2026-27 Fulbright Scholar Award Recipients Announced

Four Twin Cities campus faculty have been awarded 2026-27 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Awards to teach or conduct research in partnership with institutions abroad.

2026-27 Recipients

Edgar Arriaga, Department of Chemistry — Finland

Dr. Arriaga will promote cultural and academic exchanges between the U.S. and Finland, participate in teaching and education while visiting Aalto University, and explore the use of cellulose-based structures to prepare 3D cell cultures to investigate why humans age.

Kirsten Fischer, Department of History — Poland

Dr. Fischer will be visiting Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, where she will teach a course in the American Studies Program called "History through Memoir."  The course will use personal life stories as a lens onto American society in the last half century. Students will become critical readers of the genre, and they will experiment with writing their own short pieces of memoir. She also received a North America Visiting Fellowship Program from the University of Helsinki for the fall semester, where she will collaborate with a Latin Americanist on a comparative project called "Sites of Reckoning: Memorial Tourism in Central America, the US, and Europe."  

Sven-Ulrik Gorr, School of Dentistry — Spain

Professor Gorr will be working in Barcelona, Spain, in collaboration with Conrado Aparicio, PhD, MScEng, at the Universitat Politecnica Catalunya. They hope to combine Gorr’s research on new antibiotics that can kill drug-resistant bacteria with surface coating technologies developed by Aparicio, with the hope of finding ways to prevent the formation of biofilm on medical devices. Read more about his Fulbright plans.

Katsumi Matsumoto, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences — Germany

Dr. Matsumoto will spend part of the 2026-27 academic year in Germany advancing research on the global ocean carbon cycle. He will be at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany, where he will collaborate with senior scientists specializing in the Transport Matrix Method, a unique mathematical framework in oceanography. Read more about his Fulbright plans.

The GPS Alliance is the University of Minnesota campus representative for the Fulbright Scholar programs for faculty and professionals.