GVSU Faculty Fulbright Contact: Bren Tooley ([email protected])

CSCE Faculty Fellowships page 

The Fulbright Program, the U.S. government's flagship program in international educational exchange, was proposed to the U.S. Congress in 1945 by then freshman Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. In the aftermath of World War II, Senator Fulbright viewed the proposed program as a much-needed vehicle for promoting "mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of the world." 

Today, the Fulbright Program offers a variety of individual and institutional grants. These prestigious grants are awarded on the basis of merit and allow individuals to study, teach, lecture, and conduct research in other countries. 

Fulbright grants are made to U.S. citizens and nationals of other countries for a variety of educational activities, primarily university lecturing, advanced research, graduate study, and teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Since the program's inception, more than 85,000 U.S. Fulbrighters have traveled abroad to lecture or conduct research in a wide variety of academic and professional fields. More than 144,000 foreign citizens have come to the United States under Fulbright auspices.

The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Under a cooperative agreement with the Bureau, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) assists in the administration of the Fulbright Scholar Program.

Grand Valley State University supports the Faculty Fulbright Program. Please visit the links below to learn more about the program or visit the CIES Web site: 

• Apply for a Fulbright Grant
• Hosting International Fulbright Scholars
• GVSU Fulbright Recipients
• GVSU Fulbright Recipient Project Proposal Narratives
• GVSU Fulbright Policy 
• Guide to hosting international scholars at GVSU

For additional information, contact [email protected]

Bren Tooley: GVSU Faculty Fulbright Contact

Dr. Brenda Tooley, the Associate Director of the Center for Undergraduate Scholar Engagement and program director of the Frederick Meijer Office of Fellowships at GVSU, has long been involved with Fulbright and other international organizations and initiatives. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, in 2010 and again in 2018. She taught in the Fulbright International Summer Institute in Bulgaria in 2012 and 2014, and was a participant in the Fulbright Capacity-Building Workshop in Hungary in 2017. Her commitment to international education and exchange is woven into her professional life as an academic administrator and faculty member: in 2001, she was a participant in a Fulbright-Hays Summer Seminar in Brazil. She created the exchange programs between her institution and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in the late ‘90s, helped to establish the Freeman-Foundation-funded exchange agreement between her institution and Tzu Chi University, Taiwan in 2000, taught at Fudan Unversity in Shanghai, China, in 2005, and served as a national reviewer for the Fulbright Core Scholar program from 2012-2015. She is presently a national reviewer for the Fulbright ETA program and has served for the past two years on the IIE Boren Awards national review panel (for Boren Scholarships – Turkey and Eastern Europe, last year, and this year on one of the Asia panels). She was deeply engaged in the IIE consortium addressing the crisis in higher education in Syria from 2012 through 2016, presenting on best practices in working with students from conflict zones at NAFSA and at IIE conferences in New York and at UC-Davis, and leading webinars on outreach strategies and review of documents from displaced and conflict-zone international students for AACRO and contributing an essay to an IIE publication on the topic.

Bren Tooley ([email protected])