Four NC State faculty members have been selected as 2025-26 U.S. Fulbright Scholars. During the upcoming academic year, they will travel abroad to research topics like 3D printing, property development, climate resilience and water management.

Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious, competitive fellowships that provide unique opportunities for recipients to teach and conduct research abroad. Fulbright Scholars also play a critical role in U.S. public diplomacy, establishing long-term relationships among people and nations. Alumni of the program include 62 Nobel Laureates, 93 Pulitzer Prize winners, 82 MacArthur Fellows and thousands of leaders and world-renowned experts across the private, public and nonprofit sectors. 

Last year, the Fulbright Scholar Program recognized NC State as a Top Producing Institution — one of the universities with the highest number of faculty selected for the Fulbright U.S. Scholar programs. To support NC State faculty members seeking this type of award, the Office for Faculty Excellence (OFE) hosts a dedicated Fulbright Week every March and administers the Fulbright Pathfinder mini grant program, which empowers faculty as they navigate the application process. The OFE also highlights the program each November during International Education Week.

The Fulbright Scholar Program is currently accepting applications for the 2026-27 academic year, with a due date of Sept. 15. Interested faculty can contact Kyle Miskell, director of external faculty recognition and Fulbright Scholar liaison, with any questions. For more resources and information about how to apply for Fulbright awards, visit NC State’s Fulbright website.

Meet NC State’s 2025-26 Fulbright Scholars

Sankarasubramanian Arumugam, College of Engineering

Arumugam is a professor and University Faculty Scholar in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering. He has received a Fulbright-Kalam U.S. Senior Scholar award in Water Resources Engineering from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He will use the award to advance research on hydroclimate information for improving food-energy-water (FEW) management in India and the United States. He will also conduct workshops on incorporating hydroclimate information to improve FEW system resilience under operation and planning. Additionally, he will teach short-term courses at several Indian universities on state-of-the-art modeling tools in FEW system management. Read more about his research and the award here.

Hudson Ashrafi, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Ashrafi is an associate professor in the Department of Horticultural Science, where he leads the blueberry breeding and genomics program. His Fulbright scholarship will allow him to conduct research in Turkey, focusing on traits that enhance sustainability and climate resilience. He will investigate the genetic basis of parthenocarpy — the development of fruit without fertilization — which holds promise for increasing yield stability under suboptimal pollination conditions. In addition to his research, Ashrafi will teach a graduate-level course on genomic data analysis using bioinformatics tools at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. The course aims to equip the next generation of plant scientists with the computational skills to interpret complex genomic datasets and apply them to crop improvement.

Adolfo Escobedo, College of Engineering

Escobedo is an associate professor in the Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The goal of his Fulbright project, which is supported by the private nonprofit organization Fondazione CON IL SUD, is to foster and advance the use of principled decision-making methodologies in the development of southern Italy. To this end, he will teach a course on applied social choice topics to engineering students at the University of Naples Federico II. He will also collaborate with the university’s Optimization and Problem Solving Laboratory to improve the sustainability and efficiency of last-mile logistics by developing service districting methodologies for strategically dividing a large service area into more manageable delivery territories.

Tim Horn, College of Engineering

Horn is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. As a Fulbright Scholar, he will work with researchers at Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy, to improve the inspection process for metal parts made with electron beam 3D printing, a process used in aerospace and other high-tech industries. His project combines advanced sensors and machine learning to detect defects and material features in real time as each part is being made. This breakthrough could eliminate the need for lengthy inspections after printing, allowing critical custom components to be manufactured more quickly, more reliably and on demand.

This post was originally published in NC State News.