Following an excellent initiative, Fulbright grantees are present this academic year for the first time in several Romanian university centers which had not previously benefited from the program, such as Baia Mare, Targu Mures, Arad and Galati.

Joseph Amiri, from University of Maryland, College Park, is teaching the first semester of his academic year in Romania at Dunarea de Jos University in Galati. His presence in Galati has been noticed by local journalists, who have interviewed him: http://www.viata-libera.ro/educatie/82549-tinerii-si-orasul-un-american-invata-limba-romana-la-galati

The Romanian-U.S. Fulbright Commission and the Fulbright-EducationUSA Advising Center kicked off this year’s fall edition of the International Study Day (ISD) tour, alongside the British Council and DAAD, on November 2nd with two presentations in Craiova, at two of the city’s top schools - “Elena Cuza” and “Fraţii Buzeşti” National College.

An audience of about 160 students from both high schools attended our presentations, keen to learn more about study opportunities in the U.S., as well as Europe, and several voiced an interest in the U.S. as a potential or preferred study destination. We were happy to provide them with information on the American higher education system, the application process and financial aid, as well as ways in which the Fulbright Educational Advising Center can help them get closer to the American Dream. We also took this opportunity to advertise our newly launched competition for next year’s EducationUSA - Opportunity Funds cohort.

The International Study Day project consists of a series of outreach presentations jointly organized by the British Council, DAAD, the Romanian-U.S. Fulbright Commission and the Fulbright-EducationUSA Educational Advising Center in Bucharest in various cities throughout the country, targeting the underserved student population.

"Between 11/26/2016 and 11/30/2016 I had the privilege to participate at arguably the best and most important computer aided design conference in the world, Acadia 2016, held at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning - University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. The conference organized by the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture was entitled Posthuman Frontiers: Data, Designers and Cognitive Machines. The various papers and projects presented during the conference explored recent work within computational design that develops and applies the integration of software, information, fabrication, material intelligence and sensing to generate mechanisms for interfacing with the physical realm.

 

The paper I presented summarized the results of my one year of research at the University of California Berkeley's College of Environmental Design. The paper entitled 'Ivy: Bringing a Weighted-Mesh Representation to Bear on Generative Architectural Design Applications' was coauthored with assistant professor Kyle Steinfeld from the UC Berkeley CED. It presented the endeavor undertaken to create a tool suited for cheap, fast and reliable fabrication of low polygon custom geometries from flat sheet materials. The research together with the resulting software tool (Ivy for Grasshopper) opens new avenues for generative architectural design allowing for rapid prototyping of custom forms without the need for costly numerically controlled fabrication tools. It also enables further research and full scale production of bespoke architectural geometries with an optimized set of software instruments that link fabrication constrains to early design intent in an iterative way.

 

News from U.S. Fulbright Scholar Richard St. Peter: „I wanted to send you some exciting news about my work here in Craiova. The National Theatre Marin Sorescu is participating in a transatlantic theatre project about privacy. It is being called ‘Plurality of Privacy Project in 5 Minute Plays’. There are 14 participating theatres, 5 in the U.S. and 9 in Europe. The Romanian play is called The Truth and Nothing But the Truth by Mihaela Michailov and I was just invited by the theatre to direct this short play. I am very excited about this… Here is a link to the project website: https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/kul/sup/p3m.html”