ANN ARBOR—Three University of Michigan faculty members have won Weiser Professional Development Fellowship Awards to conduct research in the Slovak Republic while three Slovak scholars will travel here.

The Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professional Development Fellowship Awards for 2006, awarded through U-M’s Center for Russian and East European Studies, were established in 2004 through a five-year gift from Ronald Weiser, U.S. ambassador to Slovakia from 2001-04, and his wife, Eileen Lappin Weiser.

The short-term travel awards are designed to stimulate collaborations in research and teaching between higher education faculty and artists in the Slovak Republic and U-M. Applicants were invited to propose projects in any field of research or teaching to be pursued in two three-week visits in Ann Arbor or Slovakia in 2006.

U-M faculty receiving awards for research in Slovakia are: Frank Filisko, professor of materials sciences and engineering at U-M-Ann Arbor; Lawrence Perlman, assistant professor of psychiatry at U-M-Ann Arbor and the Ann Arbor Veterans Administration Medical Center; and Jennifer Zhao, professor of mathematics at U-M-Dearborn.

Three Slovak scholars from institutions in Bratislava received awards for research in Ann Arbor: Jana Flochova, professor and researcher in the Institute of Computer Systems and Networks at Slovak University of Technology; Viera Rybarova, associate professor in the Language Department of the Academy of Music and Performing Arts; and Hana Smitkova, professor and researcher in the Department of Psychology at Comenius University.

An Ann Arbor native and businessman, Ronald Weiser, and his wife, Eileen, have worked to strengthen the educational connection to Slovakia, which became an independent democracy in 1993 and was one of 10 recent new members of the European Union. Ambassador Weiser is a graduate of the U-M business school and founder and former CEO of real estate investment company McKinley Associates.

For more information about the Ronald and Eileen Weiser Slovakia-University of Michigan Collaboration, please contact the International Institute or visit http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/crees.