Several NDSU faculty members were among the 1,250 educators and professionals who received Fulbright Scholar or Specialist awards to teach or conduct research abroad this academic year. Robert Hearne, associate professor of agribusiness and applied economics, has a nine-month stay in Thailand that began in August. Mark Meister, associate professor of communication, spent two weeks in September and October teaching in Tbilisi, Georgia. Thomas Bon, senior lecturer in agriculture and biosystems engineering, will spend about six months teaching courses in Uzbekistan.

Hearne

Robert Hearne's Fulbright proposal is titled, "Strengthening Environmental Economics and Assessing Environmental Services Payments in Thailand." He left in August for Kasetsart University in Bangkok. "I am very excited," said Hearne, who lectures and conducts research on environmental services payments and protected area management. "Kasetsart University is the leading agricultural university in Thailand."

Before joining NDSU in 2002, Hearne conducted research on protected area management and eco-tourism in Central America at the Tropical Agriculture Research and Higher Education Institute in Turrialba, Costa Rica. "This Fulbright is an opportunity to return to that research line," Hearne said.

In addition, Hearne is teaching a class in environmental economics and policy at the National Center of Excellence for Environmental and Hazardous Waste Management at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. "We will be promoting and fostering a collaborative degree program and research effort between NDSU's environmental and conservation sciences program and this institute in Thailand," he said.

Hearne earned his bachelor's degree at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.; master's degree in agricultural economics at the University of Kentucky, Lexington; and doctorate in agricultural and applied economics at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul.

Meister

Mark Meister spent his time in at the Tbilisi State University's Georgian Institute for Public Affairs teaching a two-week course on rhetoric and public leadership. A former graduate student, a well-respected Georgian journalist who attended NDSU under the Muskie Fellowship program in 2004, sponsored his visit.

Meister taught a class titled Rhetorical Leadership for Emerging Democracies to a group of 25 upper-level students for three hours each night during his stay. He found the students bright, well read and passionate about learning, but behind on their classic rhetorical theory.

"My students only seem to understand persuasion in its manipulative and propaganda vein - a result of their continued bitter resentment toward former Soviet rule," Meister wrote in his journal. He advises those not teaching science and math in Tbilisi to go slow and have patience. "My students have never experienced a humanities-based communication course like the one I'm teaching. Yet, they are so smart. They ask great questions and they are so respectful."

Meister earned his bachelor's degree in speech communication and environmental studies at Carroll College in Helena, Mont., his master's degree in speech communication at NDSU and his doctorate in communication studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Bon

Thomas Bon will be teaching courses in instrumentation and software at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Melioration, Uzbekistan. He will also teach a course in fluid power hydraulics at Tashkent State Agrarian University. Bon has taught a few short courses in Uzbekistan over the past two years, but this is his first time through the Fulbright program.

"I enjoy the people I've met and had a short class with," he said. "It's an extremely different place than here in some respects. It has quite a bit of agriculture, but it's a desert country, so there's lots of irrigated agriculture."

Bon hopes to gain a broader perspective on education and working with diverse and foreign students. Uzbekistan is looking at transitioning from a soviet-style education system to a more western, American model.

Bon earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in agriculture engineering from NDSU, and his doctorate in engineering from NDSU.

This year, approximately 1,250 U.S. faculty and professionals received Fulbright Scholar or Specialist awards to teach or conduct research abroad. A similar number of foreign scholars received Fulbright grants to visit the United States. Hearne, Meister and Bon join more than 50,000 distinguished alumni who have earned a Fulbright grant since the program's inception.

The Council for International Exchange of Scholars has assisted the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board in administering the Fulbright Program since 1947.