Two UMass Lowell Professors Named Fulbright U.S. Scholars

07/16/2026

Media contacts: David Joyner, executive director, communications and digital media, David_Joyner@uml.edu and Nancy Cicco, associate director of media relations, Nancy_Cicco@uml.edu 

LOWELL, Mass. – Two UMass Lowell faculty members have received prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awards to advance their careers as educators and researchers. The honors, awarded by the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, are bestowed based on the academic merits of recipients’ work and leadership potential. 

The UMass Lowell Fulbright awardees for the 2026-2027 academic year are Management Associate Professor Jose Godinez, who teaches in the university’s Manning School of Business, and Economics Professor and Chair Shakil Quayes, who teaches in the university’s College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. 

“The UMass Lowell community congratulates professors Godinez and Quayes on their Fulbright awards, which recognize the significance of their research and work as educators. The opportunities that come with these awards will allow them to expand their expertise, establish partnerships with scholars from around the world and return to UMass Lowell to share what they’ve learned with our students,” said UMass Lowell Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor of Academic and Student Affairs Noureddine Melikechi.

With their awards, Godinez and Quayes will join more than 800 other Fulbright U.S. Scholar award recipients selected to teach or conduct research abroad over the next year.

Godinez is an authority on business ethics. His Fulbright project at the Universidad de Murcia in Murcia, Spain, this fall will examine how Spanish small- and medium-sized enterprises adapt to European environmental, social, governance and anti-corruption standards while competing internationally. 

Through teaching and research, he will explore how institutional pressures shape business ethics, comparing findings with comparable enterprises in Latin America. Activities include courses on international business ethics, corporate social responsibility and emerging markets; faculty workshops on qualitative methods; and public lectures. The research will produce joint publications, case studies and long-term collaboration between the institutions to advance responsible international business practices.

“Receiving a Fulbright award is a tremendous honor and an exciting opportunity to strengthen international collaboration. I look forward to working with colleagues at the Universidad de Murcia to better understand how firms navigate evolving sustainability and governance expectations, while building lasting partnerships that contribute to responsible international business scholarship and student learning,” Godinez said.

Quayes is an expert in financial, labor and development economics, which aims to improve the fiscal, economic and social environment in developing countries. He will conduct research in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for the 2027 spring semester at the Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), the apex microfinance funding institution in Bangladesh. 

At the foundation, Quayes will advance the digital transformation of Bangladesh's microfinance sector by developing a centralized data platform that integrates fragmented borrower and financial records from partner microfinance institutions. The initiative will establish a unified data infrastructure to strengthen institutional data management, reporting, oversight and accountability across PKSF’s partner network. 

The resulting database will support research on optimal funding strategies, technology adoption and the role of social capital in advancing financial inclusion. The project will also strengthen PKSF’s analytical capacity by training staff in applied econometric methods to support data-driven decision-making and policy evaluation.

“I'm grateful for this opportunity to represent UMass Lowell through the Fulbright Program while working with PKSF on research that bridges academic scholarship and real-world development challenges,” Quayes said.

Godinez and Quayes are the latest UMass Lowell faculty members honored with a Fulbright award. Named a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in 2025, Public Health Associate Professor Angela Wangari Walter, a nationally recognized expert in behavioral health services who teaches in UMass Lowell’s Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences, worked in Nairobi, Kenya, over the past year, where she partnered with the Catholic University of Eastern Africa to examine alcohol and tobacco use among adults who have been diagnosed with cancer. 

The Fulbright program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program and is supported by the people of the United States through an annual appropriation by U.S. Congress to the State Department, and by partner countries around the world. In the United States, awards are given through the U.S. Scholars Program and the U.S. Student Program. Representing more than 165 countries, Fulbright alumni are leaders in politics, business, science, education and the arts. Fulbright recipients include 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 61 Nobel Prize laureates, 40 current or former heads of state or government, 76 MacArthur Foundation Fellows and 16 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, according to the State Department.