Dr. William Brown will give a talk on his experience as a Fulbright recipient at the Friday, March 3 meeting of Sigma Xi, slated for noon in the Major Alice Sam Conference Room in the Science Center.
Beginning in July 2016, Dr. Brown, who received a Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship, was engaged in research at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, India, on the project, “Inquiry-based science education; the behavior and ecology of insects in southern India” at the Indian Institute of Science’s Centre for Ecological Sciences. His collaborator was Rohini Balakrishnan, an expert in bioacoustics and the nature of acoustical communication among insects in natural environments.
Brown has done extensive research on a tree cricket native to the Northeastern United States and southern Canada that’s very closely related to a tree cricket species that Balakrishnan has studied.
The top-ranked Indian Institute of Science, a public university with about 3,500 students, is located in Bengaluru, the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka and third most populous city in India with over 8 million people.
Brown also mentored graduate research students at the university and co-taught an undergraduate course in animal behavior. His Fulbright experience concluded in mid-December.
A member of the Biology department for 15 years, Brown specializes in behavioral ecology, the study of animal behavior from an ecological perspective. At Fredonia, he teaches courses in ecology, evolution and introductory biology. Brown has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and an undergraduate degree from Simon Fraser University, British Columbia.
The 2016-2017 Fulbright awards extend a remarkable line of achievement by Fredonia faculty in the distinguished international exchange program, said Ted Schwalbe, Fredonia’s Fulbright program coordinator. “We have had a tremendous record of success since 1981,” he said, that now totals 44 Fulbrights awarded to faculty members.
