During winter break, when most people are relaxing with family and winding down from the holidays, Assistant Professor Andrew Dickerson will embark on a faculty exchange trip to Israel.
Dickerson has been named an awardee of the Jewish National Fund’s 2019-20 Winter Faculty Fellowship Program, which offers a fully paid trip to Israel for U.S. based academics from a recognized university. He is one of 25 program awardee recipients this year and the first person from UCF to participate in this program, which was founded in 2008.
The group will travel Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem and Bathsheba, where participants will meet with faculty members within their discipline of study that share the same or similar research interests. The goal is to foster international research collaborations, community building in Israel, as well as international exchange programs for faculty and students.
Dickerson, whose research is a direct study of or inspired by problems in biology, hopes to gain a new perspective from the faculty he meets on the trip.
“You get to tour labs, and talk to people who have different perspectives and see how they attack problems,” he said. “Hopefully I learn something that I can bring back with me.”
Dickerson earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2014. He joined the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering as an assistant professor in 2016.
- Written by Marisa Ramiccio