Steve Stephenson, University of Arkansas
(Photo: Submitted)
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — University
of Arkansas Professor Steve Stephenson has been selected for a Fulbright
Specialist Award at Hanoi National University of Education in Vietnam.
Stephenson
is a research professor in the department of biological sciences in the J.
William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, and is regarded as one of the
world’s leading authorities on a group of organisms known as myxomycetes, also
known as slime molds.
He will
travel to Hanoi National University of Education next March, and over the
course of two weeks Stephenson will present a series of seminars and workshops
to graduate and undergraduate students on subjects ranging from biodiversity,
global climate change and conservation to forest ecology and mycology.
In addition,
he will consult with administrators and faculty to evaluate the academic
curriculum in environmental sciences at Hanoi National University of Education,
meet with individual faculty members to discuss their research, and conduct a
workshop on scientific writing. He will also discuss possible collaborative
research opportunities that might be established between faculty and students
in Vietnam and their counterparts at the University of Arkansas.
Stephenson is
one of more than 400 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad this
year through the Fulbright Specialist Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department
of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the J. William
Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
The
Fulbright Specialist Program, created in 2000 to complement the traditional
Fulbright Scholar Program, provides short-term academic opportunities to
prominent U.S. faculty and professionals to support curricular and faculty
development and institutional planning at post-secondary, academic institutions
around the world.
This is
Stephenson’s second Fulbright award. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at
Himachal Pradesh University in India in 1987. Over his academic career he has
hosted five Fulbright Scholars from other abroad. Stephenson came at the university
in 2003 after 27 years at Fairmont State University in West Virginia.
His program
of research, which has been supported by a series of grants from the National
Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society, has taken him to all
seven continents and every major type of terrestrial ecosystem. Stephenson is
the author or coauthor of seven books and more than 300 book chapters and
papers published in peer-reviewed journals.
He will be
accompanied to Vietnam by his wife Barbara, who is an instructor in the department
of mathematical sciences at the University of Arkansas.