UI professor wins Fullbright Scholar grant, heads to Ecuador
University of Idaho professor and outgoing chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering John Crepeau will join the elite group of 25 university faculty and staff members to receive a Fullbright award, according to Susie Bender, executive director of International Engagement and Programs.
Crepeau will serve as an ambassador for UI in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and teach classes in Spanish about fluid mechanics at Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) as part of the Fullbright Program.
Yishan Chen | Argonaut
UI Mechanical Engineering professor John Crepeau will spend the upcoming fall semester in Ecuador teaching a class on fluid mechanics as part of the Fullbright Program.
“We were very excited about the opportunity,” Crepeau said. “It’s not very often that you get to go to another country to teach classes, and so my wife and I are pretty excited about the chance to go do this.”
Along with teaching a course at ESPOL, Crepeau said he will also help a research group with their work in studying how to make engineering systems more efficient by manipulating additives to the properties of fluids. He said conducting research has always been an exciting activity for him.
Crepeau will assist in ESPOL’s preparations for their accreditation study as well.
“I’m really excited to help them as they undergo their accreditation preparations,” he said. “It would be a great thing, that this institution that I will be at becomes accredited. That’s kind of a worldwide acknowledgement of the quality of the work that they do.”
The Fullbright Program is a program of competitive grants for international educational activities. It is available for students, teachers, scientists, scholars and more.
Crepeau said he applied for the Fullbright grant last year, along with a sabbatical at UI, and found out he had received it in January. Since then, he has been preparing for the semester he will spend in Ecuador, starting September of this year and ending in March 2016.
Crepeau is already fluent in Spanish, and said he just needs to brush up on the technical terms to teach his classes.
“I think it’s going to be a lot of fun,” Crepeau said. “I guess I’m looking forward to bringing my experience in the classroom to the work down there and I’m very excited to see how they do their educational processes. And then maybe we can find some way to bring the stuff I learned down there to the classroom up here.”
Erin Bamer can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ErinBamer