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Four IU Bloomington professors selected as Fulbright Scholars
Feb. 20, 2001
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Four professors at Indiana University's Bloomington campus have been awarded Fulbright Scholar grants to teach or conduct research abroad.
Selected by the presidentially appointed J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board were Yvette Alex-Assensoh, assistant professor of political science; Randall Baker, professor and director of international programs in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs; Milagros Rivera-Sanchez, associate professor of telecommunications; and Marc Rodwin, associate professor of public and environmental affairs.
The IU professors join approximately 750 other scholars and professionals from across the United States who will travel to more than 100 countries, where they will work in a wide variety of academic and professional fields.
Alex-Assensoh's research and teaching interests are in the fields of urban politics, minority politics and mass political behavior. A native of Breaux Bridge, La., she joined the IU faculty in 1993 after earning a bachelor of arts degree from Dillard University and master's and doctoral degrees from Ohio State University.
She is author of Neighborhoods, Family and Political Behavior in Urban America, as well as articles and book chapters on the urban underclass and urban political behavior. She also is co-editor of Black and Multiracial Politics in America (2000), which examines the political implications of ethnic and racial diversity for inter-ethnic conflict, substantive representation, public policy, racial consciousness and mass political behavior.
Another book, African History and Politics: Ideology and Military Incursions, will be published this summer. She co-authored it with her husband, A.B. Assensoh, associate professor of Afro-American studies at IU.
Her current research, for which she received funding from the National Academy of Education and the National Science Foundation, focuses on the political development of American adolescents in urban and suburban communities. She also is working on a book that examines the relevance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s post-1965 ideology for contemporary American society.
An alumna of the Ralph Bunche Institute, Alex-Assensoh has been a book review editor for Urban Affairs Review. She serves on the executive council of the American Political Science Association. She currently is lecturing on and researching American government and minority politics at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.
Baker, an IU faculty member since 1985, seeks to bridge the gap between the natural and social sciences through his research and uses comparative study methods to examine the way that environmental and other policy problems are perceived and handled in society.
In recent years, he has published several books that exemplify the congruence of these various elements, including Environmental Management in the Tropics: An Historical Perspective (1992). His 1994 book, Summer in the Balkans, explored the way the process of democratization occurred in Bulgaria. The study was written as a result of another Fulbright scholarship, and it is now used as the briefing medium for new Fulbright scholars.
In another book published in 1995, Comparative Public Management, Baker explored the usefulness of looking at other developed democracies as a mirror for our own policy debates. He also is author of a forthcoming book, Transitions from Authoritarianism.
Baker has recently completed a study, "Environmental Law and Policy in the United States and the European Union," exploring the way that center-periphery relations operate in the federal structures of both institutions and how these two richest agglomerations in the world deal with the consequences of prosperity. This research was a joint venture with SPEA's Dutch partners at the universities of Rotterdam and Leiden.
Baker has been instrumental in establishing new schools and departments of public affairs overseas. In 1990, he helped create the New Bulgaria University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1997. He now is on its board of trustees. He has used his Fulbright grant to return there for additional research and teaching on public administration.
He has also helped develop degree programs in Azerbaijan, Spain, Bolivia, the United Kingdom, and several other countries.
Rivera-Sanchez, who joined the IU faculty in 2000, teaches and does research in the areas of telecommunications regulation, Internet law, new technologies and public policy. She currently is examining issues related to Internet privacy, access to cable broadband networks by unaffiliated ISPs, regulation of online pornography and regulation of telecommunications in Latin America.
She was a contributing author to the book Communication and the Law and has published on mass communications and law journals. She is the author of several journal articles that explore regulatory issues such as indecency in the electronic media, broadcast political advertising and the Supreme Court's treatment of commercial speech.
She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in public communication from the University of Puerto Rico, and she earned a master of arts degree in mass communication, with distinction, and a doctorate in mass communications, both from the University of Florida.
She was the law division liaison from the Association for Education in Journalism on the Commission on the Status of Minorities. She also was the chair of the Law and Policy Division of the Broadcast Education Association and has served as a reviewer for Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism History and the Journal of Communication Law and Policy.
This summer, she will be researching the regulation of telecommunications in Chile at the Catholic University of Chile.
Rodwin, who joined the IU faculty in 1992, is the author of Medicine, Money and Morals: Physicians' Conflicts of Interest (Oxford University Press, 1993) and has published in law, medicine and policy journals on the relation between law, ethics and markets in the health and environmental fields.
His primary research focuses on physicians' conflicts of interest, accountability in managed care, consumer protection in health care, health care markets and consumer choice and representation. His current research, funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award, explores different approaches to promoting accountable health care, particularly in managed care organizations.
Rodwin has been a Merck Visiting Health Law Scholar at Seton Hall Law School, and a visiting scholar at Chou University Law School in Japan. He currently is a fellow at the Center for Law and Health in the IU School of Law-Indianapolis. He has testified before Congress and state legislatures, and served on government commissions and advisory boards such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Indiana Commission on Hospital Antitrust.
He has assisted consumer groups such as the Consumer Federation of America, the Public Citizen Health Research Group, the Center for Medicare Rights and the Consumer Coalition for Quality Health Care. He has worked as a consultant or expert witness on policy- related litigation involving fiduciary law or physicians' conflicts of interests in six lawsuits.
He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the American Journal of Law and Medicine and Health Expectation: An International Journal of Participation in Health Care. He has published in the New England Journal of Medicine; Health Affairs; the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law; the American Journal of Law; and several other publications and law reviews.
Rodwin has a doctorate from Brandeis University, a law degree from the University of Virginia Law School, bachelor and master of arts degrees from Oxford University, and a bachelor of arts degree from Brown University. He currently is researching physicians' conflicts of interest in France and the United States at the Institute of Health Policy in Paris, France.
The U.S. Congress created the Fulbright Scholar Program in 1946 to foster mutual understanding through educational and cultural exchanges. Sen. J. William Fulbright, sponsor of the legislation, saw it as a step toward building an alternative to armed conflict. Today, the Fulbright Program is the U.S. government's premier scholarship program.
Grants are awarded to American students, teachers and scholars to study, teach, lecture and conduct research abroad and to foreign nationals to engage in similar activities in the United States. Individuals are selected on the basis of academic or professional qualifications and potential, plus ability and willingness to share ideas and experiences with people of diverse cultures.
The program is sponsored and funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, with additional funding coming from participating governments and host institutions in the United States and abroad. The Council for International Exchange of Scholars is a private, nonprofit organization that manages the scholar exchanges.
More information about the Fulbright Scholar Program is available on the Web at http://www.iie.org/cies/
(George Vlahakis, 812-855-0846, gvlahaki@indiana.edu)