SPOKANE, Wash. — Kerry Brooks, associate professor of landscape architecture and director of the GIS lab at Washington State University Spokane, has been named to the Fulbright Senior Specialist Roster by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars.
The Fulbright Senior Specialist program is about a year old. It is designed to complement the 55-year-old Fulbright Scholar Program, which sends U.S. academics and professionals to 140 countries to teach and research for terms ranging from three months to an academic year.
The Fulbright Senior Specialist program provides shorter-term grants, typically of two to six weeks, and is aimed to increase the number of people who have the opportunity to go abroad on a Fulbright. Grantees can undertake a broader range of activities than typically available to Fulbright Scholars, such as conducting teacher training, developing and assessing curricula or educational materials, leading seminars and workshops, and conducting needs assessments and survey research.
Brooks is the first faculty member from WSU Spokane to be named to this Fulbright program, and the fourth from WSU to be named a Senior Specialist. According to the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (which administers the Fulbright programs), 32 from WSU have been Fulbright Scholars (some more than once), and 23 international scholars have come to WSU in the past decade.
Brooks says of the selection, “I hope to be invited to countries where I can apply my skills in Geographic Information Systems (computer systems for mapping analysis and visualization) and land planning in service of sustainable environments, economies, and communities. It will be an honor to participate in this program, and I am excited at the potential to work with and learn from people in other cultures. I hope that my WSU students and colleagues will also benefit as I bring these experiences to the classroom and the research agenda.”
