Eight 91爆料 researchers have been selected as Fulbright Scholars for 2026-2027 and will pursue studies around the world.听

Fulbright Scholars are college and university faculty, administrators and researchers, as well as artists and professionals, who build their skills and connections, gain valuable international insights and return home to share their experiences with their students and colleagues.

This year鈥檚 91爆料 cohort represents a variety of disciplines, including sciences, engineering, business, environmental sciences, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science. The scholars will conduct research across the globe, including in Australia, India, Indonesia, Western Europe, Scandinavia and East Asia.

Two-thirds of this year鈥檚 91爆料 applicants were selected as Fulbright Scholars 鈥� an astonishing acceptance rate in the prestigious and highly selective program.

鈥淲e are incredibly proud of these outstanding 91爆料 faculty and staff whose selection as Fulbright Scholars reflects the excellence, innovation and global impact of their work,鈥� said 91爆料 Vice Provost for Global Affairs Ahmad M. Ezzeddine. 鈥淭he knowledge, partnerships and cultural understanding they gain through these experiences will enrich the 91爆料 and strengthen our shared commitment to addressing global challenges through collaboration and discovery. As the Fulbright Program celebrates its 80th anniversary, we are grateful for the U.S. Department of State鈥檚 continued investment in this transformative program.鈥澨�

The Fulbright Scholar Program for academics and professionals supports more than 800 people to teach and conduct research abroad.听

This year鈥檚 91爆料 Fulbright Scholars are:

is a professor in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts & Sciences. His research focuses on how mutually beneficial interactions between species 鈥� such as how insects pollinating plants is beneficial to both 鈥� scale into networks involving multiple species, and how the structure of those networks affects ecosystems. For example, some ecological network structures, or how connections between species are arranged, make these networks more resilient to perturbations, such as droughts or climate change.

Brosi’s Fulbright Scholar award will be through Spain’s flagship public research institution, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cient铆ficas, at the Do帽ana Biological Station in Seville. His work there will involve synthesizing and analyzing two comprehensive long-term datasets 鈥� one from his lab and one from his Spanish host lab 鈥� to better understand global patterns in pollination networks. In particular, scientists have recorded species that appear to be 鈥渟pecialists鈥� 鈥� such as a bee species that has only been recorded visiting one plant species听 鈥� in many ecological networks, but, without long-term data, it鈥檚 difficult to disentangle whether they are really specialists or just rare. Brosi will tackle this problem in collaboration with his Fulbright host, Ignasi Bartomeus, at Do帽ana.听听

is the director of academic services in the Department of Bioengineering in the College of Engineering and 91爆料 Medicine. She supports the department鈥檚 doctoral students with a focus on improving the research experience, expanding opportunities and advancing access and collaboration.听

While a Fulbright Scholar, she will develop a framework for a new doctoral biomedical research exchange between the 91爆料 and Tampere University in Finland. Combs will work with faculty, students and staff at both universities to lead the development of a preliminary structure of a doctoral research exchange, including eligibility criteria, mentorship plans and evaluation metrics. She will also explore funding sources for the program鈥檚 ongoing sustainability and draft a memorandum of understanding for the institutions to consider.

, an assistant professor of management and organization and the Helen Moore Gerhardt Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship in the Foster School of Business. Her areas of expertise include entrepreneurship, organizational growth and scaling, technology and innovation strategy, and venture capital. DeSantola teaches entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial strategy to undergraduates, master鈥檚 and doctoral students. She was named a Poets & Quants top 50 undergraduate business professor in 2021.听

DeSantola will use her Fulbright award, during which she will be a visiting U.S. Scholar to University College Cork in Ireland, to study factors influencing innovation and entrepreneurship in novel food technologies. The project connects to a broader stream of DeSantola鈥檚 research exploring the emergence and evolution of new technology-based industries.

is听 an interdisciplinary scientist in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs in the College of the Environment. Her work focuses on how coastal communities adapt to climate change and other environmental and socioeconomic stressors, particularly within fisheries and aquaculture systems. During the past 15 years, she has worked with coastal populations, including Indigenous harvesters, to support food sovereignty and long-term approaches to adaptation and resilience.

Greene鈥檚 Fulbright award is to advance the inclusion of听 fish and other aquatic foods 鈥斕� 鈥淏lue Foods鈥� 鈥� into Indonesia鈥檚 National School Lunch Program. The goal of this project is to improve nutritional outcomes for school-aged children while strengthening local food systems. Through working directly with fishers and fish suppliers, Green will work with the project team to identify the conditions necessary to provide Blue Foods that promote positive nutritional outcomes for children, support local fishers and sustain local ecosystems. This project is a pilot program for the initiative that will hopefully be expanded nationally.

is an associate professor in the Information School and also is part of the Responsibility in AI Systems and Experiences (RAISE) Center. An interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in human-centered AI, Mitra’s work draws on human-computer interaction, machine learning, natural language processing and social science to understand how people and AI interact in large-scale online systems. Her research examines the societal impacts of generative AI and develops methods to make AI systems more trustworthy, culturally aware and beneficial for diverse communities.

She will use her Fulbright award in India, where she will collaborate with researchers at the Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data Science (C-MInDS) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Bombay) 鈥� the nation鈥檚 topmost and most selective public research institution. She will investigate the risks and capabilities of generative AI systems across socio-cultural contexts most relevant to the Global South. The work aims to advance more culturally aware and responsible AI while strengthening research partnerships between the United States and India.

is an associate professor in the School of Oceanography in the College of the Environment. Morris鈥� research uses cultivation and whole-genome DNA sequencing to identify the roles of bacteria in global nutrient cycles. With a focus on carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, he has conducted studies that show the effects of low dissolved oxygen on the nutrient cycling activities of the ocean’s most abundant organisms.听

During his time at in South Korea, Morris will pursue a project entitled, 鈥淗igh-throughput cultivation-based genomics of freshwater Chloroflexota.鈥� A key goal is to advance understanding of the evolution of this important group of bacteria and its potential to mediate key nutrient transformations.

is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Department of Bioengineering in the College of Engineering. She leads a neural engineering lab focused on motor brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. Her work combines experiments with computational methods to develop new ways to build BCIs that interact with plasticity in the brain.

During her stay at the Champalimaud Institute Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology in Portugal, she will collaborate with two researchers, Dr. Juan 脕lvaro Gallego and Dr. John Krakauer. The new projects aim to improve our understanding of how plasticity shapes brain dynamics and apply new BCI algorithms for stroke rehabilitation.听听

is a professor in the Information School and an adjunct professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering in the College of Engineering. He is the founding director of the InfoSeeking Lab and founding co-director of RAISE, the Center for Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences. His research focuses on agentic AI, human-centered information seeking and responsible AI, examining how intelligent systems can act on people’s behalf while remaining transparent, trustworthy and accountable. He is also the founder and CEO of VersarAI, a startup translating his research on AI agents into enterprise applications. His book, 鈥淎gent Nation,鈥� was published this year.听

Shah will use his Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, to study how agentic AI can responsibly power entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems. Working with RMIT researchers and Australia’s startup community, he will investigate what he calls the Delegation Paradox: the tension between the efficiency gained by delegating tasks to AI agents and the oversight, trust and accountability that delegation demands. The work aims to produce frameworks that help founders, enterprises and policymakers adopt AI agents in ways that drive innovation without sacrificing human agency.

Three 91爆料 faculty members have been awarded early-career fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The new Sloan Fellows, announced Feb. 18, are , the Clare Boothe Luce assistant professor of electrical & computer engineering and bioengineering, , an assistant professor of chemistry, and , an assistant professor of computer science in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.听

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, and including this year鈥檚 fellows, 131 faculty from 91爆料 have received a Sloan Research Fellowship, according to the Sloan Foundation.听

Sloan Fellowships are open to scholars in seven scientific and technical fields 鈥� chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics 鈥� and honor early-career researchers whose achievements mark them among the next generation of scientific leaders.听

The 126鈥�鈥痺ere selected by researchers and faculty in the scientific community. Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on each candidate鈥檚 research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. Each fellow will receive $75,000 to apply toward research endeavors.听

This year鈥檚 fellows come from 51 institutions across the United States and Canada.听

Orsborn鈥檚 research aims to understand how neurons in our brains work together to let us learn to move in many different ways. She uses engineering technologies like brain-computer interfaces to manipulate how neural activity relates to movement, which gives researchers new ways to link neural activity to computations related to how they believe the brain may perform. She also uses collaborations with theorists to build models that help researchers bridge from experimental data to computational principles.听

鈥淲e can quickly adapt our tennis skills to the pickleball court, but it also takes years to perfect a piano concerto,鈥� Orsborn said. 鈥淥ur flexibility likely comes from our brain’s ability to learn in many ways, but we don’t understand how neurons actually implement different learning computations. I hope to build bridges between computational principles and biological implementation, which will ultimately help us build therapies to restore movements lost due to injuries like stroke.鈥�听

Xiao鈥檚 research program designs new porous materials to address unsolved challenges in clean energy and chemical sustainability. These include developing new porous adsorbents that can use renewable electricity to drive chemical processes, as well as new porous catalysts that can convert sustainable feedstocks into useful products.听

鈥淧orous materials are the bedrock of industrial heterogeneous catalysis and chemical separations. Many of the chemicals we use in our daily lives have, at some point, been purified or chemically transformed within nano-sized pores,鈥� Xiao said. 鈥淕oing forward, new breakthroughs in porous materials synthesis are needed to harness renewable energy sources and chemical feedstocks. With the support of this award, along with the collaborative ecosystem at the 91爆料, we hope to realize these synthetic breakthroughs faster, better and more cheaply.鈥�听

Zhang’s research reimagines the design of online social platforms to empower the public to take control of their online experiences. Inspired by offline public institutions and political theory, she creates novel social computing systems for collaborative governance of online communities and AI. She also develops tools for personal and collective customization on social media and approaches for encouraging pro-social public discourse.听

鈥淒igital platforms comprise socio-technical infrastructure that are crucial to the lives of millions, yet today they are governed and designed by a select few,鈥� Zhang said. 鈥淎s a result, many people do not see themselves represented in the decisions made and possible configurations supported by the major platforms they鈥痷se. But putting the onus on end users to figure it out themselves can be overwhelming. I develop toolkits and interactive techniques informed by user needs to scaffold the process of customization, enabling both flexibility and ease of use.鈥�听

Contact Orsborn at aorsborn@uw.edu; Xiao at djxiao@uw.edu; and Zhang at axz@cs.uw.edu. 听

Science is in the midst of a data deluge: Experiments are churning out more information than researchers can process. But a new endeavor, centered on artificial intelligence, will help scientists navigate this data-rich reality.

On Sept. 28, the National Science Foundation 听a $15 million, five-year grant to integrate AI tools into the scientific research and discovery process. The award will fund the Accelerated AI Algorithms for Data-Driven Discovery Institute 鈥� or A3D3 Institute 鈥� a partnership of nine universities, led by the 91爆料.

The A3D3 Institute aims to accelerate the discovery pipeline by providing scientists with new, paradigm-shifting AI tools for analyzing the types of large and complex datasets that are an increasingly common feature of research 鈥� from medical laboratories to particle colliders.

鈥淚 have been fortunate to work with an exceptional group of talented researchers, and am thrilled to continue to be a part of solving some of the most fundamental issues in science and engineering. The ultimate goal of A3D3 is to construct the institutional knowledge essential for real-time applications of AI in any scientific field,鈥� said , a 91爆料 associate professor of physics and director of the A3D3 Institute. 鈥淎3D3 will empower scientists with new tools to deal with the coming data deluge through dedicated outreach efforts.鈥�

The A3D3 Institute 鈥� part of the NSF鈥檚 Harnessing the Data Revolution program 鈥� is a collaboration among researchers at the 91爆料; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Duke University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; the California Institute of Technology; Purdue University; the University of California, San Diego; and the University of Wisconsin鈥揗adison.

In addition to Hsu, other 91爆料 faculty involved with the A3D3 Institute are , professor of electrical and computer engineering; , assistant professor of bioengineering and of electrical and computer engineering; and , associate professor of applied mathematics and of electrical and computer engineering.

From detectors searching for gravitational waves to electrical sensors monitoring the activity of the brain, research is handing scientists ever-larger datasets to analyze. Experiments are generating more data in part because researchers are developing better tools, from sharper medical imaging techniques to more precise sensors for particle physics experiments. A single experiment at CERN鈥檚 , for example, 1 petabyte of data 鈥� that鈥檚 1 million gigabytes 鈥� per second from tens of millions of collisions. But as datasets increase in size and complexity, the algorithms needed to analyze data and put the most relevant bits 鈥� or bytes 鈥� before the eyes of scientists run the risk of outstripping current computing capacity.

A3D3 research will focus on developing AI-based algorithms that can perform real-time analyses of large datasets in three data-rich fields: multi-messenger astrophysics, high-energy particle physics and neuroscience.

鈥淭he advancement of computing power from machine learning techniques on high-performance computing platforms is providing exciting new avenues for scientific discovery, while the unique challenges in high-speed and high-throughput data collection for science applications drive new demands for researchers,鈥� said Hauck.

Multi-messenger astrophysics integrates observations of the cosmos from diverse sources 鈥� including gravitational wave detectors, neutrino detectors and telescopes 鈥� to identify and study sudden and often violent events in the cosmos like supernovae, stellar collisions and black hole mergers. A3D3 researchers will work to develop AI algorithms that can quickly identify these events and help astronomers to cross-correlate observations of the same event from different sources, building a more complete picture of the types of transient events in our sky.

High-energy physics experiments, such as those studied by Hsu at the Large Hadron Collider, have the potential to upend our understanding of the universe by discovering new types of particles 鈥� like candidate dark matter particles 鈥� as well as new fundamental forces. A3D3 efforts will focus on AI-fueled approaches to detect unexpected anomalies in collision data and 鈥渞econstruct鈥� the particles underlying 40 million collisions per second that occur in high-energy experiments. These tools will streamline the downstream analysis processes, accelerating and simplifying the pipeline of discovery.

In neuroscience, A3D3 efforts will center on understanding the complex neural networks within the human brain that govern motor functions and process sensory information.

鈥淲e can now measure more of the brain for longer periods of time. We need new tools to analyze these massive datasets,鈥� said Orsborn, who is also a core staff scientist at the Washington National Primate Research Center. 鈥淎nalyzing data quickly will also enable new experiments and therapies where we can intervene based on ongoing brain activity.鈥�

Researchers need AI-based algorithms to analyze neural datasets in real time 鈥� such as electrical recordings from implanted electrodes and for a wide range of basic science studies. A3D3 researchers will focus on developing these types of tools, which can help decipher the neural underpinnings of behaviors like basic motor functions and responses to stimuli.

鈥淐ritically, A3D3 researchers will focus on developing scalable analysis tools, which can adapt not just to the datasets of today, but also to the massive and intricate datasets expected in the coming decades,鈥� said Shlizerman.

With the rapid growth in the amount of data generated by scientific research, the A3D3 Institute also has its eyes on the future. The institute will pursue training and research opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, including students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in STEM communities. These endeavors will ensure that A3D3鈥檚 impact spreads and endures beyond its immediate goals, said Hsu.

For more information, contact Hsu at schsu@uw.edu.