Georgia Tech’s Fulbright Wager Pays Off in Eight Awards

Georgia Tech entered the Fulbright Program’s Top Producing Institutions list on February 3, 2026, with two U.S. Student awards. In May the campus said eight students had won 2026-27 grants, with four more named as alternates.

The February badge put an engineering school on a roster long associated with liberal arts colleges. The May class, built around lab work rather than English teaching, is the clearer test of the fellowships office that spent a summer teaching students how to apply.

Georgia Tech Joined the List With Two Awards

The Fulbright Program named 114 higher education institutions as Top Producing Institutions for 2025-26. Twenty-five made the scholar list. 96 made the student list. Seven appeared on both.

Georgia Tech was listed among student producers and among the new Top Producers for Fulbright U.S. Students. The other new names were Colorado School of Mines, St. Catherine University, the University of New Hampshire’s main campus, and the University of Tampa. Mines is another STEM campus showing up on a list that still runs heavy with colleges that send English teachers.

Campus officials said two Georgia Tech students and alumni were selected for 2025-26, with two named as alternates. They identified only one of the two winners in public: Nethra Rammohan, a 2021 Literature, Media, and Communication graduate teaching English at a preparatory high school in Zurich.

THE FEBRUARY COUNT

• Student awards: Two Georgia Tech students and alumni were selected for 2025-26 Fulbright U.S. Student grants.
• Alternates: Two more were named as alternates for the same cycle.
• National list: The program recognized 114 Top Producing Institutions, including 96 on the student side.
• Tech’s place: Georgia Tech was listed as a new student Top Producer, alongside Colorado School of Mines.

President Ángel Cabrera treated the listing as personal as well as institutional. He came to Tech decades earlier on the same program, and he said so in the campus announcement.

Thirty-five years ago, a Fulbright award changed my life and put me on the path I’m still on today. Fulbright students benefit from unrivaled opportunities for education, personal development, and intercultural leadership, and they return home as globally aware problem-solvers with new perspectives and a renewed commitment to address humanity’s most pressing challenges. This program is dear to my heart and truly one of the greatest assets of American higher education, and I am immensely proud of Georgia Tech for becoming one of the foremost producers of Fulbright talent.

Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech, campus statement, February 3, 2026

Foremost is his word. The public list is large, and the baccalaureate table that Fulbright published the same day is led by schools with 17 or 18 grants. Tech’s 2025-26 total was two. The interesting question was whether the campus would still be talking about Fulbright once the next cycle’s decisions landed.

A Summer Boot Camp Became the Wager

Georgia Tech applicants work with Prestigious Fellowships Advising. The named advisor is Georgia Brunner. The campus said it launched a summer Fulbright Application Boot Camp to widen the pool, and that applications rose for 2025-26 and again for 2026-27.

Brunner’s brief is practical. Fulbright is a long form with a country choice, a project, and a campus review before the national one. A boot camp is a way to get STEM students, who often have no seminar in “how to write a teaching statement,” through that form before the deadline.

“Not only does Fulbright provide students a way to conduct research, study, or gain valuable teaching experience,” Brunner said, “but the program also offers a unique chance to engage and immerse in other cultures and communities.” The office points interested students to fellowshipsadvising@gatech.edu.

The campus tied the application bump to that summer session. It did not publish application totals, so the size of the bump is still the office’s claim. What can be checked is the next award count, which moved from two selected to eight awarded.

Seth Kinoshita, a biochemistry graduate headed to Poland in the 2026-27 class, made the advising debt explicit. “Thank you to Dr. Brunner for their endless support during this process, and I encourage everyone to consider applying for fellowships while at Tech,” he said.

Nethra Rammohan Took the Zurich Teaching Post

Rammohan’s grant is the one 2025-26 win the campus fully described, and it is the older Fulbright shape: an English Teaching Assistant year. She earned a B.S. in Literature, Media, and Communication in 2021. By the time she applied she was a conversational designer at Cox Communications, working on natural language processing and generative AI, and she treated the year in Zurich as a way to build public-speaking and language skills she wanted in both corporate and academic rooms.

The Ivan Allen College announced her selection on July 29, 2025, months before the Top Producer list. She had asked for a country she chose. Switzerland was the pick. The post was a preparatory high school in Zurich.

I quite literally would not have reached Finalist status had it not been for Georgia. She was always so prompt and thorough with her responses, even to my most nitpicky questions, which always made me feel like I had a soft place to land during this long and sometimes challenging journey.

Nethra Rammohan, B.S. Literature, Media, and Communication 2021, Office of Undergraduate Education profile

She also told the campus she applied because the grant mixed cross-cultural exchange, language learning, leadership, and creative expression. That is a humanities graduate’s Fulbright. The class that followed her looked different.

Eight Winners Later, the Work Looks Like a Lab

On May 15, 2026, Undergraduate Education said eight Georgia Tech students have been awarded Fulbright grants for 2026-27, with four alternates. Several were members of the Class of 2026. One was already a doctoral student. The campus profiled six of the eight.

Eight Georgia Tech students have been awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to study, conduct research, and teach abroad! This year's recipients include several members of the Class of 2026, as well as a Ph.D. student. 🐝👏

🔗 Read more: https://t.co/7CVbmYUjg5 pic.twitter.com/2p4AW1mAlS

— GT Undergraduate Education and Student Success (@gtundergrad) May 19, 2026

Those six projects read like a research roster, not a language-assistant roster. Divya Tadanki, who finished a bachelor’s in neuroscience, said she would work in the Netherlands on predictors of preterm labor. Sonali Kaluri, a biology and Spanish double major, said she would study migrant workers’ health in Spain’s digital platform economy at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health.

Kinoshita said he would join Professor Urszula Stachewicz’s Electrospun Nanofibers group at AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, and that he wanted the year for the science and for Polish family ties. Diya Chutani, also a neuroscience graduate, took a Fulbright Canada path into a Ph.D. at the University of Western Ontario’s Music and Neuroscience Lab, aiming at music-based work on neurodegenerative disease. Anya Martin, a Ph.D. student in Interactive Computing, said she would do social-scientific work with meteorologists in India on AI methods for weather and climate forecasting.

Zachary Beddingfield, a biology graduate, gave the most specific specimen of what a Tech Fulbright looks like when it is not a teaching post. He said he would go to Germany to learn how to use protein language models to design de novo proteins unrelated to any found in nature, hoping to make a de novo protease that degrades a protein behind most symptoms of human urinary tract infections, as a proof that the same tools could be aimed at a wider set of pathogenic proteins.

THE 2026-27 CLASS TECH NAMED

Two of the eight winners were not named in that announcement. Four alternates were also unnamed. Even the partial list is enough to see the shift: the public 2025-26 story was an alumna teaching English in Zurich; the public 2026-27 story is lab years in the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Germany, Canada, and India.

THE TWO CYCLES

• 2025-26 awards: Two selected, two alternates; Georgia Tech named as a new student Top Producer on February 3, 2026.
• 2026-27 awards: Eight awarded, four alternates, announced May 15, 2026.
• The multiple: Eight awards is four times the two selected the year before; twelve named finalists against four.
• The next list: The 2026-27 grants will be the ones counted when Fulbright publishes the following Top Producer table.

Martin’s caution sits well on a STEM grant. “AI/ML methods have a lot of promise for meteorology, but we will see how the methods pan out in practice,” she said. That is a research year talking, not a finishing-school year.

What Is a Fulbright Top Producing Institution?

A Top Producing Institution is a college or university that, within its Carnegie grouping, had among the highest numbers of U.S. Student or U.S. Scholar candidates selected for a given year. The 2025-26 round covered 114 schools. The student badge went to 96 of them. The scholar badge went to 25. The numbers on Fulbright’s table are awards offered, not awards accepted, for years after 2020-21.

Within those groupings, the highest student counts were Georgetown among doctoral institutions, Western Washington among master’s institutions, Pitzer College among baccalaureate colleges, and MIT among special-focus technology, engineering, science, and medical campuses. Pitzer’s row on the published baccalaureate table was 18 grants from 76 applications. Bowdoin was 17 from 46. Agnes Scott College, across Atlanta, posted 4 grants from 7 applications and made the baccalaureate cut. Colorado College’s 3 grants did not.

Georgia Tech’s two 2025-26 selections would not have led any of those tables. They were enough, in Tech’s grouping, to join the 96-school student list and to be flagged as new. That is a real designation and a modest headcount, and both things can be true if the list is a threshold inside a class rather than a national ranking of raw grants.

NEW STUDENT TOP PRODUCERS, 2025-26

• Colorado School of Mines: A STEM campus added with Georgia Tech on the new-producer list.
• Georgia Institute of Technology: Two student selections, two alternates, first time on the student Top Producer list.
• St. Catherine University: Minnesota, listed among the new student producers.
• University of New Hampshire, main campus: Also new on the student list.
• The University of Tampa: Florida, the fifth new student producer named by the program.

Inside Georgia the volume is larger than Tech’s two. The University of Georgia said 11 of its students received 2025-26 offers and five accepted, its fourth straight year as a student Top Producer. A U.S. Department of State Georgia profile put the state’s Fulbright U.S. Student totals at 307 applicants and 34 recipients. The same sheet listed Georgia Tech first among Georgia campuses by foreign-student enrollment, at 8,756 in 2024-25.

That last figure is the other direction of the same exchange. Tech already hosts a large international student body. The Top Producer title measures Americans sent out. For most of its history the campus has been louder about the inbound side.

Ángel Cabrera Came to Tech on a Fulbright

Cabrera’s 2019 curriculum vitae lists a Fulbright Scholarship from 1991 to 1995, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and the U.S. Department of State. He had completed an ingeniero de telecomunicación degree, the Spanish equivalent of a combined bachelor’s and master’s in computer and electrical engineering, at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The grant brought him to Georgia Tech for an M.S. in 1993 and a Ph.D. in psychology in 1995, with a cognitive science certificate.

He later sat on the advisory board of the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, the Fulbright scholar arm, from 2009 to 2019. He became Georgia Tech’s president on September 1, 2019. When he called Fulbright one of American higher education’s great assets, he was describing the grant that moved him from Madrid to Atlanta, then the presidency of the institute that housed it.

The faculty and inbound side of that history is still active even when Tech is not a scholar Top Producer. Fulbright’s scholar directory shows recent Tech faculty grants, including communications scholar Paul Alonso Pachas in Peru in 2024-25. Visiting scholars keep landing in Atlanta as well. The student TPI title is the new piece, and it is the piece the boot camp was built to grow.

THE FULBRIGHT CLOCK AT TECH

1. 1946: The Fulbright Program is established as the U.S. government’s academic exchange. It now operates in 160 countries and locations. Alumni include 44 heads of state or government, 63 Nobel laureates, 93 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 83 MacArthur Fellows. The May 2026 campus brief put the lifetime total near 450,000 people. More than 2,000 U.S. students go out each year.
2. 1991 to 1995: Ángel Cabrera holds a Fulbright at Georgia Tech and completes his psychology graduate degrees.
3. July 29, 2025: The campus announces Nethra Rammohan’s 2025-26 English teaching grant in Zurich.
4. February 3, 2026: Fulbright lists Georgia Tech as a new U.S. Student Top Producing Institution on the strength of two selections and two alternates.
5. May 15, 2026: Undergraduate Education announces eight 2026-27 awards and four alternates, with six of the eight profiled on STEM research years.

The Institute of International Education runs the U.S. Student and U.S. Scholar programs for the State Department. The fellowships office at Tech is the local machine. Brunner is the person several of the winners keep thanking by name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Implements the Fulbright U.S. Student Program in the United States?

The Institute of International Education implements the Fulbright U.S. Student and U.S. Scholar Programs for the U.S. Department of State, which funds the program with federal appropriations and partner support from host governments, universities, companies, and foundations. Campus applications at Georgia Tech still go through Prestigious Fellowships Advising before they reach that national process.

Can Georgia Tech Graduate Students Apply for a Fulbright?

Yes. Anya Martin, a Ph.D. student in Interactive Computing, was among the 2026-27 winners, and the graduate school’s fellowships page tells master’s students and early-stage Ph.D. students that Fulbright is open to all fields, with a campus deadline that varies. The same office that ran the summer boot camp for the student program is the contact, at fellowshipsadvising@gatech.edu.

What Is the Difference Between a Fulbright Student Grant and a Scholar Grant?

The U.S. Student Program is for recent graduates, graduate students, and early-career professionals who research, study, or teach English abroad. The U.S. Scholar Program is for faculty, researchers, administrators, and established professionals. Georgia Tech’s 2025-26 Top Producer designation was on the student side; the campus did not appear on the 25-school scholar list that year, even though individual faculty still win scholar grants.

When Will the Eight 2026-27 Awards Show Up on the Top Producer List?

Fulbright’s February 2026 table counted awards offered for 2025-26. The eight grants announced on May 15, 2026, belong to the 2026-27 program year, so they will be the figures in the next Top Producer release rather than in the list that first put Georgia Tech on the badge. Offers and acceptances can still diverge, as they did at the University of Georgia, where 11 offers yielded five acceptances.

The 2026-27 grant year those eight students won is the year the boot camp was meant to stock. Two awards got Tech onto the list. Eight research years are what the next list will have to count.