Elisabeth Hughes In 2012, International scholars from China, Croatia, Finland, Lebanon, and South Korea made themselves at home at the IHE. Dr. Lijing Yang, a graduate of the University of Michigan, is in her second year as a postdoctoral researcher focusing on higher education access, institutional finance, faculty issues, and international and comparative higher education. Yang, who “loves Athens’ weather and southern culture,” believes that “the prestigious opportunity the Institute has afforded her to research and teach will advance her career development and her future goal as a faculty member or researcher. Dr. Zhaohui Yin, an associate professor in the School of Education at Wuhan University, is another Chinese scholar who is spending a year as a visiting research scholar at the Institute, after receiving an award from the China Scholarship Council. Her research project is a comparative study of undergraduates’ entrepreneurial activities and university/industry relations at American and Chinese research universities. Qian He, a student of Professor Baocun Liu in Beijing Normal University’s doctoral program, is just finishing up a year of research at the Institute and will return to China in September. During her time in Athens, He learned that she had received three awards, the New Scholar Award, Excellent Dissertation Fund Award and the Joint Universities Dissertation Award, the only student at Beijing Normal to receive all three awards. Qian He said she will miss her time at the IHE and all the help she has received,” I feel so lucky to have had this opportunity. I have made progress with my English and there are so many valuable materials here for my research.” Another of Professor Liu’s doctoral students, Hanying Li, who was the guide and translator when the first Ed.D. cohort visited Beijing in summer 2011, will be joining the Institute for the next year. Professor Liu, director of the Institute of International and Comparative Education at BNU, who has visited the Institute a couple of times, has also applied for a Chinese Council Scholarship and plans to spend a month at the Institute this winter. The Institute also welcomed two Fulbright Scholars, Dr. Ilkka Kauppinen, a sociologist and senior assistant researcher at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, who had spent the previous year at the Institute, returned for two weeks in the summer to do additional research on the restructuring of European higher education and how this reflects the interests of an emerging transnational economic elite, and also to revise his article on the different meanings of “knowledge as commodity” in the context of higher education. Dr. Hana El-Ghali, a senior program coordinator at the Institute for Public Policy & International Affairs at American University of Beirut, is joining the Institute in September on a Fulbright to research higher education policy and management issues focusing on the Middle East and North Africa. The international reputation of the Institute is further demonstrated in the new student body with Lucia Brajkovic, a masters student from Croatia, and doctoral students Hyejin Choi from South Korea and Xuelai Qui from China. Type of News/Audience: 2012 IHE Report
