Two faculty and one professional staff member have received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award for the 2024-2025 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious and competitive fellowships that provide unique opportunities for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. Fulbright scholars also play a critical role in U.S. public diplomacy, establishing long-term relationships between people and nations.

The Fulbright Scholars from UC Davis are Mary Alurwar, international scholar advisor in Global Affairs, Dr. Lynna Dhanani, assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, and Dr. Ron Mangun, director of the Center for Mind and Brain and distinguished professor in the Department of Psychology. 

Mary Alurwar - Germany

Alurwar received a Fulbright International Education Administrator Award. This award provides international education professionals an opportunity to engage in a two-week intensive seminar to learn about the host country’s education system and establish networks with U.S. and international colleagues. In October, Alurwar will spend two weeks in Germany to learn the latest trends in Germany’s higher education system. She will participate in lectures, workshops and campus visits in Berlin and other regions of Germany.

Alurwar joined UC Davis Global Affairs in 2014 and has been in the field of international education for over ten years. She is an international scholar advisor serving as the J-1 lead advisor and backup for H1-Bs. Alurwar is a member of NAFSA: Association of International Educators and has served as a representative in several key regional roles.

Lynna Dhanani - India

Dhanani received the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award for the 2024-25 academic year. This award provides U.S. faculty, researchers, and professionals the opportunity to teach, conduct research, or carry out a combination of teaching and research at an Indian institution. 

As a Fulbright scholar, Dhanani will conduct research for her project “Multilingual Worlds of Praise: The Circulation and Production of Jain Devotional Hymns in Medieval Gujarat” by investigating several manuscript libraries across northwest, central, and south India while actively engaging with local Indian scholars, Jain communities, and Indian institutions. Her project explores the diversity of Jain hymns produced in the classical language of Sanskrit and the older Indian vernacular languages of Prakrit and Apabhramsha in 11th-13th century Gujarat by the Jain polymath scholar-monk Hemacandra and his contemporaries.

Dhanani joined the Department of Religious Studies at UC Davis in 2020, where she enjoys teaching multiple courses on Jainism and South Asian religions, as well as on sacred music and ethical eating. In 2022-23, she was awarded a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellowship at the University of Chicago for her work on the 20th-century Jain Muni Jambuvijaya and his manuscript archiving projects. In the same year, she served as a co-curator and academic advisor for the “Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings” exhibit at the UCLA Fowler Museum, for which she is currently co-authoring the exhibition book. In 2022, she received the ASUCD Excellence in Education Teaching Award. 

Ron Mangun – United Kingdom

Mangun received a Fulbright US-UK Distinguished Chair Award. The award is a generous six-month secondment that enables a prominent US professor to be based at the University of Birmingham, with access to all the University’s research collections and provides an opportunity to undertake research and build links in the UK. Mangun will spend six months in 2025 at the University of Birmingham working on research related to his ongoing work on attention and free will, which is supported by the National Science Foundation. Birmingham has specialized neuroscience equipment, a magnetoencephalography (MEG) machine, that UC Davis doesn’t have, which will enable Mangun to build on his research.

Mangun founded the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain in 2002. He leads the Laboratory for the Neural Mechanisms of Attention, which is supported by grants from NSF, NIH, and corporate and foundation partners. Mangun has consulted on numerous university, U.S. government and international scientific panels and advisory boards. He is coauthor of the leading textbook, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind and is currently the founding Editor-in-Chief for Frontiers in Cognition. Mangun's work on the neuroscience of attention investigates how we perceive, attend, ignore and become aware of events in our environment. He has received numerous awards and was elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2007 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010.

Fulbright offers a range of research and professional exchange opportunities for UC Davis faculty and staff in over 130 countries—and brings international scholars and students here for collaborations that transform the campus community and build bridges to all parts of the world. The Program is directed by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and administered by the Institute of International Education.