It was a wonderful week in the office after a wonderful week of not being in the office.

Last week was vacation in Nova Scotia - camping, kayaking, swimming, etc. From the tops of the cliffs on Cape Breton you can look down onto the ocean and see the pilot whales feeding offshre. Many bald eagles. Deer and moose. The weather was perfect - just two nights of rain - so that may have biased our view of the province.

The news this week is that Thomson Scientific has agreed to be an instutional member and a sponsor of the upcoming workshop in Morocco. Some of their sponsorship funds will be used to bring additional experts from neighboring countries so that we can have a more comprehensive discussion of regional issues relating to digital libraries and access to electronic information.

The other news is that Booz Allen Hamilton has agreed to be a sponsor of our fall internship program. We had three interns this summer - from Belgium, Peru & the US. The Booz Allen contribution will fund one or two interns, and if we can match it with a second donation, then the internship program will really take off. It is an internet-based program - the interns do not need to be based at our office in Maine - and the funds may even help young Fulbrighters as they transition back to their home country.

The monthly newsletter went out this week, and it included our offer to give free memberships to Fulbrighters from the Middle East and North Africa. The response has been quite good, and we now have around 80 countries represented in the Academy through the country of their residence (35+ countries) or the country of their Fulbright experience (65+ countries). (The numbers don't add up to 80 because some countries appear on both lists). My goal is to have over 100 countires represented by the end of this year.

The other good news of the week is that the US State Department has posted an updated list of Fulbright alumni organizations, and the Fulbright Academy is included on the list. The State Department is involved because they oversee and partially fund the Fulbright program. The list can be downloaded from the Alumni.State.Gov website.

I will be on vacation next week (August 12-19) - camping with my wife and kids in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia (Canada). Yarmouth, Nova Scotia is a 5.5 hour ferry ride from Portland, Maine. Cape Breton is an eight hour drive from Yarmouth.

If you send an email or call the office next week, I will not respond as there is no access to the internet in the park. A whole week with no computer !!

While many organizations slow down in the summer, we had a very busy July.

First, there was paperwork for the National Science Foundation - they are awarding $45,000 to the Academy to facilitate participation by US experts in a workshop, to be held on January 25-28 in Morocco. It is an international workshop on digital information communication, with a focus on implementing a Maghreb Digital Library for Education, Science & Culture. The goal is to have around 50 participants, from Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Mauritania, plus 15-20 from the United States. Our partners to date are UNESCO, the Moroccan Ministry of Higher Education, R&D Maroc, and others. We also have been in conversation with private sector sponsors.

Second, we have been looking for program leaders and speakers for the March 2007 conference in Panama. One of our interns in New York City has been identifying corporate leaders who were also Fulbright scholars, and I have been making calls to them. We also have been in communication with ambassadors and government leaders.

Third, the Chair of our Joint Committee on Clinical Research Ethics has been traveling this summer. In May Dr. Gionis was at a UNESCO Consultation in Bangkok on codes of ethics, in July he was at a UNESCO Consultation in Seoul on teaching ethics, and this week he is in Beijing at the 8th World Congress of Bioethics. At each of the meetings, he has been addressing one of our areas of interest - a better understanding of the existing guidelines for international research and assuring adequate oversight and enforcement of these guidelines.

Fourth, we have been laying the foundation for continued work on a project that was originally sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation - collecting stories from Fulbright scientists on how the Fulbright program influenced them and their work. Over the past year, we have collected some stories on our website and created a directory of other story repositories (primarily Fulbright Commissions). The work led to two new initiatives. The first will be a series of documentaries made at and about Fulbright meetings. The first documentary was made by Mrs. Fulbright (Senator Fulbright’s widow), and is about the Senator's life and his work, and the second documentary was made by us and is about the Academy's conference in Berlin. The second initiative is a multi-volume collection of essays by Fulbright scholars about their Fulbright experiences. The first volume came out this summer and is by foreign Fulbrighters in the US. Several other volumes are under production - I am co-editing one about Fulbright exchanges with Latin America. In the meantime, we continue to collect stories on the website.

Lastly, we have been working to increase our membership. About half of our current members were up for renewal, and so we sent out dues notices at the end of July (the other half is notified in January). Because of our workshop in Morocco and other activities in North Africa and the Middle East, we have been able to offer free memberships to Fulbrighters in that region. While the US restored full diplimatic relations with Libya in May, many say that our diplomatic relations with other countries in the region have declined this year. This means that there is increased value for the type of person-to-person relationships created by the Fulbright program.