5 ASU faculty receive Fulbright US Scholar awards for 2025–26

Five Arizona State University faculty members — with projects ranging from solar canoes in the Amazon to better diabetes treatment — have received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Fulbright U.S. Scholars teach or conduct research in affiliation with institutes abroad, often continuing research collaborations started abroad and laying the groundwork for forging future partnerships between institutions. Over 800 individuals take part annually.

The ASU awardees (with the destination named in the award in parentheses) are:

• Keith Brown (Finland), the Melikian Center and the School of Politics and Global Studies.
• Monica Gaughan (Japan), the School of Public Affairs.
• Paul Lewis (United Kingdom), the School of Politics and Global Studies.
• David Manuel-Navarrete (Peru), the School of Sustainability.
• Jessica Weaver (Israel), the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering.

“I take great pride in ASU’s continued distinction as the home of newly awarded U.S. Fulbright Scholars year after year,” Executive Vice President and University Provost Nancy Gonzales says.

“This year’s awardees personify the university’s commitment to fostering global collaboration and advancing knowledge across multiple disciplines. As they embark on their international research and teaching assignments, their work will not only enrich the academic profile of ASU but also strengthen our global network of scholars and partners.”

Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, and it operates in over 160 countries worldwide. Notable Fulbrighters include 62 Nobel laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, 41 heads of state or government, and thousands of leaders across the private, public and nonprofit sectors.

Learn more about what the newest ASU faculty cohort will be working on.

Connecting national, global history by analyzing a transatlantic arms trade

Keith Brown, a professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the director of the Melikian Center, is the recipient of the Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in North American Studies Award. Brown’s research focuses on the history, culture and politics in the western Balkans, and this opportunity will bring him to the University of Helsinki in Finland, which has strong ties to the region.

Brown will not only be teaching courses for the North American Studies program through this award, but he will also be working on research for an upcoming book, “Deadly Entanglements: The Transatlantic Arms Trade and the Unmaking of Empire, 1865-1914.”

Keith Brown leads the “Cities, Nationalism and Borders in Macedonia” study abroad program, where students explore the southern Balkans in the summer. Courtesy photo

The book aims “to tell the transnational story of an 1870s arms deal between a Providence-based manufacturing company and the Ottoman Empire, which shipped over 500,000 military rifles to Constantinople and in the process connected and transformed people’s lives, from European immigrant workers and Turkish inspectors in Providence through transatlantic Armenian entrepreneurs and British ship captains, to soldiers, insurgents and nationalists in the borderlands of a dying empire,” Brown says.

By analyzing this historical 19th-century trade deal, Brown says, the project will “contribute to contemporary debates that connect national and global history, advancing the case for fine-grained, microhistorical methods across the humanities and social sciences.”

Teaching about the challenges of population aging

Monica Gaughan will travel to Suita, Japan — a suburb of Osaka — to Kansai University, where she will teach several courses between September 2025 and February 2026.

Gaughan, a full professor in the School of Public Affairs since 2022, has been affiliated with the school’s Center for Organization Research and Design since 2013. The School of Public Affairs is part of Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. Gaughan was a full professor at ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change from 2013 to 2022.

Monica Gaughan

She will be teaching two undergraduate seminars and a lecture class. One, “Birth, Death and Everything in Between,” is an introduction to demography with a particular focus on population aging, which she says poses a major challenge for people living in the most developed countries. The other seminar is a graduate seminar on international development. The lecture class is in American government.

Gaughan says she is both excited and nervous about her trip and says one of her regrets is that she never studied abroad.

“Although I have traveled extensively, this is the first time I will be living abroad for any length of time,” she says. “I am looking forward to the serenity of public spaces in Japan, the courtesy of its populace and the incredible natural beauty of the islands. As a professor of public affairs, it will be very interesting to observe the changes in Japanese governance stemming from last week’s national elections.”

Examining how local governments shape urban development

Paul Lewis, an associate professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies in The College, is a recipient of the Fulbright-University of Sheffield Scholar Award. Lewis’s research is focused on urban policy

Paul Lewis

and how local governments in the United States shape that policy through regulations on land use, housing and metropolitan development.

Although the geographic focus in his research has been U.S. cities, with this opportunity Lewis will turn his focus to British cities, where he will be based at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.

There, he will be analyzing “how local authorities in British cities have handled — and how residents of those cities have reacted to — proposals to reorient urban planning around goals of improved pedestrian access and sustainability,” Lewis says. “An ultimate goal of the project is to compare the political response to land-use and transport reform proposals on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Solar canoes, Indigenous knowledge chart a sustainable future

David Manuel-Navarrete has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant to work on a new sustainability project in the Peruvian Amazon. His project will focus on helping Indigenous communities grow their local economies in ways that also protect the rainforest.

Over the past seven years, he has worked closely with Indigenous groups in Ecuador to coproduce models that support forest regeneration and cultural traditions. Now, he plans to bring these ideas to Peru and work with the Universidad Nacional de San Martín and other local partners. Manuel-Navarrete is an associate professor in the School of Sustainability within the College of Global Futures and a researcher in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.

ASU Associate Professor David Manuel-Navarrete has worked closely with Indigenous groups in Ecuador to coproduce models that support forest regeneration and cultural traditions. Now, he plans to bring these ideas to Peru, with a solar-powered canoe playing a key part. Photo by Elizabeth Swanson Andi

One of the main parts of the project is a solar-powered canoe sponsored by Tamalpais Trust. This canoe was codesigned and tested through a partnership between ASU, Indigenous people and Ecuadorean engineers to provide clean and affordable transportation along the rivers of the Amazon. The canoe will now be introduced in Peru with help from E-Tech Peru and support from the Honnold Foundation. The solar canoe is part of a bigger plan to build bioeconomies, which are forest-based local businesses that include ecotourism, sustainable farming, carbon credits and clean energy. These businesses aim to protect the forest while helping Indigenous people earn a living.

As part of his Fulbright project, Manuel-Navarrete will teach a course at UNSM about sustainable development. He will also help the university add more lessons about sustainability into its programs. Alongside his teaching, he will visit local communities to learn more about what kinds of bioeconomic projects are already working and how they can be made stronger and more widespread. He will use group discussions and interviews to better understand what helps or gets in the way of these efforts.

The project’s goal is to show that it’s possible to protect the Amazon rainforest while supporting the people who live there. Manuel-Navarrete hopes his work will lead to new research, more university partnerships and stronger support for Indigenous communities. He believes that working together with local people and respecting their knowledge is the key to building a better and more sustainable future.

Toward a functional cure for Type 1 diabetes

Jessica Weaver is an associate professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Her research focuses on developing cell-based therapies that can be translated to treat disease, particularly for inducing immune tolerance in transplantation and treating Type 1 diabetes. The Weaver Lab uses biomaterials and immune engineering to generate transplant strategies that do not require long-term immunosuppression.

As a Fulbright Scholar, Weaver will collaborate with Professor Shulamit Levenberg’s lab at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, which is known for its expertise in engineering vasculature. Blood vessel networks are critical in providing insulin-producing cell therapies with sufficient oxygen to preserve graft viability and function. Weaver will be integrating lab-engineered vasculature from Levenberg’s lab with her lab’s computationally optimized cell therapy devices to improve oxygen delivery to encapsulated cells.

Weaver says she hopes this collaboration will lead to better methods for enhancing the vascularization in cell therapy devices, ultimately improving their efficacy in clinic settings.

“I was very honored to be selected for the prestigious Fulbright Distinguished Scholar award, to represent the United States abroad as a cultural and academic ambassador,” Weaver says. “I look forward to sharing knowledge through research and teaching in the areas of tissue and immune engineering and learning from colleagues across Israel.”

Alexandra Bice, Julie Kurth, Mark Scarp and Erik Wirtanen contributed to this story.

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