Fulbright grantees

Last night was the winter meeting of Belgium/Luxembourg Fulbright program grantees, which was a great opportunity to meet my fellow grantees and learn about their projects. It was a pretty diverse array! First, we were treated to a classical guitar piece by Rosie, who is studying at the conservatory here. It was just lovely, and impressive in part because at the beginning of this year she broke her wrist. Now, I have experience with students who break their wrists (you know who you are!) and I can tell you it can seriously affect productivity! Rosie also said the recovery had been longer and slower than she wanted but she's back on track now.

I can't remember everyone's names and projects but there was an American literature professor from Boston University who is teaching at Leuven, two English language teaching assistants -- one of whom is also pursuing interests in ethnomusicology while she's here -- and several other post-baccalaureate students who are either in graduate school or applying to graduate school. Three of these students are in art history and are using the Royal Library for source materials as well as other local resources, one is an anthropologist studing West African immigrant populations in Belgium and western Europe, and three of us were science-types. You all know what I do so I'll just tell you about the other two, which had very interesting projects.

The first is a computer science/biology graduate from Colgate who is studying "meta-heuristics", "parallelism" and "swarming patterns". He very clearly communicated his passion for the subject but not as clearly communicated what his subject is! I spoke with him quite a bit at the reception afterwards. Turns out he's excited about computer models of decision making based on collective animal behavior -- an exciting field of computational/systems biology that's been getting a lot of press lately. He's hoping to start graduate school next fall with this guy: http://www.princeton.edu/~icouzin/. The other science-guy deferred entrance into an MD/PhD program to study in Liege. He said something like -- I'm a biology major with a French minor so I thought it'd be fun to study neurobiology in Liege, which is French speaking, before I return to graduate school. He's studying the effects of gender on brain development in an "avian" model (quails, I guess). He spent the whole month of January cutting up bird brains!

There was a nice reception after all the introductions and then we got kicked out because the Royal Library closes at 6:45 pm. Our next program event is in mid-April. I look forward to hearing how all the projects are progressing!