蜜桃传媒

UB faculty members Shermali Gunawardena, Barbara Prinari, Bina Ramamurthy, Adrian Rodriguez-Riccelli, Hua “Helen” Wang and Hao Zeng have received prestigious Fulbright Scholar awards to study and teach abroad during the coming year.

The Fulbright program, coordinated by the U.S. Department of State, is devoted to improving intercultural relations, diplomacy and competence between the people of the U.S. and other nations through educational exchange.

"UB is so proud of this year’s Fulbright Scholar recipients,” says Robert Granfield, vice provost for faculty affairs. “This prestigious recognition highlights that not only are UB faculty exceptional researchers and teachers, but they are strong international collaborators and colleagues who aim to make a global impact.

“It is an honor to have these faculty represent UB as they build lasting international relationships and engage in cultural exchanges that benefit us all,” says Granfield, who received a Fulbright in 2010-11 and served as the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in International Humanitarian Law at the Human Rights Research and Education Center at the 蜜桃传媒 of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

The Office of Faculty Affairs supports applicants to the Fulbright U.S Scholar Program. UB faculty interested in learning more about the program can contact Maria Almanza, director of faculty recognition, or Tilman Baumstark, UB Fulbright liaison and associate vice provost for faculty affairs. 

UB’s six Fulbright scholars:

Shermali Gunawardena, associate professor, Department of Biological Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, will travel to Sri Lanka to examine how meditation benefits patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. She will be affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine at the 蜜桃传媒 of Colombo, and will be conducting research, teaching and student mentoring activities at the university’s Centre for Meditation Research.

Gunawardena studies how proteins involved in three neurodegenerative diseases — Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s — travel great distances along microtubule tracks within neurons to maintain cell viability. Her overall goal is to identify targets/pathways that can be developed for therapeutics. She hopes to identify these pathways early before disease pathology starts, since disease mutations in these proteins disrupt this long-distance transport pathway before neuronal death and neuropathology. 

Her research group has found that many of these disease-related proteins can normally function in the maintenance of neuronal homeostasis, sending and receiving messages, and neuron protection. With this same premise, her work in Sri Lanka will focus on assessing the cellular and molecular responses after a controlled meditational regime in patients with early dementia. The Centre for Meditation Research has already examined how meditation can influence neurophysiological parameters in meditators compared to nonmeditators, and has expanded its studies to epilepsy.

Gunawardena’s long-term goal for her Fulbright award is to establish a collaborative research program that fosters student exchange, which will benefit the global dementia/aging population through a noninvasive, nonpharmacological treatment strategy that consider every aspect of the body. 

Barbara Prinari, professor in the Department of Mathematics, will travel to Greece to study wave phenomena. The main goal of the collaborative research that Prinari will carry out at the 蜜桃传媒 of Ioannina will be to develop a rigorous direct perturbation theory for the study of dark-bright solitons under physically relevant perturbations (e.g., dissipation, linear and nonlinear loss).

Prinari’s research examines how these wave phenomena, by means of mathematical models, often lead to a certain class of nonlinear partial differential equations referred to as integrable systems. Her main area of research deals with nonlinear waves and integrable systems, and has focused on both the study of the integrability of certain nonlinear partial differential equations and their discretizations (differential-difference equations), as well as the properties of these equations and their solutions. 

Prinari’s research has also explored how mathematical models can be used for social and behavioral sciences. Her team has applied generalized kinetic methods and artificial neural networks to analyze and control the quality of an existing neuropsychiatric ward. She recently developed a dynamical systems model for triadic reciprocal determinism to study how a person experiences stress or traumatic events, and the interplay among coping self-efficacy, behavior and the perception of external environment.

Bina Ramamurthy, a professor of teaching in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, will spend a semester in Austria as a visiting professor at St. Pölten 蜜桃传媒 of Applied Sciences, teaching and conducting research on blockchain-based systems.

Ramamurthy is an expert on blockchain, cryptocurrency, digital assets, tokenization of assets and data-intensive computing. As the director of UB’s Blockchain ThinkLab, she has worked extensively on these emerging technologies. She has developed a successful series of massive open online courses on blockchain technology that has reached thousands of global learners. She is the author of “Blockchain in Action,” which introduces fundamental blockchain principles and teaches users to build blockchain-based decentralized applications.

Her most recent work includes a series of online courses focused on decentralized finance. She also teaches a course on the subject, and has an upcoming book titled “Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Decentralized Finance Systems: Concepts and Applications.”

Adrian Rodriguez-Riccelli, assistant professor of Spanish, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, will teach and conduct research in linguistics in the Republic of Cabo Verde for the 2025-26 academic year.

Rodriguez-Riccelli’s research and teaching combine quantitative variationist-sociolinguistic methods with insights from cognitive linguistics, language typology and formal syntax to analyze discourse and morphosyntactic variation in vernaculars of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in Africa and the Americas. These include the Portuguese-based Creole language Cabo-Verdean Creole, Spanish in the United States and, as a heritage language, Afro-Hispanic varieties and Spanish in dialectological perspective.

His work models the linguistic, cognitive and social factors that come together to shape patterns of variation in the relationships between linguistic form, function and meaning in these languages, and how their structure has changed and continues to change over time.

In his first semester at the Universidade de Cabo Verde, he will teach five-week modules of linguistics courses in the Cabo-Verdean studies major. In the second half of the award period, he will travel with a research team to six islands of the archipelago to collect sociolinguistic interviews, a picture-based descriptive narrative of a series of unannotated drawings representing the fairytale Lobu ku Xibinhu (The Wolf and the Sheep), oral histories, folk knowledge, folk tales and other examples of traditional Cabo-Verdean cultural and linguistic expression.

His team will work to develop print and digital audio/visual resources that simultaneously document and celebrate Cabo-Verdean folk knowledge, skills and individual and community histories, as well as traditional forms of Kriolu linguistic and cultural expression, all to enhance the capabilities of Cabo-Verdeans — especially those who may be elderly, live in rural areas or have lower educational attainment — to communicate with governmental, nongovernmental and multinational organizations, as well as with family in the diaspora.

Hua “Helen” Wang, professor in the Department of Communication, will travel to Norway to study the feasibility of using MetaHumans as storytelling agents to promote environmental sustainability and climate action. MetaHumans are highly realistic, interactive and artistic digital representations of human-like entities. They can be custom-made and enhanced by artificial intelligence. Wang will explore research questions regarding the functional, relational and metaphysical aspects of this innovation.

Wang’s projects often take the form of interdisciplinary collaborations to design, implement and evaluate public campaigns and health interventions. Her work leverages innovative strategies through narrative engagement, emerging technologies and communication networks to better serve disadvantaged communities and promote the well-being of individuals, groups and society at large.

As an entertainment-education expert, Wang has worked with award-winning Hollywood and Bollywood production teams, social-impact game designers and computer and data scientists affiliated with the AI for Good initiative. Her research has addressed complex issues in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, gender-based violence and climate change. In 2024, Wang co-edited the open access book “Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions.”

Hao Zeng, Moti Lal Rustgi Professor in the Department of Physics, will conduct research on chalcogenide perovskite thin films in Japan in collaboration with materials scientist Hideo Hosono. Zeng’s work explores how new physical behaviors originate when dimensions of materials approach fundamental quantum length scales. His research spans 2D thin films, 1D nanowires and 0D nanocrystals, with a focus on understanding spin and magnetic interactions at the nanoscale.  

Zeng’s research team synthesizes these materials using both chemical solution-phase methods and vapor deposition techniques. Current research topics include magnetism in atomically thin layers and emergent phenomena that arise when they are interfaced with other materials, such as 2D semiconductors, to form heterostructures.

Zeng’s group also develops advanced semiconductor materials for electronic and optoelectronic applications. A major focus is on chalcogenide perovskites, the novel class of ionic semiconductors that he will study in Japan with support from the Fulbright award.