A Frogtown resident will soon be heading to Panama to teach university-level classes through the international Fulbright program.
Andrea Prichard, a former employee of Ramsey County Parks and Recreation’s Soil and Water Conservation Division, will lecture from August to December at the Universidad Tecnológica Oteima on Geographic Information Systems and the use of GIS in agriculture and natural resource management.
Prichard is one of 800 Americans who will teach, research or provide expertise abroad in 2021-2022 as part of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar program, which is backed by the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. The Fulbright program is the U.S. government’s flagship international exchange and is designed to build connections between residents of the U.S. and other nations. It was established in 1946 and sends Americans to 160 countries worldwide.
The Fulbright program was cut back but not fully suspended throughout the first year of the pandemic.
Some U.S. Fulbright students were able to travel and begin degree programs overseas in a few countries, and some foreign Fulbrighters were able to start their program in the U.S. Others began their programs remotely.