Two Clark University students graduating this month have received prestigious Fulbright awards that sends them overseas to conduct research on environmental change in Brazil and reproductive health in Poland.
Rowan Compton ’25, M.S. ’26, and Kaya Banka ’26 were selected for the internationally competitive academic exchange program ahead of the university’s May 18 commencement exercises.
Compton spends the 2026-27 academic year in Brazil conducting cultural and geospatial research focused on large-scale agricultural expansion in the country’s northeastern Cerrado region, while Banka will travel to Poland to study how pregnancy surrogates are affected by embryo transfer procedures.
The Fulbright Program, funded by the U.S. government, supports international research, teaching and cultural exchange opportunities for students and scholars and is widely considered among the nation’s most competitive academic awards.
“The Fulbright Program is among the most prestigious postgraduate awards that a student can win,” Steven Moon, director of special academic opportunities at Clark, said in the university announcement. “Rowan and Kaya embody the excellence that this fellowship demands and show that Clark graduates are among the very best in the country.”
Compton’s research builds on years of environmental mapping and land-use work connected to Brazil. During his time at Clark, he participated in a NASA-funded project examining irrigation expansion in the Cerrado biome, a vast tropical savanna region in western Bahia.
According to the university announcement, Compton also worked with researchers at the Federal University of Goiás and contributed to projects involving the Brazilian GIS network MapBiomas, an open-science initiative focused on land-change mapping.
Compton, who earned his bachelor’s degree in geography in 2025 and is now completing a master’s degree in geographic information science through Clark’s accelerated 4+1 program, said the opportunity represents a major milestone.
“I could not be happier with my time at Clark,” Compton wrote in a LinkedIn post cited by the university. “This is my absolute dream school and one of the top schools in the world in the field. I cannot wait to begin this next journey and am very grateful to everyone who has helped me get to this point.”
Banka’s Fulbright research in Poland will examine immune health responses in surrogate pregnancies involving embryo transfer.
Her project, titled “Immune health assessment in female mice following pregnancies obtained by embryo transfer,” will be conducted at Jagiellonian University in Krakow under the supervision of researchers at the university’s Ptak Lab.
According to Clark, Banka also plans to volunteer at a university hospital while abroad to improve her medical fluency and deepen her understanding of Polish culture.
“I am very excited to contribute to research in an understudied field, while also engaging in meaningful cross-cultural exchange between Poland and the United States,” Banka said in the university announcement.
Banka, who is majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology with a minor in environmental science, has previously conducted developmental biology research at Clark and completed an internship in Spain studying zebrafish genetics.
Clark officials said both students reflect the university’s emphasis on research and experiential learning opportunities.
