Fulbright Reality Czech

Avery Morris is a violinist and a Doctoral Candidate of Musical Arts in violin performance at Stony Brook University. This year, she is spending nine months at the Music and Dance Faculty (HAMU) of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague as a Fulbright Student grantee researching Gideon Klein's lost works and the legacy of Czech Musical Modernism. Avery has a special passion for the music of this Czech composer Gideon Klein, who died at the age of 26 in Fürstengrube, a subcamp of Auschwitz after his internment in Terezín. Avery discovered Klein by chance during the pandemic, when looking for music to play together with her twin sister. She immediately got hooked, and started to explore Klein's music, as well as his destiny. Klein experimented with genres ranging from jazz and blues to serialism and microtonal music – a style later labeled by the Nazis as "degenerate music." Avery's curiosity grew more, so applying for a Fulbright Student grant to the Czech Republ...

Kenneth C. C. Yang is a professor of  communications. As a native of Taiwan before immigrating to the US for his teaching position, he has transformed his research interests from traditional social sciences to data and computational research of unstructured texts and discourses produced by human beings. Trained as a new media researcher at Ohio State University at Columbus, Kenneth is constantly amazed by the advances and impacts of technologies on contemporary human experiences and how researchers are empowered for their research. During Fall 2023, Kenneth served as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the Department of Media and Journalism Studies of Masaryk University (MUNI) in Brno. Kenneth offered an undergraduate course in New Media Advertising that introduced MUNI students to the latest developments of new technologies and how these technologies can be utilized for their careers in the field of communication. At the end of the sem...

Fizah Yousuf is a biologist. In her research, she focuses on further understanding the syphilis bacteria, and one day, she would like to see a syphilis vaccine being developed and globally distributed. Originally from Boston College, Fizah has joined a lab at the Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University in Brno, and together with her international team, she hopes to contribute to the development of the syphilis vaccine. Her passion for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases started during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, Fizah studied COVID-19, and she took classes on immunology and vaccinology. After learning about the recent quiet resurgence of syphilis, she has been determined to contribute to the prevention of this ailment with her research. After her Fulbright experience in the Czech Republic, she plans to attend medical school and become a medical practitioner focusing on infectious diseases. This interview is the 30th part of our Fulbright series to celebrate 3...