In the News

Dr. Rana Mustafa writes in University World News about her journey from Syria to Canada, and from professor to research facilitator and leadership coach. She also shares four leadership competencies that helped her succeed through adversity and describes her collaboration with IIE-SRF to lend her wisdom to other displaced female scientists.

Cornell University has hosted a number IIE-SRF fellows, including Azat Gündoğan of Turkey, as well as displaced artists through the IIE Artist Protection Fund.

Eugene Nikiforovich of Ukraine was the first IIE-SRF fellow to benefit from an innovative new hosting model in which he is hosted in his home region by Daugavpils University in Latvia, while co-hosted remotely by Cornell University, which provides financial support and other benefits. As part of this arrangement, he visited Cornell to deliver a seminar and meet with potential collaborators in April.

IIE CEO Dr. Allan Goodman advocates in The Hill for every country to devote 1 percent of its GDP to invest in the goal of providing higher education access to at least 15 percent of refugees by 2030, alongside creative solutions from the higher education sector such as IIE’s Odyssey Scholarship for refugee students.

IIE-SRF alumni Mohammed Almahfali and Abdulghani Muthanna of Yemen contributed an article to University World News urging that the higher education sector must play a core role in rebuilding Yemen’s society.

The Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI) outlines their 8-year partnership with IIE-SRF to place threatened scholars at higher education institutions in Finland. The article includes a brief profile of Sweeta Akbari, an IIE-SRF fellow from Afghanistan undertaking her fellowship at Tampere University in Finland.