DENTON (UNT), Texas — Faculty and students at the University of North Texas are working to make connections on an international scale daily, and three more are continuing the hard work of collaboration as part of the prestigious Fulbright Program.

Established by the U.S. Congress in 1946, the Fulbright Program aims to increase the mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries through research, study, teaching and other collaborative opportunities. The program provides funding for university faculty, staff and students to teach, study, and conduct research projects abroad.

Since 1906, there have been more than 100 UNT faculty and staff named as UNT Fulbright Scholars and Specialists. Since 1949, more than 60 students have participated in the Fulbright Student program.

The award winners for the 2025-2026 academic year include.

Fulbright Scholar Awards

Julie Leventhal, a principal lecturer in the Honors College, will be returning to Romania to teach at the West University of Timisoara in Timisoara, Romania in the spring. This is her second time going to Romania as part of the Fulbright program, the first of which was in 2022 through the University of Bucharest. In Timisoara, she will be teaching a course on interpersonal relationships through the department of sociology and psychology. She’ll also continue her project from her first Fulbright visit studying Romanian family values among young adults. This time, she also hopes to hold family education workshops within the community, such as relationship and marriage education, based on her earlier research on Romanian families. Leventhal has visited Romania multiple times for the part 15 years and looks forward to being based in a smaller city while also traveling to some surrounding countries like Hungary and Serbia during that time as well.

Feifei Pan, professor of geography and the environment in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and Director of Graduate Studies, will be in Türkiye this fall establishing a collaborative relationship between the Izmir Institute of Technology and UNT. His Fulbright-funded project will be to develop an irrigation scheduling tool based on predicted soil moistures using weather forecasts and machine learning for more precise irrigation scheduling. The goal is to improve water use efficiency and conserve groundwater used for irrigation. He plans to turn the tool into an app that farmers can easily download and use anywhere. Pan will also use his experience in Türkiye to develop a new course titled “Hydrological Modeling” to teach students about hydrological processes.

Fulbright U.S. Student Program

Lily Stone will be an English teaching assistant at a high school in the North Rhine-Westphalia state in Germany. She’ll be there this fall and looks forward to engaging with her students. Stone also plans to travel around the country, comparing German and American culture while seeking out similarities between the two. She chose to teach in Germany because of her interest in German art and culture and hopes to engage with it while there.

 

UNT’s Global Engagement Office hosts Fulbright Faculty Workshops while UNT students can learn more during virtual sessions on Fulbright Fridays.

UNT faculty and students who are interested in applying for any Fulbright awards should email fulbright@unt.edu.