Elmira Popova, Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, Receives Fulbright Award
March 31, 2008
Elmira Popova, Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to lecture and do research at "St.Kliment Ohridski" University, Sofia, Bulgaria and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences during the 2008-2009 academic year, according to the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Popova will carry out research with colleagues at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics in "St.Kliment Ohridski" University, as well as the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences to link ideas and methods from the fields of Operations Research and Statistics to attack forecasting and decision-making problems which rely upon data analysis. She will also assist in development of a new course, "Bayesian Statistics and Monte Carlo Sampling", as part of their new graduate program in Mathematical Modeling in Economics, Mathematical Finance and Actuarial Science.
Popova is one of approximately 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad through the Fulbright Scholar Program. Established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Program's purpose is to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the rest of the world.
The Fulbright Program, America's flagship international educational exchange program, is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Since its inception, the Fulbright Program has exchanged approximately 273,500 people — 102,900 Americans who have studied, taught or researched abroad and 170,600 students, scholars and teachers from other countries who have engaged in similar activities in the United States. The Program operates in over 150 countries worldwide.
Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. Among the thousands of prominent Fulbright alumni are: Craig Barrett, Chairman of the Board of Intel Corporation; Mohamed Benaissa, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Morocco; Raoul Cantero, Justice, Florida Supreme Court; Luis Ernesto Derbez, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mexico; Renee Fleming, soprano; Gish Jen, Writer; Dolores Kendrick, Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia; Daniel Libeskind, Architect; Aneesh Raman, CNN Baghdad Correspondent; Robert Shaye, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, New Line Cinema; Ruth Simmons, President, Brown University; Javier Solana, Foreign Policy Chief, European Union; and Muhammed Yunus, Managing Director and Founder of the Grameen Bank.
Fulbright recipients are among over 30,000 individuals participating in U.S. Department of State exchange programs each year. For more than forty years, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs has supported programs that seek to promote mutual understanding and respect between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The Fulbright Scholar Program is administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars.
For further information about the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, please visit our website at http://exchanges.state.gov or contact Heidi Manley, Office of Academic Exchange Programs, telephone 202-453-8534, or e-mail academic@state.gov.