Australian Fulbright Scholar to lecture at Kansas State University for Oz to Oz program

2014 Fulbright Professional Coral Sea Scholarship recipient Professor Heidi Muenchberger will deliver a lecture entitled The Design Homunculus: Mapping the human brain to the built environment, on March 3 at Kansas State University, Manhattan as part of the Fulbright-Kansas State University Oz-to-Oz program.

Professor Muenchberger is chair of healthy design and a principal research fellow at the Griffith Health Institute, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Trained as a clinical neuropsychologist, she spent 15 years researching the influence of lived environments on people with brain injury, spinal cord injury and other life-changing health conditions.

Her Fulbright Coral Sea Scholarship enabled Professor Muenchberger to travel to Cornell University, New York, where she is undertaking a research project under the expert guidance of Dr Mardelle Shepley. Her studies focus on the latest approaches for viable, evidence-based design of therapeutic environments for critically injured outpatient populations.

The quality of Professor Muenchberger’s work has been recognized by peers through a number of research excellence awards. She is widely published in peer-review journals, and recently edited a book on Health and Healing after Traumatic Brain Injury, Praeger Press. She has led multiyear evaluations of major public health programs in Australia designed to improve quality of life for patients and liveability of places. Outcomes of this work include predictive models of wellbeing, design guidelines for rehabilitation and healthcare settings, and tools for assessing person-centred design.

The Fulbright-Kansas State University Oz-to-Oz program supports Australian Fulbright Professional and Senior Scholars to visit K-State campuses while the Scholars are in the U.S. to complete their Fulbright program. It is an enrichment opportunity which supported 14 of our 2014 Scholars to the U.S. to visit KSU.

Kansas State University is the first U.S. educational institutional partner of the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and supports the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Agriculture and Life Sciences and a Fulbright Senior Scholarship.

See the websites for more information on the Australian-American Fulbright and Oz-to-Oz programs.