Noelia Veras (from left), Madi VanWyngarden, and Erin Sullenberger all received Fulbright grants. Photos courtesy of Veras, VanWyngarden, and Sullenberger.

Awards

Meet BU’s Newest Fulbright Recipients

From studying astrophysics in Toronto to teaching English in Germany and making films in the Dominican Republic, Terriers are pursuing numerous projects

As last year’s Fulbright recipients return home and a new class of recipients starts packing their bags for journeys abroad, Boston University’s strong connection to the Fulbright program continues. For the fifth consecutive year, BU has been named a Fulbright “top producer.” In the 2024-2025 cycle, 13 BU students received grants. So far, 10 students have been named Fulbright grantees for 2025-2026, with results still trickling in, according to Jeffrey Berg, director of national and international scholarships in BU’s Office of the Provost.

As the US government’s flagship international educational exchange initiative, the Fulbright US Student Program provides grants for individual research, arts projects, graduate degree programs, and English teaching. Recipients are selected on the basis of their academic merit and leadership potential.

Take Madi VanWyngarden, who just spent the past nine months at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto working on a puzzle of epic proportions.

Since astronomers first discovered nearly a century ago that the universe was expanding, they have tried to accurately measure the rate of that expansion. Different measurement techniques yield different results, however, which has baffled scientists. This discrepancy is known as the “Hubble tension.”

VanWyngarden (CAS’24) focused her research on gravitational waves—ripples in space-time created by the collision of neutron stars or black holes. These waves, she says, offer a promising new method for gauging the universe’s expansion rate. VanWyngarden was part of a research team using simulated data to explore whether gravitational wave detections over the next decade could be a more consistent way to measure the expansion rate.

“I am now starting a PhD program [at the University of Texas at Austin] much more confident in my abilities as a researcher and with new skills and collaborations,” VanWyngarden says. “I couldn’t be happier.”

Berg says the Fulbright program is one of the country’s most celebrated honors. Since its founding in 1946, it has produced 42 heads of state or government, 62 Nobel Prize recipients, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 80 MacArthur Fellows.

“What makes Fulbright so unique is that it is not simply a research grant or a graduate school scholarship or an English teaching placement program, though it supports all of those opportunities,” he says. The program “looks for candidates who are excited to share US life and culture with people abroad. And at the same time, in Fulbright’s spirit of exchange, grantees must also be genuinely interested in learning about the diversity of their host communities.”

At BU, Fulbright recipients come from across the University—from the College of Fine Arts to the Pardee School of Global Studies to the College of Communication—and they’ve traveled to countries ranging from Poland to Brazil to the Dominican Republic.

Newly minted Fulbrights

Erin Sullenberger (COM’25, CAS’25, Pardee’25) will spend the next academic year teaching English in Saxony, Germany, starting in September. After eight years of studying German, she’s eager to apply her language skills in an immersive setting. She will assist in English language classrooms and share American culture through events and discussions.

Sullenberger also looks forward to the travel opportunities the Fulbright affords. “Fulbright Germany encourages [us] to work three or four days a week, allowing us extended weekends to explore different cities and neighboring countries,” she says. She’s particularly excited to celebrate the various German holiday traditions, including Oktoberfest in Munich and Karneval in Cologne.

A former varsity soccer player at BU, Sullenberger hopes to join pickup groups or teams to build friendships and foster cultural exchange, a major theme of the Fulbright program. She is also eager to connect with refugee communities in her area. “My studies, professional experiences, and friendships have always revolved around migration,” she says, “so I would love to continue learning about migrant welfare and integration strategies in Germany.”

Noelia Veras received a Fulbright Open Study/Research grant to work on a script and media project she’s envisioned. Since October, she has been living in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She is now researching and writing a film script and media project on domestic violence and femicide in that country.

“I knew it was the kind of story I needed to be in the Dominican Republic to be able to write because I needed to do research and talk to experts to be able to develop the idea and make it true to life,” Veras (COM’24) says. Alongside her script, she’s developing an audiovisual journalistic report in English and Spanish to help American audiences empathize with Dominican women who have experienced domestic violence. She continues to interview survivors, experts, and officials.

Veras credits BU’s Office of Fellowships & Scholarships for their help during the application process. “I’m the kind of person who always has a question, and [Berg] was very patient with me and provided me with so much information, I never felt out of the loop or lost in the process of applying,” she says.

Fulbright in flux

In March 2025, the US State Department paused all federal grant disbursements for 15 days, affecting programs that included the Fulbright Program, Gilman Scholarship, and Critical Language Scholarship and temporarily disrupting funding for thousands of scholars.

On June 11, the entire 12-member Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board resigned, citing political interference by the Trump administration. They alleged that almost 200 Fulbright awards to American professors and researchers were canceled and over 1,200 applications from other countries were subjected to unauthorized reviews, violating the program’s founding principles of academic freedom and free speech. The board is also concerned that the federal budget for the next fiscal year cuts spending for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (which includes the Fulbright Program) from $691 million this fiscal year to $50 million next year.

These developments have prompted calls for congressional oversight and advocacy and have raised concerns about the future of the Fulbright Program. Regardless, Berg says, his office will continue to closely monitor federal developments that could impact the Fulbright Program and that they still have all the resources in place to continue supporting BU applicants in the months ahead.

Students and recent alums interested in applying for a 2026-2027 Fulbright have until October 7 to complete the national application, but BU’s internal deadline is August 11. Applicants must be US citizens.

Berg and his team work closely with BU applicants, guiding them through every step of the application process—from answering questions to crafting application essays. Each applicant is paired with a member of BU’s Fulbright Campus Committee, a group of nearly two dozen BU faculty members who are also Fulbright Scholars and who “know and appreciate the Fulbright mission” and serve as another point of contact for BU’s applicants, he says.

“Fulbright has always been a program of soft diplomacy and international relationship-building,” Berg says. “Fulbrighters, through their collective diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, can best present to the world what truly makes America great at a time when we really need that positive representation globally… Its mission to foster mutual understanding and peace between nations feels as pressing today as ever. ”

Interested in applying for a 2026-2027 Fulbright fellowship? BU’s internal application deadline is August 11; find information on how to apply here.