Two Georgetown faculty members have been awarded grants to conduct research at foreign institutions for the U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program.

Johanna Bond, visiting associate professor of Law, received an African Regional Research Program grant to research women’s legal rights in Africa for five months. Nina Scribanu, an associate professor of Pediatrics, will research the incorporation of genetics in clinical practice at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy Carol Davilla in Bucharest, Romania for six to 12 weeks beginning this spring.

Bond’s work began last July and was split into three African countries – two months in Uganda and Tanzania and three months in Ghana. She applied for the grant after having worked several years on a program with African women at Georgetown.

The Leadership and Advocacy for Women in Africa program has brought African women’s rights advocates to Georgetown for years and Bond’s proposal to the Fulbright grant program was to follow up and publish their research.

“She was planning to collect these draft articles that need a lot of editing and quantification,” said Deborah Egan, representative for Africa for the Fulbright Scholar Program. “She’s going to pull what they’re doing together and produce an edited volume of articles that these women’s rights lawyers have written.”

After submitting this project statement to the Fulbright Scholar Program, Bond endured a rigorous application process before being one of about 800 scholars awarded the 2001-2002 grant sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars. The program, which was proposed by Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas in 1945, has had more than 250,000 participants chosen for their leadership potential.

“For the most part, you have to have a Ph.D. or equivalent professional experience, and you go through a review process with two different review committees. The people in the other country who are associated with us but not part of our organization make the final decision,” said Susan Sharp, Higher Education Liaison Officer for Fulbright.

Egan said that Bond has built up an excellent rapport with the participants of the LAWA program since 1993, so they were enthusiastic to receive her and accommodate her. Many of the women wrote letters about her, which were included in her application to the Fulbright Program.

Accompanied for the first part of the trip by her husband, Bond has worked at various universities and non-profit organizations. The Fulbright grant includes a monthly stipend, air travel allowance, a maintenance allowance for daily needs and a $3,000 allowance for research.

Bond’s goal, Egan said, is to bring accessible information to areas where it is needed.

“She is very excited. She thinks that by putting together this edited volume, it is filling a void in scholarly literature. There’s not a lot written by African women about human rights in their country,” Egan said.

Scribanu’s goal is similar; she wants to make the most updated educational resources available in the U.S. available to Romanian teaching institutions. Specifically, her objective is to incorporate genetic advances into daily clinical practice and healthcare education.

As a pediatrician specializing in clinical genetics, Scribanu believes that working with university students and professors in Romania will help prepare the healthcare professionals for the medical changes that have taken place and are likely to take place in the next five to 10 years. We have to make good use of all the information discovered on disease and the human genome project, Scribanu said, by “introducing a genetic perspective to healthcare providers.”

“I’m showing the correlation between the basic science of genetics and the clinical application – what happens in real life. I want to incorporate the information and technology into the everyday practice of medicine,” she said.

Currently, Scribanu works at Georgetown in addition to maintaining contact with two Romanian universities to figure out where they are educationally and what they hope to accomplish through the Fulbright Program.

“It seems like a very good, valuable program that benefits both sides. It’s a two-way street,” she said.

The Fulbright Scholar Program also benefits both countries through its Visiting Scholar Program, which annually brings about 800 researchers from foreign countries to the U.S., just as Georgetown sends researche