Doug Abbott receives Fulbright Scholar grant to study in Israel

A University of Nebraska-Lincoln faculty member has received a 2005-06 Fulbright Scholar grant from the Council for International Exchange of Scholars.

Douglas A. Abbott, professor of family and consumer science, will be at Haifa University in Israel from January through August. Abbott will work on a research project titled "Fractured Families: The Effects of a Combat-Related Injury on the Family." A member of the UNL faculty since 1983, he teaches classes on family policy, family theories and research methods, and researches adolescent sexual behavior and cross-cultural mate selection.

He will be one of two UNL faculty members on active Fulbright grants, joining historian Timothy R. Mahoney, who is a lecturer on gender and society in U.S. history at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, through June.

A Fulbright grant can an enrich a faculty member's teaching and research when he or she returns to the United States, said Brian Wilcox, professor of psychology and director of the Center on Children, Families and the Law at UNL. Wilcox recently completed six months as a Fulbright scholar at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

"Any time you have an experience like a Fulbright year working at a university and with students in a different country, it opens your eyes to importance of having a sense of the culture of that country and of the cultural differences between it and the United States," Wilcox said. "That experience and the ongoing collaboration that I have with the people I met during my Fulbright time has had a very direct effect on how I think about my teaching and my research."

Wilcox said another result of his Fulbright grant is that a student from Brazil will come to UNL in March to work on his dissertation under Wilcox's guidance.

Since 1946, the Fulbright Scholar Program has been the U.S. Department of State's flagship academic exchange program, serving as a vehicle for promoting mutual international understanding. Participants are selected for their scholarship and their leadership potential.

CONTACT: Douglas Abbott, Professor, Family & Consumer Science, (402) 472-1665