Two faculty awarded Fulbright fellowships for 2025-2026

Long-term faculty relationships and collaborations are critically important in the progression of an academic’s research agenda. This includes collaborations with partners across the globe. Fulbright fellowships, funded by the U.S. Department of State and administered by the Institute of International Education (IIE), have long served as invaluable project awards to facilitate critical in-person work between academic collaborators and their students, engagement with the community and access to field research.

“We are proud that once again, FIU faculty’s Fulbright project proposals were selected and funded, enabling our faculty to advance and extend their research impact globally,” said Heather Russell, vice provost for Faculty Leadership and Success. “I congratulate our scholars and look forward to learning about the outcomes of these groundbreaking projects.”

Deborah Goldfarb, associate professor of legal psychology, Department of Psychology, studies topics at the intersection of law and developmental psychology, including legal attitudes, developmental intuitive jurisprudence and memory in victims and eyewitnesses. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of her work, she is affiliated with the FIU School of Law and the Global Forensic and Justice Center, and both supported her Fulbright application. During her Ph.D. studies at the University of California, Davis, she began to collaborate with her peer Sidnei Priolo-Filho, now a professor at Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná (UTP) in Curitiba, Brazil. They have since shared similar research interests, published and presented jointly and even had their respective classes participate in a virtual Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project. Goldfarb’s Fulbright project, to be hosted by Priolo-Filho, involves conducting research and teaching a graduate course at UTP and teaching a for course on jury research to judges at Brazil’s Escola de Magistrados (similar to an National Judicial College and other organizations that provide education for magsitrates).

“What I’m most excited about are the opportunities to witness a live jury trial in Rio de Janeiro and to conduct first-hand research in Brazil. The in-person feedback from legal practitioners and students that will participate in the class and the research study will be invaluable because it will provide unfiltered context,” Goldfarb says. “Beyond that, we envision that this Fulbright project will help expand UTP’s fairly new legal psychology doctoral program and further connect it with FIU’s long-standing legal psychology program.”

Leaning on the theoretical work that has been done by scholars in Brazil, Goldfarb’s project aims to shed new light on jury decision-making and perceptions of children’s testimony with an empirical psychological perspective, which, according to professors and practitioners in Brazil, is an area that is understudied.

Goldfarb will complete this teaching and research project in Brazil over the course of two visits between July 2025 and September 2026.

John Kominoski, professor of biology, Department of Biological Sciences, is affiliated with the Institute of Environment and the Ecosystem Ecology Lab and serves as the lead principal investigator for the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research Program. He is an ecologist and biogeochemist who studies the effects of changes in water chemistry.

Kominoski was named Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (UVic) in British Columbia. His project in Canada, focused on improving environmental conditions for salmon in coastal watersheds, will initiate a joint conservation study with researchers at UVic and the Nanwakolas Council, which is known for its technical expertise and stewardship of lands and waters. He has a long-standing relationship with researchers at University of British Columbia (UBC), who also join this collaboration.

The Fulbright project will encompass collaborative observation of habitat, such as monitoring of water flow and salmon movement. Kominoski also plans to give three seminars to current and potential collaborators across the region and mentor students. “This collaboration will expand upon existing sustainable restoration approaches to benefit threatened salmon populations important to coastal British Columbia and its people,” Kominoski syas. “There are dynamics, in terms of community and environmental resilience, that are similar to our efforts in the Everglades. My goal is to replicate the multicultural model of engaging communities in conservation efforts that I am familiar with, learn from best practices shared by the local collaborators, and produce a refined model with this project.”

Upon returning to FIU, Kominoski expects to apply his findings in his advanced ecology class and possibly have students at FIU and UVic, his Canadian host institution, further explore the implications and outcomes of the discoveries through a COIL project. He will be completing his Fulbright project in British Columbia between September-December 2025.