Professor Ann Bagchi selected for Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program

Associate professor Ann Bagchi, who teaches project management and health care analytics at Rutgers Business School, will spend the next academic year at Research Ireland in Dublin as an awardee of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program.

Bagchi’s work at Research Ireland, a national agency for research and innovation in Dublin, will examine community engagement in interdisciplinary research collaborations. One of the things Research Ireland has been tasked with, Bagchi said, is being more responsive to communities.

“It’s pretty much what I’ve done my whole career, interdisciplinary research that brings community into the research process,” said Bagchi whose background includes sociology and nursing and health policy research.

Her work at Research Ireland will look at how interdisciplinary research has been done in Ireland, how researchers have brought community into their work and how it can be improved.

At Rutgers, Bagchi applies her experience to business in the health care analytics class she teaches as part of the Master of Science in Healthcare Analytics and Intelligence. As part of the supply chain management faculty, she also teaches project management and the industry client class to undergraduates.

“I’m interested in getting people in business to think about health equity as a priority not an afterthought,” she said. “Helping people to understand that when you’re advancing health equity, you’re really improving population health. It’s really something I’ve tried to bring to my classes.”

Bagchi received the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. The award recognizes her impactful scholarship and commitment to advancing research that informs policy and strengthens cross-national collaboration.

This year, the Fulbright Program marks its 80th anniversary as it continues to allow faculty, researchers, administrators and professionals who teach or conduct research to become champions of international collaboration. Fulbright scholars often seed future research, innovation and institutional partnerships based on their experience in the program. 

For Bagchi, the experience will be one of professional and personal growth. She has wanted to experience life abroad since she was young, and Ireland, specifically, is a draw because her mother was Irish. At the same time, she said that Ireland is cutting edge in its use of technology in healthcare. “There are so many aspects to why I wanted to do this work in Ireland,” she said.

“This is literally a dream come true for me,” Bagchi said of the Fulbright opportunity. “I have always taken a multidisciplinary perspective. This brings together all those threads of things I’ve worked on over the years. It feels like everything I’ve done has culminated to this point.”

-Susan Todd