University of Maine Faculty Member Receives Fulbright Specialists Award

Contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571

ORONO — Professor Harlan J. Onsrud at the University of Maine has been selected for a Fulbright Specialists project in Law in Australia at The University of Melbourne during February and March 2009, according to the UnitedS tates Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Onsrud will develop and present five major lectures, known collectively as the 2009 Melbourne Fulbright Lectureso n Cyberlaw and Spatial Technologies, focusing on key legal and policy issues with which the global spatial technology and mobile computing communities have been struggling. The lectures will be presented in a variety of academic forums and archived on the web to form a framework for global academic and practitioner discussions of the issues.

Onsrud is one of over 400 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad this year through the Fulbright Specialists Program. The Fulbright Specialists Program, created in 2000 to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, provides short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) to prominent U.S. faculty and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at post secondary, academic institutions around the world.

The Fulbright Program, America’s flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 60 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have taught, studied or conducted research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the United States. Over 285,000 emerging leaders in their professional fields have received Fulbright awards, including individuals who later became heads of government, Nobel Prize winners, and leaders in education, business, journalism, the arts and other fields.

Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement. Among thousands of prominent Fulbright Scholar alumni are Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; and Craig Barrett, Chairman of the Board of Intel Corporation. Distinguished Fulbright Specialist participants include Mahmoud Ayoub, Professor of Religion at Temple University, Heidi Hartmann, President and CEO, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Percy R. Luney, Jr. Dean and Professor, College of Law, Florida A&M University and Emily Vargas-Barone, Founder and Executive Director of the RISE Institute.