Three UB faculty receive Fulbright Scholar awards

UB faculty members Praveen Arany, Supriya Mahajan and Paul Vanouse have received prestigious Fulbright Scholar awards to study and teach abroad during the coming year.

“We are thrilled to celebrate this year’s Fulbright Scholar Award recipients, who join a distinguished community of UB faculty recognized through this prestigious program. Their selection reflects not only the excellence of their research and teaching, but also their commitment to collaboration and global engagement,” says Graham Hammill, senior vice provost for faculty affairs and dean of the Graduate School.

“Through their work abroad, these faculty members will build meaningful international partnerships and bring new perspectives back to our campus,” Hammill adds. “We congratulate them on this well-deserved achievement and look forward to the impact their work will have both at UB and abroad.”

The Office of Faculty Affairs supports applicants to the Fulbright U.S Scholar Program. UB faculty interested in learning more about the program can contact Maria Almanza, director of faculty recognition and UB Fulbright liaison.

The Fulbright program, coordinated by the U.S. Department of State, is devoted to improving intercultural relations, diplomacy and competence between the people of the U.S. and other nations through educational exchange. Scholars return with broadened insights, new collaborations and fresh perspectives that enrich classrooms, inspire students and strengthen institutional internationalization efforts.

Fulbright U.S. Scholars are accomplished faculty, researchers, administrators and established professionals who teach or conduct research in partnership with institutions around the world. Through these affiliations, they expand their professional networks and often seed future research, innovation and institutional partnerships. The Fulbright Program was established in 1946.

Praveen Arany, associate professor in the Department of Oral Biology, School of Dental Medicine, will travel to Delhi, India, to share his expertise of photobiomodulation (PBM), a light-based therapy that can be used for oral cancer treatment.

Oral cancers represent one of the most devastating and undertreated public health crises in South Asia, with India accounting for nearly one-third of global cases. Through this fellowship, Arany will collaborate with Mahesh Verma, chancellor of Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University and a UB alumnus, to introduce PBM into Indian cancer care practice.

Trained as a dentist and oral pathologist, Arany has built a distinctive translational research career at the intersection of photobiology, molecular medicine and clinical translation. He also holds adjunct appointments in UB’s Department of Surgery and Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, as well as in the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Data Sciences.

Arany and his laboratory team discovered a primary molecular mechanism that has reframed PBM from an empirical intervention into a mechanistically grounded therapeutic treatment. In recent years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the American Dental Association (ADA) and multiple international oncology societies (MASCC, ISOO and WALT) have acknowledged PBM as a standard component of supportive care for the treatment of oral cancers.

Through the Fulbright fellowship, Arany aims to extend this evidence base to oncologists and dentists on the Asian subcontinent through policy work and help with implementation by building the workforce needed to make PBM accessible to cancer patients in India. 

Supriya Mahajan, associate professor in the Department of Medicine in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, is leading an international collaborative study involving research teams from the Indian Institute of Technology (ITT) Bombay, the University of Sydney and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

The project aims to deliver a scientific evaluation of bacterial communities and water quality across diverse aquatic environments.

Mahajan specializes in microbiome analysis, with expertise in microbial community composition, diversity and functional dynamics across environmental and biological systems. She is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health for her investigation of oral microbiome-induced inflammatory responses as a pathway to neurodegenerative disorders.

This Fulbright Global Scholar Program project integrates high-resolution microbial sequencing with a cutting-edge integrated optoelectronic (IO) sensing chip capable of real-time detection of harmful bacteria, heavy metals, pesticides and industrial pollutants in diverse aquatic ecosystems.

Mahajan will participate in field testing at Lake Powai in India, the inner west bays of Australia, and South Africa’s Kuils River system. Together, these efforts aim to establish a robust early-warning framework for environmental contamination, while supporting global initiatives in public health, sustainable agriculture and environmental protection.

Paul Vanouse, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences, and director of the Coalesce Center for Biological Art, will head to Paris in spring 2027 after receiving a highly competitive Fulbright Tocqueville Distinguished Chair award.

The Fulbright Tocqueville Distinguished Chair program is designed to strengthen Franco-American collaboration in research and higher education. Recipients serve as guest scholars at French universities, where they conduct research, teach graduate and doctoral students, and participate in conferences and academic exchanges with French colleagues.

Since the early 1990s, Vanouse has created interdisciplinary artworks that use emerging technologies as artistic media to examine issues surrounding science, identity and institutional power.

His current project, Utter, began during the COVID-19 pandemic and explores the relationship between speech, breath and viral transmission through a multisensory installation that simulates human breath using scientific glass apparatuses, scent and filtered biological materials.

Vanouse says the opportunity to collaborate on research for Utter  began several years ago during an art-science workshop near Paris at École Polytechnique.

Among them was Jean-Marc Chomaz, an atmospheric physicist working with aerosolized mists and experimental devices that respond to sound frequencies. Their conversations quickly evolved into ideas for future collaboration.

The work will feature interconnected scientific glass apparatuses filled with chemicals, microbes and reactive materials. Vanouse describes the installation as resembling a strange scientific instrument designed to explore how breath, sound and communication move through space.