University of Idaho faculty win chance to conduct research and teach abroad through Fulbright Awards

Four University of Idaho faculty members will be going abroad to conduct research after receiving Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awards for the next academic year.

The Fulbright Scholar Award will send the UI faculty, as well as other faculty members across the country, to different countries for teaching and research opportunities, said John Crepeau, UI mechanical engineering professor and award recipient.

Crepeau said he will be going to the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria, in February for aviation and aeronautical research.

The aviation industry wants to incorporate sustainable and environmentally friendly fuels into work done for the industry, but Crepeau said the machinery being used is designed for typical aviation fuels.

“My particular research area is to investigate different sustainable fuels, their effect on engine parts and how to use those fuels more efficiently and how to tune the engine to use those tools more efficiently,” he said.

Crepeau accepted his first Fulbright award in 2015 and went to Ecuador for research, and he enjoys being involved in international collaborative work, as well as the opportunity to live in a different country.

“You get to meet people, develop research ideas from their perspective,” he said. “I think it’s just a great experience.”

He will be in Austria from February until July next year and will receive a stipend for his work, but will also be on sabbatical from UI, he said.

Even though the four UI faculty members will be in different countries in different time frames, Crepeau will still be doing research with a group at a well-known aviation research agency.

“I’m excited to work with this particular group that has experience in these fuels,” he said. “The European Union has done funding in this area in sustainable fuels, so they’ve got a lot of expertise and interest in it and that always makes it kind of fun.”

Alongside his research, Crepeau will be teaching a class and mentoring graduate students in Austria, he said.

Coming out of his research opportunity next year, Crepeau hopes to keep in touch with research contacts from Austria.

Washington State University has a group who works with hydrogen fuels, and Crepeau said he wants to bring his research to WSU to collaborate and continue the sustainability and optimization of the fuels he will be working with.

“I would like to … continue research as I make friends and develop research ideas that we can continue doing that cutting edge work,” he said.

UI criminology professor Brian Wolf grew up in Idaho and has always been concerned about extreme violence issues.

Wolf will be going to Norway through the Fulbright program. He said Norway has struggled with extreme violence similar to incidents in the United States.

“I’ve been very curious about how that experience in Norway is different and similar to what we experience in the United States, that history we have with extremist groups in Idaho, and just learn from that experience,” he said.

Wolf said he will be working with the University of Olso to learn how threat environments are monitored, how counter-extremist efforts are assessed and how risks can be reduced.

There is an educational exchange component to the program as well, and Wolf said he will have the opportunity to travel somewhere else to discuss long standing extremist tendencies.

He will be affiliated with the Center for Research on Extremist Violence and a lot of the organization’s work is focused on Norway, but it has recently expanded to issues throughout Europe as well.

Wolf said he recently visited Norway and enjoyed the outdoor scene similar to Idaho.

“I’m looking forward to the kind of international exchange kind of learning about the similarities and differences,” he said.

Norway does not have as big of a gun culture as the United States or Idaho, but residents are in to hunting and use firearms for support, he said.

At the same time, guns are more heavily regulated in Norway. Wolf said he is interested in exploring the differences when he is in Norway.

“It’s a new research topic for me,” he said. “I think it’ll contribute to academic literatures we have on extremism.”

Elowyn Yager, a UI civil and environmental engineering professor, will be going to Italy in just a few months to work on a project focusing on vegetation that grows along riverbanks and how the roots strengthen and add stability to those riverbanks.

“For example, when a river floods, oftentimes what you’ll see is that erodes the side of the river channel and that can erode into things like people’s houses and roads,” Yager said. “What vegetation does in some cases is … add strength to the bank to make it harder to erode, which means you have less likelihood of eroding into people’s houses.”

Yager said in September she will be in Italy conducting laboratory experiments and field measurements to study the rivers and understand how those roots add strength to riverbanks.

She is looking forward to collaborating with a group of people who have new ideas for the project but is also excited to learn about Italian culture and how people in a different country operate, she said.

“I hope to gain new collaborators and people to work with in the long-term, and measurements I can use to better understand this vegetation and maybe write some further proposals to continue this research in the future,” she said.

While Crepeau, Wolf and Yager will be focusing on research and projects during their time abroad, Zachary Turpin, UI associate professor of English, will be teaching three classes at Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany.

“It’s a university that’s got a very Whitman-centric American studies program,” Turpin said. “They have a lot of good scholars who are doing translation studies of Walt Whitman, and I’m a Whitman scholar, so it felt like a perfect match.”

One of the classes Turpin will be teaching is about poet Walt Whitman’s international pieces, the diversity of his poems and the way his work extends throughout the entire world. Turpin’s other two classes will focus on Emily Dickinson’s poetry and archival research methods.

Turpin said he has taught American students for most of his career and there will be major differences in the students he will be working with in Germany, such as the way they interact in the classroom.

“There can be different expectations for how students prepare and how they ask or answer questions,” he said. “I’ve been told that there’s just cultural nuances that I’ll notice immediately.”

UI has 16-week semesters, but Germany has a fluid schedule for its terms and Turpin said a class could last two weeks or 10 weeks.

“It’s really kind of exciting and scary to rethink how classes work,” he said.

In addition to the three classes he will be teaching, he will be working with graduate students on Whitman’s translations to look at how translators handle the poet’s word coinages, Turpin said.

“He’s a dictionary lover but he coins his own words when there isn’t one,” Turpin said. “It’s a curious way of figuring out how translators grapple with and adapt with such lexically complex poetry.”

He will be moving to the country with his family in January, and he is looking forward to watching his children make friends in a new environment, as well as making friends of his own, he said.

“Germany is such a great place. I just kind of want to soak it all up and bring some of it back,” Turpin said.