Two NC State faculty members — Angus I. Kingon, professor of materials science and engineering, and Robert C. Kochersberger, associate professor of English — have been awarded prestigious Fulbright Scholars grants for 2002-03.

NC State was also selected as a host institution for visiting Fulbright Scholars recipients from Lebanon, Japan and Greece.

The Fulbright grants are awarded each year to leading researchers, teachers and administrators at universities worldwide. Recipients are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as extraordinary leadership potential. The grants enable recipients to travel, conduct research and teach abroad at host universities for up to one year.

Kingon will lecture and conduct research involving electronic ceramics and films from March to June 2003 at the University of Aveiro in Aveiro, Portugal. Kochersberger will lecture on communications and journalism from January to June 2003 at the University of Ljublijana in Ljublijana, Slovenia.

Earlier this year, Kochersberger and Vern Granger, assistant director of Undergraduate Admissions at NC State, became two of the first recipients of a new Fulbright Senior Specialists grant, a short-term award given to leading U.S. academics and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at academic institutions around the world.

Through the Senior Specialists grant, Kochersberger spent two weeks in May at Thammasat University in Thailand, where he presented seminars to faculty on journalism and mass communication curriculums.

Granger spent four weeks in April in Germany and Belgium, where he exchanged ideas regarding educational systems with faculty members and administrators of various institutions within those two countries.

The research interests of the three Fulbright Scholars visiting NC State in 2002-03 cover a wide spectrum of disciplines. Mustapha Haidar, associate professor of plant sciences at the American University of Beirut in Beirtut, Lebanon, will spend the entire academic year working on research subject "Initial Characteristics of Light Signal Transduction in Dodder Seedlings."

Taro Ochiai, professor of design at Kyushu Sangyo University in Fukuoka, Japan, has spent the past three months working on the research subject "Aging of Color Perception: Environmental Analysis Upon the Problems Pertaining to the Changing Color Perceptions From Aging as an Interdisciplinary Area Between Medicine and Design."
Tatiana Tambouratzis, a researcher in the Radiation Protection Division of the Institute of Nuclear Technology at the National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos" in Athens, Greece, recently completed a three-month study entitled "Monitoring Loose Parts in Nuclear Power Plants Employing Wavelets and Soft Computing Techniques."

For more information on the Fulbright Scholar Program, visit the Web at www.cies.org.

Posted October 23, 2002

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