Malik R. Watkins Receives Fulbright Specialists Award
(SAVANNAH, GA) Malik R. Watkins, Ph.D., Public Service Associate at the Carl Vinson Institute of Government, has been selected for a Fulbright Specialists project in Panama for the Municipality of Panama during the months of September and October 2012, according to the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Dr. Watkins will assist the Municipality of the City of Panama in developing a strategic action plan to create a Territorial Planning and Management System that decentralizes the functions of public administration. The project is designed to promote sustainable development for the City of Panama by strengthening municipal institutions. This will be facilitated by producing a Strategic Action Plan for the development of a prototype geographic information system. The system will provide support for the public administration as well as planning and territorial management. Project activities involve integrating municipal and local level context and priorities, identifying critical paths for plan development, supporting personnel identification and development as well as coordinating the integration of multiple sectors of local governance, and identifying socioeconomic indicators to support local government decision making.
Dr. Watkins is one of over 400 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad this year through the Fulbright Specialists Program. The Fulbright Specialists Program, created in 2000 to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, provides short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) to prominent U.S. faculty and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at post secondary, academic institutions around the world.
The Fulbright Program, America’s flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 60 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have taught, studied or conducted research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the United States. Over 285,000 emerging leaders in their professional fields have received Fulbright awards, including individuals who later became heads of government, Nobel Prize winners, and leaders in education, business, journalism, the arts and other fields.
Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement. Among thousands of prominent Fulbright Scholar alumni are Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; and Craig Barrett, Chairman of the Board of Intel Corporation. Distinguished Fulbright Specialist participants include Mahmoud Ayoub, Professor of Religion at Temple University, Heidi Hartmann, President and CEO, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Percy R. Luney, Jr. Dean and Professor, College of Law, Florida A&M University and Emily Vargas-Barone, Founder and Executive Director of the RISE Institute.
After serving as the first Fulbright Specialist to work in post-civil war Liberia, this is Dr. Watkins’s second Fulbright Assignment. He can be contacted through the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at malik@uga.edu or via phone: 706.201.2296.
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Malik Watkins Ph.D.