Dr. Catherine Pirkle always enjoyed traveling and being in very diverse settings, so she was enthused after learning that she had been selected as a Fulbright Specialist by the J. William Fulbright Council for International Exchange of Scholars in spring 2017.
The Fulbright Specialist Program sends U.S. faculty and professionals to serve as expert consultants on curriculum, faculty development, institutional planning and related subjects at international academic institutions for a length of two to six weeks.
Pirkle, an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UHM), worked with the College of Health Sciences of Trairí (FACISA) and Rio Grande do Norte Santa Cruz – rural satellite campuses of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in northeast Brazil – to conduct research on adolescent health.
More specifically, Pirkle studies the long-term health consequences of having a child during adolescence.
Many federal universities in northeast Brazil established satellite campuses in rural, more inland communities in order to make higher education more accessible to communities that otherwise would not be able to reach it, Pirkle said.
As a Fulbright Specialist, Pirkle jointly worked at the main campus in Natal, which is a community of about 800,000 people on the coast but also traveled to the inland campus, about two hours away.
“[Working at] both campuses was just a really incredible experience because the main campus is very much what you think of when you think of what higher education is in the United States or in Canada,” Pirkle said. “The buildings look very similar … It looks like a big university campus. Natal is a middle-income country so there’s huge income disparities, but it’s got everything you could want there.”
