{"id":35651,"date":"2024-12-18T13:47:41","date_gmt":"2024-12-18T18:47:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=35651"},"modified":"2024-12-18T13:47:41","modified_gmt":"2024-12-18T18:47:41","slug":"lori-alvin-receives-fulbright-u-s-scholar-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/lori-alvin-receives-fulbright-u-s-scholar-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Lori Alvin receives Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lori Alvin was starting to get nervous. She\u2019d applied for a U.S. Fulbright Program<\/a> research award, and by May 2024 she was worried she wouldn\u2019t hear back.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was cutting it close, but then I received an email with a link I had to follow to read their decision,\u201d Alvin said. \u201cThe email started with \u2018Congratulations!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

As the Henry Keith and Ellen Hard Townes Associate Professor of Mathematics,<\/a> Alvin was thrilled to read she\u2019d received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award. It would enable her to continue her research into dynamical systems with her collaborator in Slovenia.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, a new sense of anxiety and excitement washed over her. She hadn\u2019t been to Slovenia when she applied, and she had never lived abroad. Now she\u2019s been living in Maribor, Slovenia\u2019s second-largest city, since Sept. 28, experiencing the magic of small-town European life every day.<\/p>\n

\"An

Mathematics professor Lori Alvin traveled to Lake Bohinj while in Slovenia after receiving a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI was a little nervous because I do not speak any Slovenian,\u201d she said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s 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\u2019t driven a car in months.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s even a small mountain in Maribor that has some ski hills on it, but unfortunately we don\u2019t have much snow right now,\u201d she said with a laugh.<\/p>\n

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

\u201cI get to learn some of the tools they\u2019ve been working with and apply them to my own research, even though we might be working with different functions or models,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Alvin’s field of dynamical systems involves describing certain behaviors through patterns \u2014 any pattern she sees, she seeks to write it in terms of ones and zeroes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just identifying patterns,\u201d she said. \u201cMy work is about trying to convert those patterns into a symbolic language that then can be analyzed quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alvin will also be teaching a \u201cmini-course\u201d in January on a theory closely related to her research.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m excited about the opportunity the university has given me to teach this mini-course in addition to the research I\u2019m doing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Math professor Lori Alvin received a Fulbright research grant for her work in Slovenia on dynamical systems<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":401,"featured_media":35656,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,50],"tags":[290],"class_list":["post-35651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-admission","category-mathematics","tag-fulbright"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/401"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35651"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35658,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35651\/revisions\/35658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}