Global Scholar Award

Dr. Yaroslava Babenchuk is leading a multi-faceted career combining her work as a higher education administrator at Suffolk County Community College with active engagement in Performing Arts management research and practice globally.
 
In recent years, Yaroslava’s research/project work focused on developing new approaches to planning the design and construction of new Performing Arts facilities. As audiences change, technologies penetrate the art form and everyday life, and cities around the world focus more and more on developing spaces for their communities to engage, create, and be together there appeared a need to think in a more complex way about what the future Performing Arts facilities will be like. In an effort to address this question, Yaroslava over the last 4 years engaged into multiple conversations about the future of Performing Arts spaces with leading architecture firms (Zaha Hadid Architects, Foster + Partners, Diamond Schmitt, Henning Larsen Architects, to name a few), operators of recently designed and constructed Performing Arts facilities (HARPA (Iceland), Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Forum of Music (Poland), and more), organizations that provide various support and services to Performing Arts organizations (Arup, ISPA, Therme Art). Babenchuk will utilize the Fulbright Global Scholar award to continue and advance her work on this topic in Romania and Singapore.

Previosly, Dr.Babenchuk produced live shows internationally, worked for major Performing Arts festivals around the world (Golden Lion Festival (Ukraine), Avignon Festival (France), “Baltic House” International Theatre Festival (Russia), Sibiu International Theatre Festival (Romania)), led special projects at the International Renaissance Foundation (Ukraine) etc.

Betül Başaran is Professor of Religious Studies and Coordinator of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Her primary area of expertise is the social, economic and legal history of the Ottoman Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries. She is the author of Selim III, social control and policing in Istanbul at the end of the eighteenth century: between crisis and order (Brill, 2014) and has published a number of book chapters on the artisans and urban dynamics of Istanbul. Her Fulbright research is about the life and work of Princess Niloufer who belonged to the Ottoman dynasty and was condemned to life-long exile at the age of six after the collapse of the empire following World War I. Her life is a fascinating story of exile from Turkey to the French Riviera, followed by royal glamor in India as the daughter-in-law of Hyderabad’s last independent ruler, where she evolved from foreign bride into a cultural ambassador dedicated to women’s empowerment. Her transnational and cross-cultural journey presents a unique perspective to investigate the intertwined themes of international politics, religion, royalty, and Muslim women’s agency during a turbulent period of major social and political transformations. For the project, Betül will conduct research in the UK and in India.

Dr. Matthew S. Bramble is a former NIH Fogarty Global Health Fellow, where he was based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a Staff Scientist in the Dept. of Genetic Medicine Research at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington D.C. Dr. Bramble earned a Ph.D. in Human Genetics from UCLA, where he was mentored by Eric Vilain, M.D, Ph.D. His background has predominately focused on genetic and epigenetic mechanism underlying sex differences in the mammalian brain, as well as genetic influences contributing to Differences of Sex Development (DSD). Lately, Dr. Bramble has spent most of his research efforts building genetic capacity within the DRC to expand user-friendly genetic diagnostic tools as well as techniques involved in basic molecular biology/genetics.  He plans to continue this line of work during his time in both South Africa and the Philippines during his Fulbright award period. In addition to building genetic capacity and collaborations in the DRC, he has also focused heavily on infectious disease research, as well as projects dealing with the mechanistic understanding of cassava induced neurotoxicity (Konzo).

Nikki Dryden is a former Olympic swimmer, Commonwealth & Pan Am medalist and Olympic journalist. Today she is a human-rights and immigration attorney. Nikki is the Founder of Athlete Activist and Lex Athletica, on the Editorial Board of LawInSport and is also an athlete activist on campaigns for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Nikki is an independent scholar who regularly writes, speaks and advises on the legal issues at the nexus of sport and human rights, including athlete rights, gender discrimination, sex abuse and corruption in sporting organizations. She has a BA in International Relations from Brown University and a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School and is being hosted for her Fulbright Global Research Scholarship at Sport Resolutions UK and the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada. Nikki will use her Fulbright to analyze how these two institutions are protecting athletes’ rights in the sport dispute system and how their best practices can be used to create a global model sport dispute resolution process that can be effectively used to address athlete human rights issues in sport.

Home Institution: University of Nevada, Reno
 Host Countries: Mexico, Philippines
 Discipline: Literature
 Project Title: Dreaming Aloud: Reflections on Migrant Childhood
Since 9/11, U.S. self-narrating practices of undocumented subjects have changed profoundly. The research and writing of this Fulbright project will lead to the completion of two book chapters on activist autobiographies linked to the yet nascent DREAMer movement by Chicanx authors Reyna Grande and Alberto Ledesma, as well as Filipino American Jose Antonio Vargas. In Tijuana, I will collaborate with philosopher Sayak Valencia from el Colegio de la Frontera Norte to organize a virtual roundtable on “Decolonial Feminisms in the Time of Corona.” In Quezon City, I will partner with the University of the Philippines Film Institute to consider cinematic undocuqueerness.

Mary E. Gallagher is the Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights Professor at the University of Michigan where she is also the director of the International Institute. She was the director of the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies from 2008-2020. Professor Gallagher received her Ph.D. in politics in 2001 from Princeton University and her B.A. from Smith College in 1991.  Her research focuses on Chinese politics, US-China Relations, and Chinese state-society relations, especially labor politics and labor law.
 
Dr. Gallagher’s most recent book is Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers and the State, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. She is also the author or editor of several other books, including Contagious Capitalism:  Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton 2005), Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China (Cambridge 2011), From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization:  Markets, Workers, and the State in a Changing China (Cornell 2011), and Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies (Cambridge 2010). In addition to her academic research, Dr. Gallagher has consulted with governments, international organizations, and corporations on China’s domestic politics, labor and workplace conditions, and urbanization policies.
 
Dr. Gallagher was a foreign student in China in the fall of 1989 at Nanjing University at the Duke-in-China Program. She taught at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing from 1996-1997 as a member of the Princeton-in-Asia program.  In 2003-2004, she was a Fulbright Research Scholar at East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai, China. In 2012-2013, she was a visiting professor at the Koguan School of Law at Shanghai Jiaotong University. In 2021-23, Dr. Gallagher will be a Fulbright Global Scholar on a new research project that examines how economic engagement with China has affected domestic public opinion toward globalization. This project involves research in the United States, Germany, South Korea, and Japan.

Diana Garvin
University of Oregon  
Italy and Brazil
Transnational Italian Studies
Brazilian Beans and Italian Machines: A Global Tale of Caffé Culture
 
“Brazilian Beans and Italian Machines” investigates the history of coffee culture across metropole, work site, and colony during the Fascist ventennio (1922-1945).  The project will analyze seasonal agricultural practices within a larger framework for botanical colonization to show how totalitarian politics impacted people, as well as the coffee trees they tended.  Coffee provides a novel framework of to connect interwar histories of Italy, Brazil, and East Africa that have previously been explored independently.  By untangling the interwar trade of beans and bodies across different world regions, this project brings to light an untold story of imperial aggression and caffeinated resistance.  

Sarah Gendron is Associate Professor of French and Cultural Studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee Wisconsin. Gendron is the author of Reading Repetition in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze (Peter Lang, 2008) and The Co-Opting of Education by Extremist Factions: Professing Hate (Routledge, 2020), two literary translations, and numerous scholarly focusing on cultural propaganda, genocide, and gender studies. Gendron is currently writing a book on gender-based violence in conflict settings. Titled Sub silentio, the book traces manifestations of sexual violence at the hands of security forces, the evolution of legal language proscribing sexual assault, and subsequent prosecution (or lack thereof). During the tenure of the fellowship, Gendron will conduct the on-site research for three case studies: the sexual assault during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, U.K, sexual violence within the military in the Irish Republic, and sexual abuse by the police in India.

Julia Haggerty is Associate Professor of Geography in the Department of Earth Sciences at Montana State University, where she holds a joint appointment in the Montana Institute on Ecosystems. Haggerty teaches courses in human, economic and energy resource geography at MSU. She also leads the Resources & Communities Research Group in studying the ways rural communities respond to shifting economic and policy trajectories, especially as they involve natural resources. As a Fulbright Global Scholar, Haggerty will conduct a comparative analysis of rural land inequality politics and land market interventions in the United Kingdom (Scotland), New Zealand and Australia.

Roselyn Hsueh is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, where she codirects the Certificate in Political Economy. Her next book, How Nations Globalize: Sectoral Pathways to Development in China, India, and Russia, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. She is the author of China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2011), and scholarly articles and book chapters. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and other media outlets have featured her research. She has testified in Congress in front of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and consulted for The Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dr. Hsueh has served as a Global Order Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and Residential Research Faculty Fellow at U.C. Berkeley, and lectured as a Visiting Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. Prior to arriving at Temple, she held the Hayward R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern California and conducted international fieldwork in China, Japan, and Taiwan as a Fulbright Scholar and David L. Boren National Security Fellow. She earned her B.A. and doctorate in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

I currently live in Portland, Oregon and will be working in Belfast at Queen’s University and in Ecuador at ACLAS for my Fulbright award. The title of my project is Interculturality and Internationalization: Building local and global partnerships. My aim is to research how governmental policies that mandate inclusive practices and global engagement are being designed and implemented. This will involve building and strengthening local and global partnerships, designing inclusive curriculum, and building shared knowledge through collaboration.

Dr. Farida Jalalzai, Associate Dean for Global Initiatives and Engagement, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and Professor of Political Science.  Her research analyzes the role of gender in the political arena including women national leaders. Her books include: Shattered, Cracked and Firmly Intact: Women and the Executive Glass Ceiling Worldwide (Oxford University Press 2013) which offers a comprehensive analysis of women, gender, and national leadership positions; Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? (Routledge 2016), a comparative analysis of women presidents in Latin America and Senhora Presidenta: Women's Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil: The Rise and Fall of President Dilma Rousseff, which examines the first female president of Brazil (with Pedro dos Santos, forthcoming 2021 Temple University Press). She has published dozens of peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters related to gender and politics worldwide.

Alan Jay Kaufman is a Geobiologist at the University of Maryland who studies the co-evolution of life and environment.  Through field and laboratory studies of the stratigraphy, paleontology, and geochemistry of sedimentary rocks that accumulated across the most significant transitions in early Earth history, Kaufman's integrated research has shed light on:

• The Great Oxidation Event (when atmospheric oxygen rose dramatically some 2.3 billion years ago) and its biological consequences;
• The extremes of climatic and environmental change associated with episodic Snowball Earth ice ages at both ends of the Proterozoic Eon;
• The Ediacaran Period evolution of macroscopic life in the aftermath of the greatest recorded perturbation of the carbon cycle;
• And the Cambrian Explosion of Animals.  

Kaufman's research has carried him to far away places with strange sounding names, including Namibia, Siberia, and Australia where his Fulbright Global Scholar award will support his discovery of the earliest sea shells and their first appearance in the immediate aftermath of dramatic environmental changes in the world oceans over 570 million years ago.

Eric Kurlander, PhD, is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Modern European History at Stetson University. Kurlander earned his BA at Bowdoin College and his MA and PhD at Harvard University. He offers courses on Modern German, European, and World History and his current book project, which is the topic of his 2020-2021 Fulbright Global Scholar Award, is titled: Before the Final Solution: A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question”. Kurlander’s recent monograph, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (Yale, 2017; paperback 2018), offers the first comprehensive study of the supernatural in Nazi Germany, illustrating how the Third Reich drew upon a wide variety of occult practices, esoteric sciences and pagan religious ideas to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire. The book has been reviewed positively in the Washington Post, Times of London, and Der Spiegel, among many other periodicals, and has been translated into Italian, Polish, Czech, Croatian, and Estonian (with Chinese and Russian editions appearing next year). Kurlander has published four other books and edited volumes as well as articles in leading journals, including Central European History, German History, and The Journal of Contemporary History. He has held research and writing fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German Historical Institute; the German Academic Exchange Service; the Krupp Foundation; and Harvard University's Program for the Study of Germany and Europe. At Stetson, Kurlander has received the William Hugh McInery Award for Excellence in Teaching and has contributed to the university in numerous leadership roles. He has served as Chair of the History Department, Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department, Chair of the Professional Development Committee, Chair of the Arts & Sciences Tenure and Promotion Committee, and Chair of the Faculty Finance and Budget Committee as well as multiple terms on the Faculty Senate. In his free time, Kurlander enjoys parenting, reading, travel, sports, and popular culture.  
(https://www.stetson.edu/other/faculty/eric-kurlander.php)

Dr. Carleen Maitland is co-Director of the Institute for Information Policy and Associate Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University, USA. She is an international expert in humanitarian informatics and the of information and communication technologies (ICTs) fostering economic and social development. Working with humanitarian and UN agencies, her research examines technology use in organizational responses to crises, particularly forced migration. She can conducted field research in the U.S., Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. She serves on the Advisory Board for the UN University’s Institute for Computing and Society and holds leadership roles in related conference communities.

Option 1:
Ana Marjanovic-Shane is an Independent Scholar and a deputy editor-in-chief of Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal (http://dpj.pitt.edu). She graduated from the “Interdisciplinary studies of human development” program at the University of Pennsylvania, and has been interested in socio-cultural, Bakhtinian approaches to education as dialogic meaning-making, democracy in education, students’ academic freedoms and students’ critical and creative authorship. Contact: [email protected] or [email protected]

Option 2:
Ana Marjanovic-Shane is an Independent Scholar, Professor of Education, and a deputy editor-in-chief of Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal (http://dpj.pitt.edu). She received a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Her main professional interests and research are focused on the following issues: dialogic meaning making and creativity in human development and education, democratic and dialogic education from and for agency, play and it humanizing potentials in education, dialogic relationships in educational events, drama and art in education, teaching as conceptual art, etc. Her articles in English and Serbian were published in various journals (e.g. Mind, Culture, Activity Journal, Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, Dialogic Pedagogy Journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. Two of her recent publications are Marjanovic-Shane, A., Meacham, S., Choi, H. J., Lopez, S., & Matusov, E. (2019). Idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 20, 68-79, and Matusov, E., A. Marjanovic-Shane & M. Gradovski, (2019). Dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: Bakhtin by and for educators, Palgrave Macmillan. Ana lives and works in the USA.

Avi Meyerstein is the founder and president of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP). He has spent nearly the last 20 years working as a social and business entrepreneur, non-profit leader, and Washington, DC attorney.
 
In 2003, Avi brought together dozens of NGOs to join forces in a single umbrella coalition, creating ALLMEP. On behalf of the coalition, he then led a team of volunteer attorneys to develop proposals and advocacy strategies to significantly expand resources and scale up Israeli-Palestinian people-to-people activities. Their advocacy resulted in over $230 million in annual U.S. funding for P2P activities around the world.
 
Avi also proposed, launched, and has shepherded the initiative to create an international fund for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Those efforts most recently led to the passage by Congress of the Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act of 2020, which provides $250 million over 5 years for joint economic and people-to-people projects.
 
Avi has led ALLMEP through several stages of growth and organizational development, including spearheading its early communications, development, and public policy strategies and hiring and working with its professional leadership. He continues to lead ALLMEP's board as its president.
 
He lives outside Washington, DC with his wife, Dana, and three daughters.

Dr. Jennifer Powers is a Professor in the Departments of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior and Plant Biology & Microbial Biology at the University of Minnesota.  She received her PhD in Biology from Duke University in 2001 and then completed postdoctoral studies at the State University of New York- Stony Brook and the University of Minnesota.  Her research program focuses on understanding how land-use and climate change affect biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem processes and forest dynamics in tropical landscapes.  Much of her work over the past twenty years has centered on seasonally dry tropical forests, which have received less attention but are more threatened than tropical rain forests.  Together with her students and network of collaborators, they have investigated these questions from hierarchical scales—from the microbe to the biome, using a diverse toolkit that includes long-term observations, large-scale manipulative field experiments and simulation modeling. The objective of Fulbright work is to lay the foundations for a synthetic book on the ecology of seasonally dry tropical forests by visiting colleagues and collaborators in Australia, Brazil, and Cambodia.

I have been a language educator for over a quarter of a century in three different countries. In my native country, Italy, I taught French and English; in Britain, I taught French and Italian, and currently I am teaching Italian at the Lycée Français de New York. I obtained a PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, specializing in the acquisition of a second language during childhood. I am the author of Child Second Language Acquisition, published in Amsterdam by John Benjamins in 2007. I have collaborated with language teacher education programs nationally and internationally. I founded MOBILLE (Mobile Language Learning Experience) International Conference. I am profoundly honored to be a Fulbright Global Scholar. I will be working with language educators in Japan, Kazakhstan, and Uruguay, exploring how technology has affected their practices and identities, collaborating on researching technology enhanced learning and teaching in their classrooms, and ultimately encouraging them to verbalize their research at professional forums. I am looking forward to experiencing the language and culture of these countries, as well as building long-lasting fruitful collaborations.

Lucy HG Solomon is an associate professor in CSUSM’s department of Art, Media, and Design who works at the intersection of art and science. In her Global Fulbright project, A Pan-Microbiological Portrait of the Arctic, the Andes, and the Amazon, she will look at the specific microbiology of distant terrains to tell a visual story that connects them all. An artist who often collaborates with scientists, she looks forward to working with collaborating biologists and artists to tell a macro story about micro-connections—a story that now has more layers because of the pandemic. The co-founder of two art collectives, The League of Imaginary Scientists and Cesar & Lois, Lucy has exhibited along with her collectives in museums and cultural spaces around the globe. Cesar & Lois won the 2018 Lumen Prize in Artificial Intelligence for Degenerative Cultures, an artwork that crosses biological and human systems and proposes AI based on the logic of microbiological organisms. Their work was selected for Singapore’s Global Digital Art Prize Biennial in 2019 and as part of Edital CoMciência, an exhibition of international artists who integrate art, science and technology, at MM Gerdau in Brazil. Collaborators and partners for Lucy’s Global Fulbright project include microbiologist Lise Øvreås (University Centre in Svalbard, Norway); artist Kristin Bergaust (Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway); artist Cesar Baio (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil); biologists César Arana and Letty Salinas (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru). 

Originally from the Chicago area, Aimee moved west when she was 19 to work as a wildlife technician in Yellowstone National Park. There, she discovered a passion for both wildlife and ecosystem interactions. She stayed in Yellowstone for over 10 years researching and managing wolves, bears, and bison before returning to graduate school. Aimee received a Ph.D. in Wildlife Ecology from Utah State University, where her research focused on wolf-bison interactions in Yellowstone, and wolf-brown bear interactions in North America and Scandinavia. She is currently working on numerous research and science communication projects with several universities and non-profits across multiple countries. Aimee’s research generally focuses on large carnivores, predator-prey interactions, animal behavior, and socio-economic ecosystems. However, her true passion lies in making science accessible to the general public, especially children, and has involved in a variety of broader impact projects. Her Fulbright Fellowship, Foraging in a Landscape of Risk: The Predatory Behavior of Large Carnivores, seeks to understand how the behavior of large cats at and around their kill sites is affected by humans.

Sharon Tennyson is Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. She holds a PhD in economics from Northwestern University, and her primary research focus is on consumer behaviors and consumer wellbeing in insurance markets. Dr. Tennyson’s Fulbright research on “Disaster Risk Financing and Disaster Resilience in the Caribbean” studies the effects and limitations of disaster insurance programs in promoting disaster resilience, and seeks to identify potential governance, regulatory and educational avenues for improving disaster insurance and disaster resilience for vulnerable populations in the region. The work is in partnership with University of West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, and the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII) hosted by United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, Germany.

Professor Thusi is an Associate Professor of Law at Delaware Law School. Her research examines racial and sexual hierarchies as they relate to policing, race, and gender. Her articles and essays have been published or are forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, NYU Law Review, Northwestern Law Review (twice), Georgetown Law Journal, Cornell Law Review Online, and Utah Law Review.

Thusi’s research is inextricably connected to her previous legal experience at organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and—most recently—The Opportunity Agenda, a social justice communication lab that collaborates to effect lasting policy and culture change. She served as a federal law clerk to two social justice giants: the Honorable Robert L. Carter, who sat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and was the lead counsel for the NAACP in Brown v. Board of Education; and the Honorable Damon J. Keith, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and is lauded for his prominent civil rights jurisprudence. She also clerked for Justice van der Westhuizen at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the country’s highest court.
 
Among other acknowledgements throughout her career, Thusi was selected as a Fulbright U.S. Global Scholar for 2020-2022. Her paper “Reality Porn” was selected for the 2020 Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, and she was recognized as a Top 40 Rising Young Lawyer by the American Bar Association in 2019. Thusi has received a W.E.B. Dubois Fellowship at Harvard University, the Andrew W. Mellon Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, and was named a Next Generation African Scholar by the Social Science Research Council. She recently drafted a discussion guide for the "American Son" play, starring Kerry Washington, which was featured on the Tonight Show and provides guidance for talking about race and policing; and her criminal justice policy report Transforming the System was recognized as a must-read about policing by the Obama Foundation.

Dr. YuYe J. Tong is a professor of chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and director of the Environmental Metrology & Policy Program at Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA. He obtained his BS and MS in nuclear physics from Fudan University, Shanghai China and PhD in experimental condensed matter physics from l’École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. His research focuses primarily on fundamental electrocatalysis of anode or cathode reactions related to clean-energy-generating fuel cells and methane and carbon dioxide electro-conversion to value-adding chemicals. While the list of his interests beyond professional activities can be long, on top of it are down-hill skiing, traveling and fishing.

Asim Zia's research, teaching and outreach activities focus on advancing the sustainability and resilience of integrated socio-environmental systems. He has led NSF, USDA and McArthur foundation funded Team Science projects aimed at developing computational models of Social Ecological Systems, Complex Adaptive Systems and Coupled Natural and Human Systems. Foresight generated from these computational models is used widely to enable early warnings of systemic risks, design early actions and anticipatory policies, configure governance systems and implement adaptive management. Asim Zia is serving as a Professor of Public Policy and Computer Science in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Vermont (UVM). He is Director of the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security (IEDS) and a founding Co-Director of the Social Ecological Gaming and Simulation (SEGS) lab at the UVM. He has recently served a 3-year term on scientific review committee of the national socio-environmental synthesis center (SESYNC), acting as an academic editor for PLOS One since 2014, and serving a 3-year term as co-editor-in-chief of Complexity, Governance and Networks . He has a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology; recipient of 2004-2005 best dissertation award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, a post-doctoral fellowship from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (2004-2006), and serving as a senior research fellow with the Earth System Governance project. He was recently appointed as a Fulbright Global Scholar to lead a project on “Securing Clean Water in Transboundary Indus, Jordan and Amazon Basins through Science and Environmental Diplomacy.”