EAST LANSING, Mich. – Michigan State University graduate student RoseAnna Downing-Vicklund has joined a long history of scholars – many of whom have won Nobel Prizes – by being named a 2005 Canada-U.S. Fulbright Fellow.
Downing-Vicklund, a doctoral candidate in anthropology in the MSU College of Social Science, is using her fellowship to explore issues of trust and responsibility with respect to the quality of drinking water in Walkerton and Stratford, Ontario, Canada.
A 1994 graduate of Jackson High School, Downing-Vicklund, 29, hails from Novi where her parents, John and Cheryl Downing-Vicklund, live. She obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology from MSU in 1998 and 2003, respectively.
Throughout her studies, Downing-Vicklund has been interested in the intersection between the environment, health and gender. As a Fulbright student, she intends to create a model for understanding the thresholds at which water quality moves into conscious awareness, the trust people have in private enterprise and government to provide and regulate safe drinking water, and the kind of active strategies the public turns to when that trust falters.
“One of the reasons water is so important is because it is vital for human life and health,” she said. “Even in places that have a sufficient quantity of water, the quality isn’t always great. We need to provide adequate, safe drinking water for our population.”
“RoseAnna Downing-Vicklund is an excellent student whose work focuses on water, perhaps the critical issue of the next millennium,” said Lynne Goldstein, chairperson of the MSU Department of Anthropology. “In examining this topic from an anthropological perspective, she has studied with MSU anthropologists who have focused on similar issues in different areas of the world. This research reflects the MSU land-grant tradition of conducting research that can help develop policy and benefit society.”
After completing her doctorate, Downing-Vicklund would like to take up a teaching position and continue to do research on North American environmental health issues. She hopes to build on her existing research to do a comparison between public attitudes about water contamination in Canada, the United States and Mexico.
Long regarded as the world’s premiere academic exchange program, the Fulbright attracts exceptional scholars from more than 150 countries. Among the fastest growing of the bilateral exchanges is the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program.
Named for former U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright and supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs Canada and the U.S. Department of State, the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program has engaged more than 800 scholars in high-level academic exchanges since 1990.
For more information on the Fulbright Fellowship, visit: www.fulbright.ca