Alumni and Grantee News

The Alumni Association invited newly arrived U.S. grantees to join alumni at a happy hour at Sky Bar at the end of September. It was great seeing both new and familiar faces!

Alumni news and highlights:

• Fulbright alumna (PhD student 2011-12) and Fulbright Iceland Board Member Dr. Catherine Chambers has been appointed as the new Director of the University Centre of the Westfjords.
• In August, Meghan Orman (Fulbright-NSF Arctic Research Fellow 2023-24) started a new position as a Jackie Bezos Researcher in Residence at the Bezos Family Foundation in Seattle.
• Bridget Burger, Fulbright Specialist 2022 and new Fulbright Iceland Board Member, won the Women in Tech Ally award at the Nordic Women in Tech Awards in October.
• Bryndís Björk Ásgeirsdóttir, Fulbright Scholar 2016 and Fulbright Iceland Board Member, became the Vice President for Education, Students and Sustainability at Reykjavik University earlier this year.
• Deirdre Lockwood (Fulbright fellow 2002-03) published her debut poetry collection, An Introduction to Error, in September.
• Gríma Irmudóttir (Fulbright fellow 2023-24) won the Best Icelandic Short award at the Reykjavik International Film Festival in October, for her short film Memory Traces.
• Mariah Seater (Fulbright Arctic Initiative IV scholar 2024-26) completed her PhD in Public Health from Tulane University at the end of July, only a couple of weeks after returning from her six-week research exchange to Iceland.
• Víðir Smári Petersen (Fulbright fellow 2014-15) defended his doctoral dissertation, Constitutional Property Protection and Regulatory Inertia: Towards an Aristotelian Understanding of Regulatory Excess, at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
• Ryan Dennis (Fulbright fellow 2014-15) published his memoir, Barn Gothic; Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm, in November.
• Ólína Kjerúlf Þorvarðardóttir, Iceland-U.S. Educational Commission Scholar 2025, published a new book at the end of November, Glæður galdrabáls, on 17^th century witch hunts in Iceland.
• Guðbjörg Ríkey Th. Hauksdóttir (Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher 2023-24) published an article, co-authored with Baldur Þórhallsson, on Sino-Russian Arctic Cooperation in the Polar Journal. The article is based on research done during her Fulbright at Harvard.
• Cayla Rosché (Fulbright-Ministry for Foreign Affairs Arctic Scholar 2022-2023) wrote on Icelandic Art Song Lyric Diction and Repertoire along with Matthew Carlson in the Journal of Singing, using the work she started as a Fulbright scholar at Iceland University of the Arts.
• Earlier this year, Hera Guðlaugsdóttir (Fulbright scholar 2022-23) was the lead writer on an article in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics on how high-latitude volcanic eruptions could affect global climate, which was based on the research she did as a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Irvine.

Fulbright Alumni Association in Iceland annual general meeting will take place on Friday January 16, 2026 at the Fulbright Commission. You can find more information here.