The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs has named Hunter College a Fulbright Top Producing Institution for the 2023–2024 academic year — the 17th time in the last 19 years that the college has earned the distinction. Fulbright is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational-exchange program.
“Hunter College’s brilliant and diverse students, many from immigrant backgrounds, are a natural source of Fulbrights, as this recognition shows,” said Stephen Lassonde, the director of Ruth & Harold Newman Office of Prestigious Scholarships and Fellowships.
Three students — now graduates — from Hunter were selected for Fulbright awards for academic year 2023–2024: Samantha Bodamer ’23, Hunter Moran MHC ’23, and Rafa Sattar MHC ’20.
Samantha Bodamer, Latvia
Bodamer is spending a year in Latvia conducting research on the deconstruction of Soviet identity through films made by the Riga School of Poetic Documentary and will forge links among related areas of scholarship accessible to English-speaking academics. Graduating from Hunter with a GPA of 3.97, she hopes to enter a Ph.D. program when she returns from her Fulbright Scholarship.
Hunter Moran, Denmark
An Economics major, Moran wants to be a physician-scientist one day with a practice in gastroenterology. Moran is serving as an epidemiology research assistant at the PREDICT Center at the University Aalborg, in Copenhagen. He is investigating the socioeconomic impacts of Inflammatory Bowel Disease in Denmark using a national data set that is only on-site in Denmark. The goal of this project is to make a positive change for IBD patients in Denmark and show trends that will apply worldwide.
Rafa Sattar, India
Sattar, the daughter of immigrants from Bangladesh, founded a nonprofit, “Fera” (“return” in Bangla), during her senior year at Hunter. Fera offered weekly classes in 200 schools and orphanages in seven countries, coordinating the work of 70 remote teachers. In India, Sattar is focused on helping village girls gain their parents’ support for their education. She is working with Dr. Devi Vijay of the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta, an expert on rural health care.
See more information about applying for a Fulbright or other prestigious scholarships from Hunter.
