Fulbright Reality Czech

Anya is a preschool teacher, actor, and Marketing Director for her local community theater. She is also one of 300 English Teaching Assistants, who have come to spice up foreign language education of Czech students at various high schools all over the Czech Republic since 2005. With a BA in Theater Education, a PreK-12 teaching license, and family heritage in Central Europe, Anya was placed at Masaryk Gymnazium and Nursing School in Vsetín, a town of 25,000 in East Moravia. During the 2019/2020 academic year, beyond teaching English, Anya hosted a popular drama club, where students played theater games, learned how to improv, read parts of scripts, and built scenes with the expectation of performing a play at the end of the school year. In March 2020, however, Covid suddenly paralyzed the world. The Fulbright Program was terminated, and Anya, as well as thousands of other Fulbrighters all over the world, had to return home, often without the opportunity to say a proper goodbye to their...

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...

Elizabeth Clifton is a behavioral ecologist who studies termites. Why termites? They are interesting, social, extremely important, but also vulnerable. During the academic year of 2021/2022, Elizabeth spent five months studying the evolution of termite weapons at the Faculty of Tropical AgriSciences of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. Elizabeth loves traveling. The idea to study termites in the Czech Republic sparked during her conversation with another expert on termite behavior, Dr. Jan Šobotník, an Associate Professor at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. They originally met at a week-long termite course in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Their shared scientific interest led to a field trip studying termites in Cameroon, Africa. Last year, they agreed on performing lab work in Dr. Šobotník’s lab in Prague. Five months after her return to the U.S., specifically to the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at The University of Connecticut, Elizabeth sh...

Petra Urbanová v médiích často vystupuje jako česká forenzní antropoložka a vysvětluje rozdíly mezi svou prací a zobrazováním tohoto oboru ve filmech a v literatuře. Je docentkou a ředitelkou Ústavu antropologie na Masarykově univerzitě. Ve školním roce 2012/2013 strávila šest měsíců na North Carolina State University ve městě Raleigh jako stipendistka Fulbrightova programu. Obor forenzní antropologie vznikl právě v USA, a Petra Urbanová tak vysvětluje, že během svého pobytu mohla: "nasát atmosféru a vidět davy, které mají zájem o forenzní vědy. Bylo to důležité a utvrdilo mě to v tom, že dělám smysluplnou práci, co lidi zajímá." Málokoho napadnou praktická využití forenzní antropologie v každodenním životě. Petra Urbanová to ale vnímá jinak a pro příklad není třeba chodit daleko. Na jaře 2020, bezprostředně po vypuknutí pandemie, se její tým podílel na vývoji a testování respirátorů pro dospělé i pro děti. K výběru konkrétní velikosti stačila fotografie zájemce v mobilním te...

Jubilee Marshall, Fulbright English Teaching Assistant 2019/2020 at Gymnazium Polička, shares her way of maintaining her presence in the classroom and keeping her afternoon conversation club, even though she had to physically leave the CR four months earlier than planned. I sit attentively at my computer, listening as Tomáš, an eighteen-year-old boy over four thousand miles away, teaches me about investing. “You only have to invest $20,000 to get monthly dividends,” he explains wisely, in an attempt to get me on board with the concept. Tomáš started investing two weeks ago, as a way to fill his time during quarantine. So far, he has lost $4.00. He tells me all this during our conversation club, a weekly meeting that began when I was teaching at our school in the Czech Republic and continues in spite of the coronavirus pandemic that sent me scrambling to fly home to Washington, DC. Although I primarily teach the four oldest grades at Gymnázium Polička, the club is open to ev...

Ondrej Ditrych is a political scientist, a proud recipient of Fulbright scholarship held at Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School (2007/2008). He currently serves as the director of Institute of International Relations Prague, Czech Republic, and as an academic fellow at Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences. The Fulbright scholarship I was most gratefully awarded as a junior doctoral student at Charles University was a true beginning of a wonderful journey of curiosity and discovery of the nature of politics and society. More than a decade later spent on this journey, I now have the privilege to be at the helm of Institute of International Relations Prague. A true institution for the Czech science of international relations, founded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs yet independent by statute, the Institute is something of a ‘hybrid’: a place for interdisciplinary academic research of all things international which we seek, at the...

Hannah Rempel is an Associate Professor of Library Science at Oregon State University. This year, Hannah has spent two semesters teaching at Charles University’s Institute for Information Studies and Librarianship in Prague as a Fulbright Scholar. Even though her stay in the country was cut short because of the pandemic, Hannah has continued teaching Czech students online from across the Atlantic Some Pre-Quarantine Context The time was January 2020. You may remember this time as BCV (Before CoronaVirus). Or more accurately and selfishly as BCVMDM. That would be Before CoronaVirus Mattered Directly to Me. It was the gap between my two semesters teaching at Charles University’s Institute for Information Studies and Librarianship in Prague. I was using this time to prepare for the upcoming semester, and was reworking a course I had previously taught so that it was tailored for my Czech bachelor’s and master’s students. I had taught prior iterations of this class as a continuing educa...

Photo credit: Masaryk University This week we share the achievements of one of our alumni, Petra Urbanová whose long-term research in the field of anthropology has become applicable to save one of the most vulnerable populations at-risk of COVID-19, immunocompromised children. Read on to learn more about how Petra expanded on her experience as a Fulbright Scholar at North Carolina State University in 2013/2014 to contribute her skills in craniofacial morphology to a database that now is used to accurately fit children’s protective facial masks. Some fields of science are directly connected to our current, pressing global challenge of stopping the spread of COVID-19, such as virology, epidemiology, and most fields of medicine. In other fields, we have heard about the successes of some who have creatively stepped in and started developing aids and tools to help those fighting the coronavirus on the front lines. The technical universities in the Czech Republic and many companies th...

Niecea Wilson, Fulbright ETA 2018-2019 at Agriculture and Veterinary High School in Lanskroun, reports on her experience returning to teach in the USA and the effects of COVID-19 on teaching and learning in Downieville, a picturesque mountain town of 300 residents in the heart of the Sierra-Nevadas. New teachers are told if they can persist through the difficulties of the first year, nothing is impossible. Well, this is my third year teaching, (my first year back in the United States after completing my 2018-2019 Fulbright ETA in Lanškroun, Czechia) and it has certainly been the most difficult. A year that began with rolling power outages, leaving millions of Californians without electricity, now concludes with a global pandemic that shut our schools so abruptly, many of us didn’t get to say goodbye to our students. Everything just came to a standstill. School districts and states are now grappling with how to administer free and appropriate public education, a right to all stu...