Five University of Tennessee faculty receive Fulbright Awards

(Press-News.org) Five faculty members at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville — Christopher Cherry, Virginia Corrigan, Bernard Issa, Hector Pulgar and Tong (Toni) Wang — have been selected to receive Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awards for the 2025-26 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Fulbright U.S. Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. Fulbright Scholars engage in cutting-edge research and expand their professional networks, often forging future partnerships between institutions.

“I’m incredibly proud to see our faculty recognized with Fulbright awards that reflect the breadth and depth of excellence at UT — from engineering and veterinary medicine to world languages and agriculture,” said Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor John Zomchick. “Their global engagement strengthens our campus and demonstrates the far-reaching impact of their scholarship.”

Christopher Cherry, Tickle College of Engineering
Christopher Cherry, professor and associate department head of undergraduate studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will travel to Rwanda for five months as part of Fulbright’s Africa Regional Research Program. Cherry will work with the University of Rwanda’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Transport, Logistics, and Smart Cities to investigate the electrification of small vehicles, including e-bikes, e-trikes and e-motorcycles, in urban and rural Rwanda. Electrification of the transportation system is seen as a necessary strategy to maintain mobility while reducing environmental harm and increasing energy efficiency from vehicle operations, said Cherry, who joined UT in August 2007.

Virginia Corrigan, College of Veterinary Medicine
Virginia Corrigan, clinical associate professor in Small Animal Clinical Sciences and director of interprofessional education for the College of Veterinary Medicine, will travel to Australia in spring 2026. She will be based at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Wellbeing Science  and the Melbourne Veterinary School. Corrigan’s work will focus on integrating systems-informed positive psychology into veterinary education and developing a collaborative research project to evaluate how well-being frameworks can be woven into veterinary professional curricula. Corrigan graduated from UT’s College of Veterinary Medicine in 2010 and has been a faculty member since January 2024.

Bernard Issa, College of Arts and Sciences
Bernard Issa, an associate professor of Spanish linguistics in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, will be working at the Universidad de Murcia in Spain in the fall. Issa specializes in second language acquisition and will use his Fulbright opportunity to test how different research instruments used to measure working memory are able to predict learning outcomes for language learners, focusing on native Spanish speakers learning English as their second language. Issa, who also serves as the First-Year Spanish Language Program director and the language training coordinator for graduate students, has been at UT since 2015.

Hector Pulgar, Tickle College of Engineering
Hector Pulgar, associate professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will spend six months at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain. His project will focus on making electric power systems more reliable and environmentally friendly by improving the integration of renewable energy sources into the electricity grid. Because renewable sources do not produce power in a steady, predictable way as traditional power plants do, the grid can become less stable and more prone to blackouts, said Pulgar, who joined UT in fall 2014.

Tong (Toni) Wang, UT Institute of Agriculture
Tong (Toni) Wang, Charles E. Wharton Institute Professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Food Science, will travel to the University of Iceland for her Fulbright project. She will explore arctic fish and proteins and their hydrolysates for their potent antifreezing and antioxidant activities, which could be used to improve the quality and shelf life of frozen foods and foods containing omega-3 fatty acids. Wang, who joined UT in 2019, will also investigate the factors affecting polar lipid recovery from arctic fish and processing byproducts that are rich in high-omega-3 and high-value polar lipids.

Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 400,000 talented and accomplished students, scholars, teachers, artists and professionals with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research abroad. Fulbright scholars exchange ideas, build people-to-people connections and work to address complex global challenges.

Notable Fulbright recipients include 62 Nobel laureates, 93 Pulitzer Prize recipients, 82 MacArthur Fellows, 44 heads of state or government, and thousands of leaders across the private, public and nonprofit sectors.

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