The three awardees are graduate students based in Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. 

The Einaudi Center has managed Cornell's applications for the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program since 2000, supporting over 200 students in applying to this competitive opportunity. One in three of Cornell’s Fulbright-Hays applicants wins an award—much higher than the national average of one in ten. 

Meet the Fulbrighters

Christa Núñez

Ghana

Christa Núñez, PhD student in Global Development, will continue her work on black land politics while abroad in Ghana. 

“The Back to Land Movement asserts that displaced Black and Indigenous peoples residing on marginal lands in urban regions and reservations in the U.S. are mobilizing liberatory trajectories toward food and land sovereignty in rural lands,” says Núñez. 

She will collaborate with the University of Ghana to study how migration and international political exchange influence the processes of liberation and collaboration across regions.

Steven McCutcheon Rubio

Mexico

Steven McCutcheon Rubio is a PhD student in Global Development who studies infrastructure security and mobility through the case study of the Corredor Interoceanico en el Istmo de Tehuantepec—"a sprawling transportation, logistics, manufacturing, and energy corridor under development in southern Mexico." 

His project explores how this route “is shaping the emergence of an internal borderland in the region” and how it affects the state, agrarian communities, and migrants. 

Adele Woodmanse

Morocco

Adele Woodmanse is a graduate student in the School of Integrative Plant Science Soil whose work studies adaptive agricultural landscapes in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. 

“The High Atlas Mountains are a hotspot for biodiversity and climate change, and they conserve agrobiodiversity associated with unique cultural practices,” says Woodmanse. “Cereal crops are central to agricultural systems across the region, but little is known about cereal diversity.” 

In collaboration with researchers at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Woodmanse seeks to better understand agricultural livelihoods in the region and evaluate the role of cereal diversity.