“We talked about the Fulbright together, we learned about it together, and we got excited about it together,” said Mendenhall.
The Fulbright Scholar Program and Fulbright Student Program are designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by providing faculty and high-achieving students with opportunities to research, study or teach abroad.
Mendenhall will travel to Iceland for six months beginning next January to teach classes about the law of the sea at the University of Akureyri and to study how a small nation like Iceland has such an outsized influence on international ocean law. She plans to interview government officials and review the national archives to examine Iceland’s influence over international fisheries and whaling policy, its claim of national jurisdiction well beyond the 200 miles offshore that most nations claim, and its role in international relations.
Baron Lopez, who grew up in Monterey, California, will use her Fulbright scholarship to spend 10 months studying South Korea’s strategies for managing marine litter. Beginning in August, she will collaborate with researchers at the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology on a variety of projects designed to better understand the success of various methods of reducing plastics pollution in nearby waters.
Baron Lopez became interested in plastic pollution while attending a lecture at Monterey Aquarium when she was 12 years old. She enrolled at URI after learning that Mendenhall had referenced South Korea’s plastic pollution abatement methods in a research paper about plastic policy development.