Lorenzo Rodriguez Wins Fulbright Research Grant

Geneseo, NY (05/30/2019) — Jamestown, NY, native and Jamestown High School graduate Lorenzo Rodriguez has won a U.S. Student Fulbright Research Grant for Bulgaria for 2019-20. Rodriguez graduated from SUNY Geneseo in May with an anthropology major and an emphasis in sociomedical science. He will research how funding and staffing challenges within health care facilities impact Bulgaria's capital and its neighboring cities.

Upon returning to the U.S., Rodriguez will present his research at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting. He plans for his work to serve as a foundation for future publications and graduate school applications.

A 2017 medical service trip to the Dominican Republic illuminated for Rodriguez the need for comprehensive community-based health care worldwide. In spring 2018, he assisted with an ethnographic study on Latino and other farmworkers' family health and health care access. In July 2018, he received a Student Ambassadorship from Geneseo's Center for Integrative Learning that supported a trip to Bulgaria where he carried out a five-week study on health care in Bulgaria.

At Geneseo, Rodriguez was a McNair Scholar, volunteered as a Geneseo fire department EMT/firefighter, and served as president of both the Wrestling Club and the Wesley Fellowship Christian Group.

SUNY Geneseo was recently named a Top Producer of U.S. Student Fulbright awards, the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announced in its annual article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Fulbright Program is the highly competitive flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and citizens of other countries. According to the U.S. State Department, Fulbrighters are considered cultural ambassadors who "interact with their hosts on a one-to-one basis in an atmosphere of openness, academic integrity, and intellectual freedom, thereby promoting mutual understanding."

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