The Fulbright Program: Chock Full of Bright Ideas

Tags: academia, research, musings

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One of the most memorable events in my career so far was being selected as a host for the Fulbright Program. When Emily (Simons) approached me with her idea of applying for this type of scholarship, I was already blown away by her enthusiasm—but little did I imagine how immensely enriching her visit to the lab would turn out to be!

We initially discussed a project aligned with our shared interest in healthcare topics; specifically, I proposed making Emily part of a planned project with cardiologists, the aim being to study circulatory failure via certain machine learning methods. The project fell through, however, since our collaborators were unable to provide data due to privacy concerns.¹ Hence, we pivoted, and I suggested a couple of other projects that Emily might be interested in.

Having developed a taste for all things graphs and networks, it was only a matter of time before Emily started contributing to our work on physician–patient referral networks, showing her skills in data science and visualization. Working together with Jeremy (Wayland), Emily quickly also got enthralled by our efforts to better understand datasets in graph learning. She and Jeremy thus joined a project that Corinna (Coupette) and I had been dreaming of for some time. As an intrepid fellowship, we finally brought it to fruition as our joint ICML 2025 paper No Metric to Rule Them All: Toward Principled Evaluations of Graph-Learning Datasets.²

This was already outstanding, but Emily did not stop there! Like a breath of fresh air, she also started working on dissemination strategies for our projects, improved our repositories, and helped revamp our website. Watching her grow as a researcher, writer, and software developer was truly awe-inspiring. And, from what I can tell, the research stay was rewarding for her as well. New friends, new colleagues, new experiences—these are things that cannot (and should not) be easily quantified.

So why am I writing all of this? There are two reasons: First, Emily is on the job market and I cannot sing her praises highly enough. Second, this is a time of uncertainty; a time in which funding is cut, in particular for programs that may not yield direct results. Are the United States richer or better off because of our joint research projects? Probably not—or maybe not yet. Like any type of fundamental research, our projects are but a small part of the grand and eternal conversation that is science.

It is precisely for this reason that we must resist the urge to see everything as a commodity or as a fungible good. The true value of the Fulbright Program lies in connecting bright minds with others and giving them new opportunities. This brings about changes whose beneficial consequences we cannot possibly fathom in the moment. To misquote Boethius:

And it is because you don’t know the end and purpose of things that you think these programs have no worth.

Through the Fulbright Program, we all got to meet someone we would not have met otherwise. Through the Fulbright Program, we created connections that would not have happened otherwise. Through the Fulbright Program, we have all been intellectually enriched. I hope that the politicians responsible for these programs see them for what they are, i.e., a unique opportunity to foster change, innovation, and mutual understanding across cultural barriers. I, for one, would love to support such a program. Let us not sell tomorrow in a feeble attempt to save money today.