The German-American Fulbright Commission (Fulbright Germany) facilitates cross-border international understanding through academic exchange. As the only binational exchange organization in Germany with a US focus, we award around 700 scholarships annually for study, research, teaching and continuing education in the USA and Germany, thereby actively promoting transatlantic dialogue and creating opportunities and space for experiences through various types of encounters. We bring people together.
We are shaped by the founding spirit of US Senator J. William Fulbright and the experiences of the Second World War, in which humanity was sacrificed to ideology.
The Fulbright Program has international outreach, providing exchanges between the United States and over 160 countries and territories worldwide. Currently, fifty permanent commissions support the work of the Fulbright Program on the binational level, among them the German-American Commission. Annually about 8,000 scholars, American and foreign, participate in the Fulbright exchange. Since the inception of the Fulbright Program in 1946, it has sponsored approximately 310,000 scholars.
The largest and most varied of the Fulbright programs worldwide, the German-American Fulbright Program has sponsored over 46,000 Germans and Americans since its inception in 1952.
The focus of the program is student exchange. It is complemented by academic year programs for professors, teachers, teaching assistants, and journalists; summer internship programs for students; and seminars for experts in university administration and German and American Studies.
The Fulbright Commission is a binational board consisting of the German Foreign Minister and the American Ambassador to Germany, who act as honorary chairmen, and five German and five American members, all of whom are appointed by the honorary chairmen. Guidelines for the international Fulbright exchange are provided by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, whose members are appointed by the President of the United States. The German-American program is administered by the Secretariat located in Berlin, Germany; the Commission's partner on the American side is the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the U.S. Department of State.
