Fulbright New Zealand honours NZ-US exchange grantees

Fulbright New Zealand honours NZ-US exchange grantees

Fulbright New Zealand last night honoured 84 grantees of Fulbright and associated NZ-US exchange awards for 2012, at its annual parliamentary awards ceremony in Wellington. The event, hosted by Hon Steven Joyce, Minister of Science and Innovation, was used to announce 26 recipients of various Fulbright New Zealand Graduate Awards to study or research in the United States of America in the 2012-2013 academic year. A crowd of around 300 well-wishers celebrated the achievements of those and other New Zealand and American participants in prestigious educational, cultural and professional exchange programmes administered by Fulbright New Zealand.

The newly-announced Fulbright New Zealand Graduate Students included alumni of most New Zealand universities and one polytechnic, as well as several esteemed foreign institutions. They will be funded for one or two years of study or research to obtain a US masters degree or PhD, or conduct research in the US towards a New Zealand doctorate. Their fields of study and research range from clean tech entrepreneurship to cosmology, earthquake engineering, human rights law, performance viola and printmaking. Each student will attend the US university of their choice which are often world leaders in those fields.

Also recognised at the awards ceremony were ten Fulbright US Graduate Students who are mid-way through an exchange year, 40 New Zealand and American academics, artists and professionals who have received Fulbright awards in the past year, and participants in the Ian Axford and Harkness Fellowships programmes which Fulbright New Zealand administers.

New Zealand’s Fulbright programme continues to grow, and at last night’s ceremony two new award programmes were announced to commence in the coming year. Through a new partnership the American New Zealand Association (ANZA) in New York, from next year a small number of extra graduate awards for American Fulbright students to visit New Zealand will be provided. In addition, the new Fulbright-Meg Everton Professional Enhancement Awards, funded by a bequest from a Fulbright exchange teacher from 1956, will provide for short exchanges by New Zealand educators to assist with their professional development through international experience in America.

ENDS

For more information about this year’s Fulbright grantees see the 2012 Fulbright New Zealand Grantees Booklet, attached.

More photographs from the awards ceremony will be available next week. Portrait photographs of individual grantees are available on request, as are interviews.

Fulbright New Zealand was established in 1948 to promote mutual understanding through educational and cultural exchanges between New Zealand and the United States of America. The Fulbright programme offers a range of prestigious awards for New Zealand and American graduate students, academics, artists and professionals to study, research and teach in each other’s countries. Fulbright New Zealand offers over 70 exchange awards each year – half to students and half to scholars – and more than 1,500 New Zealanders and 1,200 Americans have benefited from a Fulbright award to date. The programme is mainly funded by the US and New Zealand governments with additional funding from award sponsors, private philanthropists and alumni donors.

See www.fulbright.org.nz for details about Fulbright awards and how to apply, or download a Media Fact Sheet of further background information from http://www.fulbright.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/mediafactsheet.pd
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