Lori Alvin receives Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award

Lori Alvin was starting to get nervous. She’d applied for a U.S. Fulbright Program research award, and by May 2024 she was worried she wouldn’t hear back.

“It was cutting it close, but then I received an email with a link I had to follow to read their decision,” Alvin said. “The email started with ‘Congratulations!’”

As the Henry Keith and Ellen Hard Townes Associate Professor of Mathematics, Alvin was thrilled to read she’d received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award. It would enable her to continue her research into dynamical systems with her collaborator in Slovenia.

Suddenly, a new sense of anxiety and excitement washed over her. She hadn’t been to Slovenia when she applied, and she had never lived abroad. Now she’s been living in Maribor, Slovenia’s second-largest city, since Sept. 28, experiencing the magic of small-town European life every day.

Mathematics professor Lori Alvin traveled to Lake Bohinj while in Slovenia after receiving a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award.

“I was a little nervous because I do not speak any Slovenian,” she said. “I was relieved to find that since I arrived here everybody has been incredibly helpful in trying to navigate the process of becoming a temporary citizen.”

She’s traded her daily drive for a walk through a gorgeous municipal park and up a hill that overlooks Maribor. Christmas markets are open in town, she said, and walking through she can feel the different pace of life. Few people are in a rush, and she hasn’t driven a car in months.

“There’s even a small mountain in Maribor that has some ski hills on it, but unfortunately we don’t have much snow right now,” she said with a laugh.

The Fulbright program will enable Alvin to continue her research with collaborators at the University of Maribor, where she said some faculty are working in areas that overlap with hers.

“I get to learn some of the tools they’ve been working with and apply them to my own research, even though we might be working with different functions or models,” she said.

Alvin’s field of dynamical systems involves describing certain behaviors through patterns — any pattern she sees, she seeks to write it in terms of ones and zeroes.

“It’s not just identifying patterns,” she said. “My work is about trying to convert those patterns into a symbolic language that then can be analyzed quickly.”

Alvin will also be teaching a “mini-course” in January on a theory closely related to her research.

“I’m excited about the opportunity the university has given me to teach this mini-course in addition to the research I’m doing,” she said.