EUGENE–Someone once told Terri Warpinski that if she truly loved photographing the desert as much as she claimed, she needed to travel to Israel.

So Warpinski, a University of Oregon art professor who has photographed many parts of Oregon’s high desert, applied for and received a prestigious Fulbright grant to go to Israel during winter term. Now back on campus, she spent the past four months using photography to explore the human and natural history of Israel and the landscape of the desert.

Warpinski, also associate dean of the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts, is one of 800 American scholars and professionals granted Fulbright awards to study and research other countries during the 2000-2001 academic year. Since 1950, 132 current UO faculty members have had similar international study and teaching opportunities one or more times.

While she was in Israel, Warpinski’s academic host was the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura. After arriving in mid-December, she taught a two-week intensive course in photography with a special emphasis on environmental responsibility. She also mentored three local artists, aiding them in the development of a course in environmental art for the institute.

In addition to the American scholars who travel overseas, each year more than 800 Fulbrighters from other countries visit the United States. For this academic year, the University of Oregon is hosting three Fulbright scholars from abroad.

Sirilaksana Khoman, working with the UO International Studies Program since September, will stay until June. She is a professor and dean of the economics faculty at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand.

While here, Khoman has taught a seminar on the Asian economic crisis as well as a course on the economics of education in development. She is enjoying Eugene and its surrounding area, as well as the university community.

"There are many things I like about this university," she says. "Several UO scholars are actively engaged in teaching about and researching the peoples, histories, cultures and economies of East and Southeast Asia, and this makes UO an attractive place to work."

Gediminas Juzeliunas comes from the Lithuanian Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he is a senior researcher in theoretical physics. Working since September with Howard Carmichael, director of the Oregon Center for Optics and a physics professor affiliated with the Institute of Theoretical Science, Juzeliunas will be leaving in mid-July.

Juzeliunas’ Fulbright project is on the optical properties of ultra-cold atomic gases, in which the atoms start behaving like waves. Currently, he is working on slowing down and storing the laser pulses in such media–a topic that became very popular in the scientific community earlier this year.

Juzeliunas, who has taken advantage of the surrounding area for activities such as skiing, says he has enjoyed the hospitality of faculty and staff at the university.

Mahmoud Dhaoudi, a sociology professor at the University of Tunis I in Tunis, Tunisia, has been working since September with the UO International Studies Program. He is researching the state of American sociology at the end of the 20th century and spent winter term in the sociology department.

The Fulbright program was proposed to the U.S. Congress in 1945 by then freshman Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. The purpose of the program was to give grantees and their hosts the opportunity to gain a better understanding of each other’s institutions, cultures and societies.

Since its inception in 1946, more than 85,000 U.S. participants have traveled abroad and more than 144,000 foreign citizens have come to the United States as Fulbrighters.

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