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Four Jamaicans awarded Fulbright Scholarships
Friday, July 10, 2009
FOUR outstanding Jamaican professionals have been awarded prestigious Fulbright Research Scholarships, tenable at universities in the United States.
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| Public affairs officer at the United States Embassy, Patricia Attkisson (centre) listens keenly to Dr Arkene Levy (right), one of the recipients of the 2008/2009 Fulbright Research Scholarships. Other recipients are (from left) Dr Asha Badaloo, Margaret Brissett-Bolt and Pauline Nicholas. All four will do research at prestigious universities in the United States. |
The grants, awarded under the 2008/2009 Fulbright Visiting Scholars Programmme, will provide an opportunity for the grantees to spend three months researching subject matters that will be important to the development of Jamaica.
The four are:
. Margaret Brissett-Bolt, behaviour change and community workstream lead in the Ministry of Education;
. Dr Asha Badaloo, senior lecturer, Tropical Metabolism
Research Unit, University of the West Indies;
. Dr Arkene Levy, lecturer in pharmacology, Department of Basic Medical Sciences, University of the West Indies; and
. Pauline Nicholas, electronic reference librarian, also from the University of the West Indies;
The grantees were selected by the US Embassy's Public Affairs Section from a highly qualified and competitive group of applicants.
"The Public Affairs Section is so proud that Jamaica has again taken the lion's share of awards in this prestigious programme. We nominated four outstanding candidates and all four were chosen to participate this year," said Patricia Attkisson, the embassy's public affairs officer.
"This selection speaks to the outstanding quality of Jamaican researchers who are dedicated to their work and often labour without glory but produce beneficial results for their country and, often, the world," she said.
Margaret Brissett-Bolt, a pioneering force in the Change from Within programme (a transformative education model), will be conducting research in educational leadership and its impact on the development of children in school. She will be exploring the issues of educational development in developing countries and at-risk youth in education policy planning, and will be affiliated with the Boston College Lynch School of Education in Massachusetts.
Dr Badaloo will be conducting research on childhood malnutrition, which has become a significant health problem in Jamaica. Her research will provide Jamaican medical practitioners with very useful information for prevention and treatment of malnutrition. She will be affiliated with the Children's Nutrition Centre, Department of Paediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Texas.
Dr Levy will be conducting research to evaluate the cytotoxic effect of two plant extracts on human ovarian cancer cells. She believes that the study has the potential to identify a new bioactive compound which would be useful in the treatment of ovarian cancer, a leading cause of death from gynaecological malignancies in Jamaica.
Dr Levy will be affiliated with the Moores Cancer Centre, University of California in San Diego.
Nicholas will be conducting research in Digital Reference Services and the implications of their usage for academic libraries in developing countries. She intends to investigate how such a service may be implemented and maintained for adoption in developing countries, through observation of a fully functional model in the US.
She will be affiliated with the Information Institute of Syracuse at Syracuse University in New York.
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