Hanany Receives Fulbright Award 

Professor Shaul Hanany of the School has received a Fulbright Specialist Program award from the U.S. State Department and the Fulbright Foreign Specialist Board. He will complete a project at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, that aims to exchange knowledge and establish partnerships benefiting participants, institutions, and communities both in the U.S. and in Israel through educational and training activities within physics education.

Hanany is one of over 400 U.S. citizens who share expertise with host institutions abroad through the Fulbright Specialist Program each year. Recipients of Fulbright Specialist awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, demonstrated leadership in their field, and their potential to foster long-term cooperation between institutions in the U.S. and other nations. 

Hanany received the award in order to help with an Israeli national initiative to integrate computation into the undergraduate physics curriculum. He will advise a team of Israeli physics faculty that is assessing current use of computation in physics college education, and is investigating pathways to better integrate computation into the curriculum. The team's goals are to reduce barriers for use of computation, to make sustainable curricular changes, and to identify opportunities for securing institutional and national support. 

Hanany says he received the award “because the physics curriculum in Israel is very similar to that in the US, because there is wide-spread recognition among physicists that when educating a new generation of physicists computation should become a standard problem solving method, and because the steps our School has taken to integrate computation place us in a leadership position.”