The Senior Specialist program, an extension of the Fulbright Scholar Program, is a new program intended to send scholars and professionals abroad on short-term grants at the request of academic institutions overseas. The traditional Fulbright Scholar Program awards research and teaching grants for a semester or an academic year. Both programs are administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars for the U.S. Department of State and the Institute of International Education. Composed of one or more members from each program field, the panel acts as an advisory group to recommend potential candidates for the Senior Specialist program. When an academic institution abroad requests a specialist with a unique set of skills and experience in one of the fields, members of the Advisory Panel are contacted for recommendations of qualified candidates.
Appointees serve a period of one year.
The recipient of two traditional Fulbright grants, Soroos is no stranger to the Fulbright Scholar Program. She lectured and taught seminars in marketing and international marketing at Kazakh State Economics University in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, in the spring of 1992, and as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Vladivostok State University of Economics in Vladivostok, Russia, in the spring of 1999. Soroos has also lectured on topics related to international business and international marketing at Moscow Business University in Moscow, the National University of Business in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and a number of other institutions in Russia and Kazakhstan. She has interviewed approximately 80 business professionals in Russia and Kazakhstan on the challenges of doing business during the transition from central planning to a market economy, and has also conducted in-depth interviews with business professionals and diplomats from over 60 countries. The Lundy-Fetterman School of Business was established in 1983.