Sorcinelli Receives Fulbright Award to Participate in Education Project in Qatar

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Mary Deane Sorcinelli, senior fellow in the Institute for Teaching Excellence and Faculty Development, has received a Fulbright Specialist Award to engage in a collaborative higher education project in Qatar.

Sorcinelli will spend February in Education City, Doha, hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning of Texas A&M University, Education City. She will also visit other universities in Education City, which include Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Hamad bin Khalifa, Northwestern, University College London, Virginia Commonwealth, and Weill Cornell Medicine. 

Sorcinelli, who is a professor emeritus in the College of Education and served as associate provost for faculty development and as founding director of the Center for Teaching, will work with students, faculty, professional staff and academic leaders in the Texas A&M Qatar community on issues of teaching and learning, faculty professional development, and systemic change in undergraduate education. 

“I look forward to working with colleagues as they develop the first teaching center in the country, assess its impact and advance the culture of teaching and learning at Texas A&M Qatar,” Sorcinelli said.  “In turn, establishing leading American academic and research universities in the Arab Gulf is a bold, interesting and important experiment. I hope to learn about the possibilities of this unique educational experience as a bridge between cultures.”    

She is also co-principal investigator of a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the Association of American Universities (AAU) to study how universities can successfully coordinate multiple undergraduate STEM education reforms to achieve sustainable change.

The Fulbright Specialist Award promotes linkages between U.S. scholars and professionals and their counterparts at host institutions overseas. The focus of the award is educational capacity-building and the development of longer-term educational relationships. The program awards grants to qualified U.S. faculty and professionals, in select disciplines, to engage in collaborative projects lasting up to six-weeks at eligible institutions overseas.