U faculty named as Fulbright Scholars for
2025-26 academic year

Two University of Utah faculty members were named Fulbright Scholars for the 2025-26 academic year.

Created in 1946, the global Fulbright Program was a response to World War II. In 1948, the US-UK Fulbright Commission was created with a treaty between the U.S. and U.K. governments, one of the world’s first Fulbright programs.

The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by the Institute of International Education. Each year, over 800 U.S. scholars are selected to teach or conduct research in institutions around the world, building connections through international collaboration.

Learn more about the U’s 2025-26 Fulbright Scholars below.

Blair D. Sullivan, Inaugural Fulbright-Collegium de Lyon Chair

Blair D. Sullivan, a professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, will spend her fellowship at the ENS de Lyon as a fellow of the Collegium de Lyon—the Institute for Advanced Study (Institut d’études Avancées) at the University of Lyon (l’Université de Lyon)—through a new partnership between Fulbright France and the Collegium.

Sullivan is the inaugural Fulbright-Collegium de Lyon Chair and will be co-hosted by two research laboratories—the parallel computing group LIP (Laboratoire de l’Informatique du Parallélisme) and the multifaceted LIRIS (Laboratoire d’InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d’information).

Sullivan’s research bridges the theory and practice of graph algorithms, with a focus on approaches that use parameterization and structural properties of networks to achieve efficiency. Her Fulbright research project, “Towards Practical Parameterized Algorithms: Twin-width and Graph Modification,” focuses on new approaches for adapting specialized tools from theoretical computer science to data-driven problems arising in scientific computing, robotics and algorithmic fairness. By exploiting common structure in real-world networks—whether they are networks of biological processes, transportation routes or social connections  Sullivan’s work aims to reduce the computational complexity of optimization problems within those fields.

Juliet Carlisle, University of Exeter Scholar Award

Juliet Carlisle, a professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of Environment, Society, and Sustainability at the University of Utah, will spend her fellowship year at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. Here she’ll join a vibrant community of climate researchers.

Her research at Exeter, sponsored through the US-UK Fulbright Commission, will examine how climate-related emotions—particularly anxiety and hope—shape collective action across generations in the U.K. By investigating generational differences in climate attitudes and experiences, her work aims to better understand the emotional pathways that motivate public support for climate solutions.

“It means a great deal to me to be selected by the US-UK Fulbright Commission to pursue this research at the University of Exeter—especially now, when political polarization and climate anxiety are shaping so much of our public life,” Carlisle said. “To me, this award speaks to Fulbright’s enduring belief in the power of international collaboration, even in uncertain times.”

Carlisle is co-author of “The Politics of Energy Crises” (Oxford University Press, 2017) and is currently co-writing a book based on two decades of data on U.S. environmental attitudes. A recipient of the Francis D. Wormuth Esteemed Scholar Award, she serves on the editorial board of Political Behavior and is co-founder of the Environmental Politics Virtual Group. Her work has appeared in journals such as Environmental Politics, Political Psychology and PLOS Medicine, and she is a mentor to first-generation and women scholars in environmental leadership.