Vietnamese researcher funded by the Cuomo Foundation-IPCC Scholarship program gains place on Prestigious Fulbright (VSP)

Vietnamese specialist in Water Resources Engineering, Dr. Tran Anh Duong has been selected into the highly competitive. Fulbright US-ASEAN Vietnamese Visiting Scholar Program 2020. From 2013 to 2017, Tran Anh Duong was supported by the IPCC Scholarship program funded by the Cuomo Foundation to complete his doctoral thesis entitled “An investigation of the impact of the water Level in the Mekong River and sea level rise due to climate change on the Tien and Hau River Estuaries“. He is one of 16 young scholars who have received funding from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fellowship Program, with which we have collaborated since 2014.

Dr Tran Anh Duong, who is currently pursuing research at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HUTECH), will join the US-ASEAN Vietnamese Visiting Scholar Program 2020 and will be at the University of South Florida for four months commencing May, 2021.

Established in 1946 by US Senator J. William Fulbright, the Fulbright Scholarship Program is considered one of the most prestigious in the world, with several Nobel Prize winners among its alumni. Our founder, Mr. Alfredo Cuomo, was a Fulbright alumnus,another reason for the Cuomo Foundation to rejoice in Mr. Duong’s success.

Here is an extract from the invitation letter written by Dr. Mauricio E. Arias, the Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida:

Dr. Duong is a highly skilled water resources engineer with great quantitative technical abilities and much knowledge of water issues in the Vietnam Mekong Delta. The project he is proposing as part of this Fulbright US-ASEAN Vietnamese Scholar Program, entitled Climate change effect on surface and groundwater in the Greater Mekong River Basin using couple SWAT-MODFLOW modeling, is an interesting, ambitious, timely, and well- scoped project. There is a major gap in the Mekong in understanding the linkages between surface and groundwater resources, and this project has the potential to fill this gap. Similar issues related to the interactions of surface and groundwater are being faced in Florida, and Dr. Duong’s stay at USF will greatly improve his knowledge on how to best deal with this challenge.