs, and every year several students get a Fulbright.

Some memories.
As part of their branding effort, the University has been giving out lapel pins that are a large red "N" Everywhere you go, you see the N.
It has a great collection of outdoor sculptures and also a nice art gallery. In the permanent collection, they have an exhibit of Marsen Hartley, who apparently was a leading American modernist painter around 1910-1940. He was born in Maine and the exibit includes a painting of Mt. Katahdin (Maine's tallest mountain and also the location of the northern end of the Appalachian Trail). So even in Nebraska, I can't get away from my home state.
I visited the State House and saw groups of visiting elementary school kids on a field trip to see government in action. The building is full of images of corn cobs - from the walnut wood ceiling of the Supreme Court chamber to the brass light fixtures in the basement. It also has wonderful mosaics in the floors, with images of various plant and animal life.
On my jog this morning, I went by the train depot. Amtrak's California Zephyr was waiting to depart. It left Chicago yesterday at 1:50 in the afternoon and will get to San Francisco tomorrow at 5:00 pm - a 53 hour trip. Back in 1982 - the summer I graduated from high school - I took the Greyhound from Boston to Los Angeles and back - that was something like 85 hours each way (3.5 days). I had not been back to Nebraska since that summer.
I have discovered that I will need to come again - I did not have a chance to visit the "Telephone Historical Museum" or the "National Museum of Roller Skating," which the hotel information booklet tells me is considered to be "the definitive source of roller sports history."

Time to go to this morning's meetings, then a flight home. Yesterday it was sunny and 70 degrees in Lincoln. In the evening, I called home - it had been snowing all afternoon.

This week, I am in the office two days and on the road for three.

Tomorrow (Tuesday), I leave for Lincoln, Nebraska, where I will be meeting with faculty and administrators. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is one of our institutional members, and one of the benefits of membership is that we try to be flexible and help them in any way possible. While there, I will be meeting with researchers and staff to discuss the availablity of federal funds for a joint project that we are considering.

I also will give talks to faculty and students as part of their "Research Week" - a several day program where for students present their research and outside speakers talk about the world beyond Lincoln. I will be talking about opportunities available through the Fulbright program, and so I was up until midnight on Saturday working on my powerpoint presentations. I took a Dale Carnegie public speaking course two years ago, and so I tried to remember some of the tricks of the trade so that my talk will excite as well as inform.

The flight leaves at 7:05 am, arriving shortly before lunch. Happily I live just 15 minutes from the airport, and Portland has a small airport. This means that I can get up at 5:30, have breakfast and leave just before 6:00 am and still have no problem getting the flight.

I get back to Maine on Thursday evening, and Friday will be a busy day - interviewing candidates for one or two summer internships at the Academy. We have seven current Fulbrght grantees who would like to come to Maine for the summer as part of their academic training. All are interesting, so it will be a difficult choice.

April Fool's Day 2006.

This seems like a good day to start a blog for the Fulbright Academy of Science & Technology (FAST).

I was a Fulbright Grantee to West Germany in 1989 - the year the Berlin Wall fell - and so I was in the last group of Fulbrighters to "West Germany." Thereafter, they just were going to "Germany." After my year as a Fulbrighter, I was interested in meeting with other scientists who had gone on Fulbright exchanges to foreign countries - Americans who went overseas or foreigners who came to the US. The internet was just beginnng and Google certainly did not exist, so there was no easy way for us to link up.

And so, FAST was an idea that floated around for a decade. In the fall of 2000, I organized a small group, and we incorporated an organization: the Fulbright Academy of Science & Technology. But I was busy with my three small children, so not much happened until 2003 when I did a mailing and got over 100 alumni interested. We established a formal board of directors, obtained our non-profit status from the US Federal Government, designed a simple website, and started sending out newsletters.

In 2003-2004, we remained a completely volunteer organization, with the board meeting once a month via conference call and me writing the newsletters. Also in 2004, we started organizing "Fulbright Forums" - meetings where Fulbright grantees, alumni, hosts and friends could exchange ideas and learn from each other.

In 2005, we decided it was time to move forward as an organization - and so we began to approach members, foundations, organizations, and others for funding. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation came through with a $35,000 grant for an on-line history project, and we were off.

That was almost exactly ten months ago. Our income in 2005 was nearly $70,000, and our goal is to break $100,000 this year. Some of it pays my salary. The rest pays for programs, interns, office supplies, travel, and meeting expenses.

Since then, I have sent thousands of emails, met with two Nobel Prize winners, hosted a conference in Berlin with 140 registered participants from 25 countries, and hosted programs in Belgium, Morocco, and several US states. With so much going on, I hired a Fulbright alumus, Emily Peckenham, who also was a grantee to Germany, to help out on projects, and this week we are interviewing for a summer intern - again a Fulbrighter is being sought out.

With this Blog, I will be sharing some of our successes (and perhaps some of our mistakes). I want to close by thanking our Board of Directors for their advise and assistance - David, Torsten, Flynn, Maggie, & Bob. Also our former board member Michelle and Karl who just joined the board in February. Also thanks to our members and donors.

You can read more about the Academy on our website: www.FulbrightAcademy.org