Sixteen Stanford seniors, graduate students, and recent alumni have accepted grants funded by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to pursue special projects abroad during the 2026-27 academic year.

The scholars will travel to 11 countries, including Cambodia, Chile, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Fiji, France, Kenya, Mauritius, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Spain, where they will carry out individually designed research projects, pursue graduate study programs, or take part in English Teaching Assistant programs.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is designed to build lasting connections between the United States and other countries. It awards grants annually to more than 1,800 U.S. students, artists, and early-career professionals who will pursue projects in more than 140 countries.

Meet this year’s Stanford-affiliated grantees:

Maya Agarwal, ’26, holds a BA with honors in economics. She will travel to Mexico for a 10-month Fulbright-García Robles Scholarship, pairing professional experience at a Mexican or multinational firm with graduate coursework at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

Caleb Benz, ’26, holds a BA in linguistics. He will travel to Spain to teach English in the Canary Islands and explore using music as a vehicle for cross-cultural connection.

Victoria Bermudez, ’26, holds a BS in human biology. She will teach English in Spain, lead a journalism workshop, and volunteer at a local clinic, exploring connections between wellness and community engagement.

Debbie Bong, ’26, holds a BA in human biology and an MS in epidemiology. She will travel to Fiji to study hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and develop prediction models for cardiometabolic disease using clinical and biomarker data.

Binta Diallo, ’25, holds a BS in human biology with a minor in medical anthropology. In Mauritius, she will collaborate with the Ministry of Health and Wellness to investigate how land use change influences arboviral outbreak risk, using spatial, environmental, epidemiological, and community health behavioral data.

Esha Gupta, ’26, who holds a BS in symbolic systems, will teach English in Kenya while partnering with a local environmental conservation NGO to explore the relationship between education, storytelling, and the environment.

Carolyn Kennedy, ’26, holds a BA in international relations. In Chile, she will conduct semi-structured interviews investigating how new compulsory voting legislation in the 2025 presidential election shaped Chileans’ understanding of civic duty.

Lyn Lee Loth, ’25, holds a BS in biology and a BA in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Loth will examine the relationship between urbanization and dengue virus in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, focusing on how rapid development is affecting environmental and community health.

Varsha Naga, ’26, who holds a BS in biology, will travel to Sri Lanka to examine barriers to timely trauma care by mapping patient access patterns and transportation delays. Her goal is to inform evidence-based improvements to emergency care delivery.

Lorelei Santa Maria, ’26, holds a BS in human biology and an MS in community health and prevention research. In the Czech Republic, she will teach English and first aid at a nursing secondary school while adapting the Stanford WELL for Life framework to assess adolescent well-being in a post-communist cultural context.

Georgia Scarr, ’26, holds a BS in biology (ecology) and an MS in biology (ecology). In Chile, she will investigate how Aymara cultural burning affects high-altitude Andean wetlands. Through youth engagement, she will support local Aymara communities in protecting cultural practices, stewarding wetlands, and strengthening water sovereignty.

Lucy Stark is a PhD candidate in history. At the Archives Nationales D’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France, she will complete doctoral research on coerced child labor regimes in the 18th- and 19th-century French Empire, focusing on children of African descent in Saint-Domingue, Louisiana, and Senegal.

Vivek Tanna, ’22, holds a BA in philosophy and religious studies. He will travel to the Canary Islands in Spain, where he will utilize his experience in bilingual health education and violence prevention to teach English while exploring Spanish culture and dance.

Isabel Vila Ortiz, BS ’25 in Earth systems and MS ’26 in biology, will travel to the Dominican Republic, where she will collaborate with the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo to research the effects of tourism on public health access in agricultural communities.

Katherine Wang, BS ’25 in symbolic systems and dance and MS ’26 in computer science, will travel to Paris. At Sorbonne University, she will conduct human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence research on opportunities for emerging technology to transform how art is experienced and understood.

Jingyu Zhang, ’26, who holds a BS in chemistry, will teach English in the Canary Islands in Spain while pursuing opportunities to be further involved in the local community, such as dance classes, volunteering at a clinic, and hosting spoken word workshops in English.