Six Trojans receive Fulbright awards
Awardees will teach and conduct research in topics from biology to literature.
By SEAN CAMPBELL
Six Trojans were among more than 800 distinguished professionals to earn awards from the Fulbright United States Scholar Program for the 2024-25 academic year. The program offers awardees the opportunity to teach, research and carry out professional projects in more than 135 countries, according to its website.
USC professors Jenifer Crawford, Nina Kang, Serghei Mangul and Jessica Marglin, alongside doctoral candidate Jordan Chancellor and alum Katie Googe, were selected for the competitive award. With an acceptance rate of around 20% in the last two award cycles, according to ProFellow, an online database for professional and academic fellowships, those selected faced stiff competition.
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“[Earning a Fulbright Scholarship] is a validation of the work you have done and an encouragement for the work to continue,” said Kang, a master lecturer in academic and professional writing at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
The USC scholars will take their research projects across the world, from the Canary Islands, to Jordan and to Mexico.
The Daily Trojan interviewed Crawford, Kang, Mangul and Googe regarding the projects they will be taking on through the Fulbright program.
Jenifer Crawford
Crawford, a professor of clinical education at the Rossier School of Education, will embark on her second Fulbright project in January. Crawford will teach graduate-level classes on second language acquisition, curriculum instruction and language pedagogy while working on curriculum development for a doctoral program for Educational Linguistics at Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico.
“I am really, really excited to write and teach with these incredibly smart and dedicated colleagues [at Universidad Veracruzana],” Crawford said. “I am excited to do that in Spanish, which offers me an opportunity to lean into and improve my Spanish language skills.”
Crawford’s previous Fulbright Scholarship took her to Brazil, where she worked on projects involving racial justice in education reform. Crawford said she was drawn back to the program due to her first project being “incredibly intellectually engaging.”
This time, however, is much different.
For one, after spending three to four months per year in Mexico growing up, Crawford has a deeper connection to the Spanish language than to the Brazilian Portuguese she spoke in 2010. She also studied as an exchange student at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, both in Mexico City, before taking her first teaching position as an English teacher at a secondary school in Oaxaca.
Second, and more important to Crawford, is the experience for her children, who will be joining her in Mexico in the winter.
“For them to be able to have an experience where they don’t just talk to elders in their family or extended family in Spanish, but are able to talk … to kids on their soccer team or basketball team in Spanish … is really exciting, and have a different view of this part of their identity and heritage,” Crawford said.
Serghei Mangul
Mangul, an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy and quantitative and computational biology at the School of Pharmacy, will look to develop the bioinformatics program at the Technical University of Moldova for his Fulbright project.
Mangul was born in Moldova and hopes to use his knowledge in bioinformatics — a blend of biology, computer science and statistics — to make a contribution to its developing scientific field.
“I think bioinformatics should not be only for developed nations,” Mangul said. “If we achieve success there, it will be really, really encouraging for the nations in Eastern Europe to join and maybe repeat the same path.”
Bioinformatics uses computer technology to collect, store, analyze and disseminate biological data, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. Mangul helped develop a bioinformatics lab at USC, but the field has yet to develop fully in Moldova, he said.
Despite Moldova having strong computer science and biology research institutes and only a decent computer and internet connection being required for bioinformatic research, Mangul said his home country lacks the interdisciplinary knowledge that he learned at USC after leaving Moldova.
“They don’t realize that they have everything they need to do it,” Mangul said. “They just need to be structured [and gain] experience, and somebody needs to come help them.”
Mangul said that his first priority is developing the metagenomics program, a part of bioinformatics that is applied to microorganisms, when he arrives in Moldova in May.
Nina Kang
Kang, a master lecturer in academic and professional writing at Dornsife, will work to integrate artificial intelligence and learning management technology into her instruction at the University of Jordan in Amman through the Fulbright Scholarship.
“We have these [learning management systems] in many parts of the world,” Kang said. “[In Jordan] it’s not quite like that. The LMS is not always a smooth part of instruction.”
Kang said she will teach instructors how to integrate AI into their learning management systems and how to incorporate both into their teaching to make the learning hybrid, including online assignments and academic resources.
After teaching in 10 different countries in her career, Kang is no stranger to international teaching. Kang took a life-changing gap year to teach writing and math in Uganda.
In her 20s, Kang taught in Uzbekistan, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria, where she participated in rebuilding the education system. She has continued to teach in multiple developing countries where she felt the resources were limited.
Kang was drawn to Jordan and the Middle East for her Fulbright project after leading an English department training in Lebanon through the U.S. State Department — which also issues the U.S. Fulbright Awards.
“I chose specifically an area where I felt, ‘Oh, I can contribute,’” Kang said.
Katie Googe
For her Fulbright project, Googe will use her recently completed dissertation on 19th- and 20th-century anti-imperialistic American speculative fiction to teach classes on the topic at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.
“The Czech Fulbright Program is a really sort of open program,” Googe said. “They accept applications from all different disciplines … My work is a little bit specific some Fulbright programs really want you to be a pre-med student or that kind of thing and so [the Czech program] was a good fit for me.”
Googe is most looking forward to hearing the perspectives of international American literature scholars.
“One thing that I have learned studying American literature is that it’s not something you can shove away into a corner and say, ‘This is American literature, and no one else is involved,’” Googe said. “I am really excited to talk to other people who are studying this, who are going to have a different perspective and are going to understand the sort of international connections of American literature really differently than the mostly American professors who have taught me.”
The newly minted scholar will teach classes on imperialism in U.S. literature and science fiction. Googe will teach in the birthplace of the word “robot” — one of the foundations of science fiction — from Sept. 23 through May 23.
Googe is excited to “explore science fiction and to think about all of the questions that came up in [her] dissertation.”
