Fulbright Fellowships are making futures brighter in Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean.

As the new academic year gets started in the United States, three residents have joined the millions of new students matriculating at U.S. universities – and one more will join their number in February.

Barbadians Roderick Prescod and Megan Cox, Antiguan Amaya Athill and St. Lucian Nyo Serieux are the 2012 Fellows of the prestigious Fulbright program and will have their graduate-level studies funded by the U.S. government.

Prescod,a hospitality management tutor at the Barbados Community College, was awarded a Fulbright Faculty Development scholarship and has gone to Florida State University where he will earn a master’s degree in Instructional Systems.

Nyo Serieux, a mathematics teacher at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College was also awarded a Fulbright Faculty Development scholarship and just recently headed to North Carolina State University to pursue his master’s degree in Statistics.

Antiguan attorney Amaya Athill was awarded the Fulbright Foreign Student scholarship and is in the U.S. capital of Washington D.C. where she is pursuing her master’s degree in law at Georgetown University.

In February, Barbadian Megan Cox will be heading to the University of Southern Mississippi on a Fulbright Nexus Scholarship. Cox, a technical specialist at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology, will conduct research in association with Dr. Alvin Holder on the impact of karst sinkholes and drainage wells on Barbados’ groundwater quality.

The quartet has become part of a worldwide community of Fulbright scholars, including such distinguished alumni as Barbadian novelist , UWI Cave Hill’s deputy principal and St. Kitts and Nevis’ Minister of Education, Hon.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and operates in more than 155 countries.

Since 1965, nearly 200 people from Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean have received Fulbright Awards. They are part of a larger global family of 285,000 people who have won Fulbright awards in its 66 years of existence, with large numbers going on to become academic, political, social, cultural and scientific leaders in their home countries. Approximately 7,000 grants are awarded annually.

The program’s creator, late U.S. Senator intended it “to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.”