blog posts

• 

  Meet our Fellows: Mahbubeh Moqadam, AAUW International Fellow

  Aug 6, 2025 9:00 am

  Mahbubeh Moqadam has made a lifelong commitment to transnational feminist activism. A fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department, this commitment was recently recognized with an International Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). 

• 

  Meet our Fellows: Rachel Nixon, Link Foundation Fellow

  Feb 10, 2025 5:00 pm

  Rachel Nixon has spent more time than most shining lasers through liquids. As a graduate student in the Jain lab, she was awarded a two-year fellowship from the Link Foundation for her research on synthesizing ammonia as a fuel source. Read about her success.

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Biniyam Melesse, Fulbright-Hays DDRA Awardee

  Nov 1, 2021 4:30 am

  For Biniyam Melisse, winning a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellowship was “a match made in heaven.” 

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Destiny Williams-Dobosz, NSF Graduate Research Fellow

  Jun 9, 2021 4:45 pm

  “Why is science so hard for students?” This question has intrigued Destiny Williams-Dobosz, a Ph.D. student in Educational Psychology and NSF Graduate Research Fellow.  

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Matthew Boudreau, NCI Pre/Postdoctoral Fellow

  Sep 28, 2020 1:15 pm

  “All of us, unfortunately, have a personal experience with cancer impacting a friend or family member. It touches a lot of our hearts. I saw the depths of what we could not treat through a life experience of a friend,” Matthew Boudreau, PhD Candidate in Chemistry said. “I think that was the first spark for me to become involved in cancer research.”

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Raquel Escobar, Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow

  Aug 17, 2020 12:15 pm

  Graduate education prepares you for many ways to positively impact the world around you. For Raquel Escobar, recent doctoral graduate in History, the opportunity to have a broad and active impact on the community comes through a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellowship. The fellowship allows Escobar to marry her scholarly expertise in history, memory and public humanities with a position at the Humanities Action Lab (HAL) at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Daniel Raudabaugh, Schmidt Science Fellow

  Sep 9, 2019 8:00 pm

  It’s not every day you get to name a new species of fungi, but Daniel Raudabaugh (PhD Plant Biology, 2019) named two during his time as a graduate student at Illinois. Hongkongmyces snookiorum, named to honor his grandparents who let him collect on their land for his pilot study, and Coniella lustricola, Latin for “bog-loving.”

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Busra Karagobek, Visiting Fulbright Fellow from Ankara, Turkey

  Feb 4, 2019 1:15 pm

  In this special "Meet Our Fellows" post, SAGE member Meera interviews Busra Karagobek, a PhD student from Turkey, who is currently studying at the University of Illinois under a Fulbright Scholarship. Let's meet Busra!

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Safiyah Muhammad, Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow

  Oct 18, 2018 11:45 am

  Ford Fellow Safiyah Muhammad says that she learned to teach from the best – her mom. Her mother homeschooled her before she was old enough to enroll in kindergarten and served as her fourth grade teacher as well. “She never limited me in what I could do. She never told me I was too young. She was my very first and obviously most impactful teacher,” Safiyah said. With the help of the Ford Fellowship, she hopes to channel that feeling into her work as a researcher, teacher, and scholar at Illinois.

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Nubras Samayeen, American Association of University Women

  Jul 20, 2018 1:45 pm

  When she finishes her degree at Illinois, Nubras Samayeen may be the first woman in Bangladesh to hold a PhD in Landscape Architecture. This is the realization of a goal she's had since she was a child and is, in no small part, something she's doing for her own two young daughters and for other Bangladeshi women who, like her, have unconventional dreams. Here’s her story.

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Matt Haugen, Fulbright Fellow studying Chinese Sport Industry

  Jun 5, 2018 8:00 am

  Last April, after nearly a yearlong process and an arduous wait, Matthew Haugen was notified that he had been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, which would allow him the opportunity to complete his dissertation research project studying sport education in China. His fellowship experience ultimately encouraged him to pivot his dissertation research project to better represent and inform the future he sees for himself as a scholar.

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Matthew Klopfenstein, Fulbright Fellow in Moscow

  Apr 23, 2018 12:45 am

  Matthew Klopfenstein has spend the last seven months deep in the world of Russian archives exploring how the deaths of female pop stars in the early 1900s entered the public realm and became national phenomena. Read about Matthew's day to day life as a Fulbright Fellow living in Moscow, Russia.

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Ford Fellows on Campus

  Jul 26, 2017 10:00 am

  To increase diversity in higher education, the Ford Foundation offers predoctoral, dissertation, and postdoctoral fellowships. The goal is three-fold – increasing university’s ethnic and racial diversity, maximizing the educational benefits of diversity, and increasing the number of professors who use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.

  We talked to three University of Illinois graduate students from across campus who received a Ford Fellowship to learn more about the program.

• 

  Giving Names to the Dead: Building the Philippines' First Skeletal Reference Collection

  Feb 28, 2017 8:30 am

  Matthew Go, PhD student in Anthropology, spots it tucked into the foundation of a building on the grounds of a cemetery in Manila. An old rice sack, bulging in place and covered in dirt and grime, partially decomposing. Inside, a jumbled collection of bones showing their age and exposure to the elements.

  Matt and fellow Illinois Anthropology PhD student, Amanda Lee, spent last summer in Manila creating the world’s first reference collection comprised exclusively of contemporary Filipino skeletons. Their salvage archaeology work and the new collection, housed at the University of the Philippines Diliman, may potentially help identify victims of criminal cases, mass disasters, mass fatality events, and mass graves throughout Southeast Asia.

• 

  Meet Our Fellows: Lauren Hagler, Illinois Sloan Scholar

  Mar 9, 2016 9:15 am

  Lauren Hagler fell in love with Chemistry during her first general chemistry class at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. 

• 

  Meet Ana Martin: Fulbright Research Fellow in Barcelona, Spain

  Oct 21, 2015 4:00 pm

  Hola! My name is Ana Martin, I am a 6th year PhD student in Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Illinois. This month has been pretty exciting for me as it marks the beginning of my Fulbright Research Fellowship in Spain. Although it was a long process getting here, I’m excited to embark on the adventure of living abroad while I complete my PhD research at the University of Barcelona. For anyone interested in teaching English or conducting research abroad, I highly recommend applying for a Fulbright Fellowship. Hopefully through this post you will gain some insight into the application process and some aspects of moving abroad.