Ndaya Malambi ’20, who goes by Cynthia, was just named a finalist for a highly prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Program award. The award will fund Cynthia’s one-year Master’s program at Ghent University in Ghent, Belgium, where she’ll be studying the Congolese diaspora.

Cynthia, is a double major in Political Science and French. The Fulbright is only Cynthia’s latest major award. She spent the previous academic year abroad in Rennes, France with funding from a US Department of State Benjamin Gilman Scholarship and a RI Foundation Beatrice S. Demers Language Fellowship, and attended a program last summer at UC Berkeley as a Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) Law Fellow. Here at URI, Cynthia is a URI Talent Development Scholar and a proud member of the URI Honors Program.

Each year, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program awards approximately 2,000 grants in over 140 countries; these include funded English teaching assistantships, individualized study and research opportunities, and awards to fund graduate-level study at universities around the globe.

While at Ghent University, she will pursue a one-year Masters in Conflict and Development with a research focus on the Congolese diaspora — an interest stemming from personal experience. When the Second Congolese Civil War broke out, her family was forced to flee the Democratic Republic of Congo for the Central African Republic, and then again to Benin. The family spent the next seven years in the Kpomasse refugee camp, and these formative years profoundly shaped Cynthia. This early multicultural experience in the camp, and her first-hand look at the realities of war, kindled an interest in other people and cultures, culminating in her research interests today. Cynthia aims to research politics and development in the Global South, and to address the humanitarian aspects of these complex issues. She feels as though quantifying human suffering minimizes the reality of the experience, and that the qualitative, rigorous, and human-based research going on at Ghent University is exactly what we need more of in development studies.

After her Fulbright program, Cynthia will return to the US seeking employment with the US Department of State, the United Nations, or with an NGO working to address development in the Global South.