Organizational Dynamics Teaching Faculty Member Gets Fulbright
February 2008
John Pourdehnad, affiliated faculty in Organizational Dynamics, has won a Fulbright Senior Specialists grant in Business Administration. Located in the School of Arts and Sciences, Organizational Dynamics operates two professional master’s degree programs and a research/education center that explore the complexities of organizational activities.
As a Fulbright Senior Specialist, Pourdehnad will complete a project at the New Bulgarian University School of Management in the Republic of Bulgaria. He will be helping to create the “Design Institute” for the practice of design thinking using trans-disciplinary teams to cope with complex and intractable problems. He will also be giving a series of lectures to educational, government and corporate institutions on systems thinking.
In addition to teaching in the Organizational Dynamics graduate studies program, Pourdehnad is Associate Director of Penn’s Ackoff Collaboratory for Advancement of Systems Approaches and Adjunct Professor, Systems Engineering, in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has been the U.S. government’s flagship program in international education exchange. The Council for International Exchange of Scholars, under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of State, administers the Fulbright Scholar Program. Each year, about 800 U.S. faculty and professionals receive Fulbright Scholar awards to lecture, take part in seminars and conduct research abroad in more than 140 countries. A similar number of foreign scholars receive Fulbrights and come to the United States. This year, Penn will host 10 Fulbright Visiting Scholars.