Two Reed Faculty Earn Fulbright Scholar Awards for 2022-23

Profs. Jamie Pommersheim [math] and Tom Landvatter [GLAM] each received grants to conduct research abroad.

Two members of the Reed faculty earned Fulbright Scholar Awards for the 2022-23 academic year. Jamie Pommersheim, Katharine Piggott Professor of Mathematics, and Tom Landvatter, associate professor of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean studies and humanities, were each awarded grants to conduct research abroad. 

Pommersheim spent several months in Budapest over the fall doing research on geometric dissections at the Rényi Institute of Mathematics and giving a handful of presentations and talks. Alongside collaborator Aaron Abrams, a math professor at Washington and Lee University, Pommersheim has been engaged in a systematic study of all the different ways in which a given surface can be built out of triangles, an area that has received new attention in recent years thanks to developments in computer animation and medical imaging. Pommersheim says the uninterrupted research time provided by the Fulbright grant led to many new results, including the proof of a conjecture he and Abrams made more than 11 years ago.

Landvatter, meanwhile, will apply his grant over two years, making visits this year and next to the Vigla Archaeological Site in Cyprus, where he’s been working since 2018. Discovered in 2003, archaeological finds date Vigla to the early Hellenistic period, right around Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BC. It seems to have been a short-lived military fortification, with excavated materials that include bronze and iron weapons and lead sling bullets as well as evidence of weapons manufacture. As he did in 2018, 2019, and 2022, Landvatter will lead six Reed students on a monthlong dig as part of his Vigla Archaeological Field School, a project co-directed by Brandon Olson, a faculty member at Metropolitan State University of Denver. (For more, check out our 2020 feature.) With the extra time afforded by the Fulbright, Landvatter will also be able to devote himself to research in Nicosia, the capital, and to strengthening vital connections within the island’s antiquities and archaeological communities. 

Launched in 1946, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program. Over the years, thirty-eight Reed faculty have received grants to teach, conduct research, and conduct projects around the world.

Tags: Academics, Awards & Achievements, International, Professors, Research