By Emily Leclerc | Waisman Science Writer
Being awarded a Fulbright is a globally recognized and highly prestigious achievement. One of the top awards in all of academia, it is no small feat being selected to become a Fulbrighter. The program’s purpose is to expand perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue by sending accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals to more than 140 partner countries to conduct research or teach English. Over the course of the last year and a half there were three Fulbright scholars from the Waisman Center.
In late 2022, Waisman investigator Brittany Travers, PhD, associate professor of kinesiology, was selected to become a Fulbrighter. Travers spent six months in Malaga, Spain at the University of Malaga where she taught a graduate class on neuroplasticity and collaborated with researchers there as well. For Travers, applying was a personal and professional pursuit. “A big goal of mine is to be a global citizen. That means having perspectives that may not be what I grew up with and learning about the different ways people all over do things,” Travers says. “How do people talk about neuroscience and autism in other cultures? Having these experiences and then being able to infuse them into my teaching was something I felt was really important.”
Travers brought her whole family with her to Spain and says that for her and her husband and children, it was an incredible experience. Upon returning to the states, her children even asked to host international exchange students due to the trip’s influence. “It was incredibly rewarding being able to forge relationships across cultural and geographical boundaries,” Travers says. “It was so inspiring and gives me a lot of hope for the future.”
Not long after Travers left for Spain, Brittany St. John, PhD, was awarded a Fulbright to continue her research on feeding challenges in autism in Australia. Then a little more than a month ago, Libby Hladik, doctoral candidate in kinesiology, was told she is heading off to the Czech Republic on a Fulbright to further her research project on disability inclusion in cultural institutions. Both St. John and Hladik were members of the lab of Karla Ausderau, PhD, Waisman investigator and associate professor of kinesiology.
“I feel honored that both St. John and Hladik were a part of my lab,” Ausderau says. “They are both highly deserving students. While it is a highly competitive process, I wasn’t surprised when they were selected because they were both competitive applicants and bring the qualities necessary for a Fulbright. Receiving a Fulbright felt like a natural match for their skill sets and long-term goals. As a mentor, I was ecstatic to have two students receive Fulbrights over consecutive years.”
The Fulbright program prioritizes cultural exchanges and the promotion of mutual understandings across cultural differences. St. John’s and Hladik’s lines of research fit Fulbright’s model well because they prioritize community engagement and creating space for community input throughout the research process. “They think about moving beyond their siloed areas of work and about engaging the community that we live in,” Ausderau says. “For both St. John and Hladik, this extends far beyond UW-Madison, the state, and country to an international perspective and recognizing the value of being engaged in research in places outside of the United States.”
St. John is at the end of her Fulbright and will be returning to the U.S. with her family in May. She has been in Melbourne, Australia at the Olga Tennison Autism Research Center which is a part of Latrobe University. There she has been piloting a trial of Australian families in a six-month caregiver-mediated feeding intervention. St. John adapted the program in Wisconsin during her time in Ausderau’s lab. “We culturally adapted the program for Australian families to help kids with feeding challenges,” St. John says.
Feeding challenges often include a restricted diet – meaning there are only a select number of foods that they will eat – or having a really hard time accepting new foods into their diet. “So, we collaborate with the caregiver to deliver the intervention. It is telehealth and we really work in partnership with the caregiver over the six months to support the child,” St. John says.
This work has continued to expand for St. John throughout her time in Australia. She has had two internal projects funded, her Fulbright extended by several months, and continuing collaborations that will travel with her to her new position after leaving Australia. Being a Fulbright scholar has opened so many doors for her including a faculty position at the University of Washington that starts in July. There she will start her own lab and continue the thread of feeding research alongside her colleagues in Australia.
The entire experience has been a dream come true for St. John. “I moved to Australia with my partner and two kids and we talk about this as the magical year that doesn’t exist because it has just been incredible. I can’t believe we got to do this,” St. John says. “I have also gotten to bring Waisman’s teachings with me. I have been partnering with microbiology, biostatisticians, people in food innovation and the agricultural side of things, nutrition, and dietetics. I have really taken the spirit of interdisciplinary training from Waisman and become connected across the entire university. It has been absolutely wonderful to get to do that.”
As St. John wraps up her time in Australia, Hladik is prepping to begin her Fulbright journey. She is off to the Czech Republic with her partner and five-year-old daughter in August. There she will work with the Institute for Research in Inclusive Education in the Faculty of Education at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic to continue her research on developing culturally appropriate assessments for disability inclusion in cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. Hladik’s work during her doctoral training with Ausderau has focused on helping places like the Madison’s Children’s Museum assess how well they include kids with disabilities and identify areas where they can improve their accessibility to all abilities. Understanding the cultural elements that add nuance to potential solutions is exceptionally exciting to Hladik.
“It happens that the Czech Republic is a perfect place to be thinking about culture and people with developmental disabilities because their social structure is different than in the U.S.. Children with developmental disabilities were institutionalized for a long time and it is only recently that education and public spaces have started to think about how to include them in everyday life with their families,” Hladik says. “And the institute that I am partnering with, one of their primary goals is to really think about community participation which is exactly what my research is. Just thinking about how families are being included in community and cultural spaces across societies. It is very exciting.”
Hladik’s project has two phases. The first is really getting to know what life is like in the Czech Republic for families with children with developmental disabilities. She will be working with an organization called Integrační centru Zahrada, which provides services for children with disabilities in Prague, and their partnered advocacy organizations to understand the accessibility efforts already in place and then in general learn what the lay of the land is and what is meaningful to the families. The second phase is then taking that newly acquired data and using it to culturally adapt a toolkit that she helped developed in Ausderau’s lab to, “help institutions self-evaluate and go through the process of understanding how they are meeting inclusion efforts and where they could potentially improve,” Hladik says.
While the project and receiving a Fulbright is incredibly important to Hladik, it is also particularly special that she is going to the Czech Republic. Her partner is originally from the Czech Republic and a native Czech speaker. This experience will give her an opportunity to be fully immersed in her partner’s culture and improve her Czech fluency. Their five-year-old daughter will also be enrolled in a Czech public school. “I am so very excited,” Hladik says. “And it is incredibly motivating because I still have to finish my dissertation!”
Both St. John and Hladik are deeply grateful for their experiences and look forward to all that the future holds. “I am just tremendously proud of both of them and excited for them to move from students to colleagues,” Ausderau says. “I look forward to continuing to collaborate with them and learn with them as future colleagues.”
St. John and Hladik say that if anyone is interested in applying for a Fulbright and learning more about what that process entails, that they would be happy to connect and talk. Their email addresses are bstjohn@wisc.edu and ehladik@wisc.edu.