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
Richard Scott Cohen, President
Dr. Richard Scott Cohen is Professor Emeritus. He served as 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.
Michelle Metro-Roland, Vice President
Dr. Michelle Metro-Roland serves as the Vice President of the West & Mid Michigan Fulbright Association and is the Fulbright Program Advisor (FPA), Fulbright International 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, Treasurer
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.
Lane Demas, Secretary
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Lane Demas is a professor of history at Central Michigan University, where he specializes in African American history. He is the author of two books: Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) and Integrating the Gridiron: Black Civil Rights and American College Football (Rutgers University Press, 2010). His media contributions include interviews for outlets such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and CNN.com, radio interviews for National Public Radio and BBC World Service, and interviews for ESPN television documentaries. Professor Demas has earned awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the United States Golf Association (USGA), and the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH). He is also editor of The Michigan Historical Review, the only scholarly publication devoted to Michigan history. In 2021, he served as a Fulbright scholar at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, where he taught African American history.
Thomas Gilsdorf, Member-At-Large
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.
Jennifer Liu, Member-At-Large
Dr. Jennifer Liu is a professor of history at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. She received her bachelor’s degree in history at UCLA and earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in modern Chinese history from the University of California, Irvine. In 2021 Liu was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Taiwan where she conducted research on refugee students during the Sino-Japanese War (WWII) and the Chinese Civil War, Kuomintang youth organizations, military training in high schools, and civics textbooks at her host institution of the National Central Library (equivalent to the Library of Congress in the US) in Taipei. She subsequently published a book, Indoctrinating the Youth: Secondary Education in Wartime China and Postwar Taiwan, 1937-1960.
In 2023 Liu was the Visiting Faculty Scholar at the University of Michigan’s Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Residency Research Fellowship where she researched her current project on how women’s magazines in Taiwan have evolved on the topics of domesticity, democracy, feminism, and fashion from 1945 to 2020. Liu is also a member of the Association for Asian Studies. She has given conference presentations, public lectures, and invited talks throughout the US, Canada, Taiwan, and Germany.
Mahana Lugo, Member-At-Large
Mahana Lugo is an Independent Behavioral Health Therapist based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has dedicated her career to the field of human development since 2004, gaining extensive experience across community mental health, school counseling, education, and human resources in both the United States and Nicaragua.
Originally from Nicaragua, Mahana was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship / Foreign Student Program in 2012, earning her Master’s degree in School Counseling from Western Michigan University. Upon returning to Nicaragua, she led one of only 25 global winning teams in the 2015 Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund (AEIF). Her initiative, “Carruseles Educativos” (Educational Carousels), successfully promoted educational access to prevent child labor on coffee farms.
After completing her Fulbright service commitment, Mahana returned to Michigan, where she married her husband, David. Through her practice, Mahana Lugo, LLC, she partners with local organizations to implement effective mental health interventions. Deeply committed to community and global connection, Mahana also remains an active leader within the Kalamazoo Fulbright community, hosting events and networking with fellow alumni.
Shannon McMorrow, Member-At-Large
Dr. Shannon McMorrow is an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Health Programs at Western Michigan University. She specializes in community-based Photovoice research, combining participant photography with in-depth focus group discussions to promote gender, health, and racial equity.
McMorrow’s passion for global education started while studying abroad in Luxembourg as an undergraduate student. During her master’s program, she conducted HIV outreach in Belize and eventually started her academic career as a Lecturer at Uganda Martyrs University in 2005. Since then, McMorrow has built a globally engaged career as a university professor. She holds various leadership roles related to global engagement at WMU, is the global health Editorial Director for the Health Promotion Practice journal, and has engaged in research or teaching in Belize, Bulgaria, Canada, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Thailand, Uganda, and multiple locations in the U.S. including Puerto Rico.
From 2022-2023, McMorrow was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar with Makerere University in Uganda. She brought her family for the year, conducted research with women refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and taught public health courses. While in Uganda, McMorrow was awarded a Fulbright Regional Travel grant to conduct projects at Nelson Mandela University and University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. In 2025, she was honored to be a Fulbright Specialist with Naresuan University, Thailand. These Fulbright experiences inspired McMorrow to engage in her current roles on the board of Fulbright of West and Michigan and as a national, subject matter reviewer for the core U.S. Fulbright Scholar competition.
Prakash Adhikari, Member-At-Large
Dr. Prakash Adhikari is Professor of Political Science at Central Michigan University. He studies conflict processes from below, and he is interested in understanding how civilians behave when they face armed actors and are forced to make a difficult choice between leaving and staying. His most extensive works to date are focused on forced migration, looking at the causes of conflict-induced displacement with case studies from Nepal and Malawi. He has published in American Journal of Political, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Human Rights, among others.
In 2024-2025, Dr. Adhikari was a Fulbright U. S. Scholar in Malawi. His previous work has received several awards, prizes, and fundings, including a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). His current research examines the integration of recently resettled refugees into local communities in Michigan.
Jennifer Ward, Member-At-Large
Jennifer Ward is an Assistant Professor of Special Education at Saginaw Valley State University, bringing a rich background in global and domestic inclusive education to her work. She holds an EdD from the University of San Francisco, where she explored the intersections of human rights, Critical Refugee Studies, and disability justice through the lived experiences of disabled refugees.
Her academic career is built on over twenty years of K-12 experience as a special education teacher of Deaf/Hard of Hearing students in the Midwest, Southwest, and Southern California, alongside extensive teaching experience abroad. Her commitment to international inclusive education includes two Fulbright Specialist projects in Greece and Morocco, and leadership as the Immediate Past President of the Council for Exceptional Children’s (CEC) Division of International Special Education and Services.
Past Board Members
David C. Weindorf, Vice President for Research and Economic Development at Georgia Southern University
Felix Famoye, Professor Emeritus, Department of Statistics, Actuarial and Data Sciences, Central Michigan University
Ian Magnuson, Operations Analyst, Michigan Home Energy Rebates
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
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