Fulbright Association
To engage, serve, and support a diverse, inclusive, and growing network dedicated to the Fulbright principle of cooperation through mutual understanding.
Fulbright Association mission statement.
The Fulbright Association extends the Fulbright international exchange into a lifelong experience for U.S. alumni. We connect alumni and friends of the Fulbright program through lifelong learning, collaborative networking, and service projects at home and abroad. Established on February 27, 1977, the Fulbright Association is the U.S. alumni organization of the Fulbright Program, representing 140,000 U.S. alumni – 70 years of Fulbrighters since the program’s inception – and friends of international education. We support a thriving alumni community that helps increase visibility for the Fulbright effect and helps preserve Fulbright exchanges for future generations.
Through our 54 local chapters, the Fulbright Association hosts more than 230 regional and national programs each year for visiting Fulbrighters and alumni throughout the United States. Programs include educational events, career development seminars, music and art presentations, networking events, volunteer activities, and more. We are a hub for Fulbright alumni to connect in meaningful ways, as well as a community of friends of Fulbright who support international education and cultural understanding around the world.
West and Mid-Michigan Chapter
The West and Mid-Michigan Chapter of the Fulbright Association is a regionally based chapter serving Fulbright alumni and friends of international exchange. The chapter is focused on hosting engaging programs and events for Fulbright alumni and visiting Fulbright students and scholars throughout the region, primarily in Jackson, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Big Rapids. The chapter is closely affiliated with universities and colleges in the region, and often co-sponsors programs with these institutions.
Executive Leadership Board
Michelle Metro-Roland, President
Dr. Michelle Metro-Roland serves as the President of the West & Mid Michigan Fulbright Association and is the Fulbright Program Advisor (FPA), Foreign Student Advisor (FSA), and Campus Scholar Liaison at Western Michigan University.
A cultural geographer, her research explores landscape, place, and material culture and is concerned with questions of interpretation and Peircean semiotics. Her work has investigated the ways in which various scales of local, national, and global culture interact in the built environment, as more recently has turned to an exploration of the intersection between linguistic and physical landscapes. She has published widely, including numerous articles and book chapters, a monograph, Tourists, Signs and the City: The Semiotics of Culture in an Urban Landscape, and is co-author of Tourism, Performance, and Place: A Geographic Perspective, and co-editor of Landscape, Tourism, and Meaning.
Dr. Metro-Roland has studied, researched, and taught internationally. She studied Classics at the University of Nottingham, and Latin in Rome, taught English in a technical high school in Budapest, Hungary, and North American Civilization at South East European University in Tetovo, Macedonia. In 2005 she received a Fulbright-Hays DDRA award for field work in Budapest.
Bill Weiner, Vice President
Bill Weiner is a happily retired lawyer and law professor. He served on the board of the statewide Fulbright chapter and then helped form our new West and Mid-Michigan Chapter.
While a student at Kalamazoo College, Bill studied for six months in Vichy and Clermont-Ferrand, France. Shortly after the group returned to the US, the May 1968 student revolt broke out across France. Bill claims no responsibility for the historic uprising.
While on the faculty at Thomas Cooley Law School, he planned, developed, and received American Bar Association accreditation for international law-based study abroad programs in Caen and Paris, France; Freiburg, Germany; Melbourne, Australia; Christchurch and Hamilton, New Zealand; and Toronto, Canada. He also directed and taught in summer international law programs for the University of San Diego School of Law in Paris, Dublin, and Oxford.
Bill’s Fulbright was an International Education Administrators award. His group of twenty-five international education professionals spent three weeks in Germany in 2004. They began with a week in Berlin, then visited sites in the former GDR, followed by short stays in Stuttgart and Mannheim. Among many highlights, they were invited to attend the ceremony where ten countries joined the European Union.
Richard Scott Cohen, President-in-Training
Dr. Richard Scott Cohen is Chair of the Department of Humanities, Professor of Music, and Director of Instrumental Concert Ensembles at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. A native of Chicago, he received bachelor’s degrees in Music Education and in Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, through which he also studied abroad at the University of Barcelona (Spain). He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in Conducting from Northwestern University.
From 1993 to 1995, Cohen was a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, where he researched the community band movement in the Valencia region of that country. His subsequent dissertation was awarded the Fritz Thelen Prize in Wind Music Research by the International Society for the Research and Promotion of Band Music (IGEB) in 2000.
Cohen currently serves as Vice President of the IGEB; as a board member of the Fulbright Association of West and Mid-Michigan; as coordinator of the Ferris Fulbrighters and Friends group; as a board member and Past President of the Rotary Club of Big Rapids; as a board member of Artworks-Big Rapids; as a board member of the Big Rapids Festival of the Arts; and as chair of Ferris State’s International Education Committee; as a member of Ferris State’s Shoah Visual History Archive Project; as a member of Ferris State’s Arts and Lectures Committee; and as a member of Ferris State’s Museum of Sexist Objects at Ferris State University. He is also a member and former board member of the College Band Directors National Association North Central Division, and of the North American Catalan Society.
An honorary lifetime member of the Michigan School Band and Orchestra Association, Cohen remains active as a conductor, trombonist, composer, arranger, music adjudicator, clinician, researcher, author, translator and lecturer throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia.
Felix Famoye, Treasurer
Dr. Felix Famoye is a professor and a consulting statistician in the Department of Statistics, Actuarial and Data Sciences at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, USA. He received his B.Sc. degree with honors in statistics from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. He received his Ph.D. degree in statistics from the University of Calgary under the Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship.
He is a co-author of the books “Lagrangian Probability Distributions”, “Statistics for Biological and Health Sciences” and “Applied Statistics: Regression and Analysis of Variance.” In 2009-10, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria. He is a recipient of the Carnegie Corporation of New York Fellowship Award. In 2016-17, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria.
Also, he is a recipient of the College of Science & Technology Outstanding Teaching Award, College of Science & Technology Award for Outstanding Research, Central Michigan University Excellence in Teaching Award, and President’s Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Statistical Distributions and Applications and Associate Editors of other journals.
Ian Magnuson, Secretary
Ian Magnuson, originally from Battle Creek, has long had a passion for international affairs. He completed his B.A. in German and Global and International Studies at Western Michigan University and studied abroad at the University of Bonn. His capstone project focused on the then-nascent German Pirate Party. While at WMU, he co-founded the German Club and Western Model United Nations student organizations.
While living in Detroit after graduation, he was granted a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Leipzig, Germany where he would teach at two university-preparatory schools (Gymnasiums). His time there sat at the height of the 2015 refugee crisis and the beginning of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Ian returned to the U.S. to complete a Master of Public Policy degree at Michigan State University, where he served as a graduate assistant, resurrected the Public Policy Student Association, and was a member of the Graduate Students Union. Stoked by his experience seeing wind turbines and solar panels überall in Germany, he became interested in environmental policy and focused his capstone project on sustainability planning.
After graduating, he returned to Kalamazoo. In 2022, he returned to the Haenicke Institute for Global Education, where he worked as a student worker. Currently he serves as the interim Marketing Manager for the Institute, supporting international recruitment, study abroad, global learning, and more.
Ian joined the executive board in June of 2021. He served on the City of Kalamazoo Environmental Concerns Committee for four years, swims for the competitively with the Michigan Masters swim team and enjoys writing, video games, and making pizza from scratch.
Thomas Gilsdorf
Tom Gilsdorf is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Central Michigan University. He has a BA in mathematics from the University o f Minnesota, an MS in mathematics and computer science from Mankato State University (now called Minnesota State University-Mankato), and a PhD in mathematics from Washington State University. The first significant international experience occurred for him in a Solomon Lefschetz Postdoctoral position at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados- CINVESTAV), Mexico City, Mexico.
His career path has included serving as a mathematics department chair at the University of North Dakota and at Central Michigan University. Tom has had two Fulbright Scholarships at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), Mexico City and the Centro de Investigaciones en Matemáticas (CIMAT) in Guanajuato, Mexico. His academic specialties are in two areas. One is topological vector spaces, which is an abstraction of concepts from calculus and linear algebra. The other is cultural mathematics, also called ethnomathematics, which is a combination of mathematics with disciplines like anthropology and linguistics. He is the author of the the book Introduction to Cultural Mathematics, with Case Studies in the Otomies and Incas.
Past Board Members
David C. Weindorf, Vice President for Research and Economic Development at Georgia Southern University
Vlad Tarabara, Director of the Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies & Professor of Civil Engineering, Michigan State University
Max Cherum, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Kalamazoo College
Privacy Policy