Biography

Kathleen Maher oversees the application process for prestigious national fellowships requiring institutional endorsement and provides guidance to students applying to other external awards.

A member of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors (NAFA), Kathleen has served as a national selection panelist for the Critical Language Scholarship, the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Scholarship. She is the institutional representative to many private and federal scholarship foundations, including the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, Harry S. Truman Foundation, Rhodes Trust and Udall Foundation. In Spring of 2023, Kathleen was named an Excellence Award winner by the URI Foundation & Alumni Engagement.

Before coming to Honors, Kathleen served as the Assistant Director of URI’s renowned International Engineering Program for ten years. She came to URI in 1999 from the University of Iowa, where she was a study abroad adviser and the administrative coordinator for study abroad programs in Canada, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. From 1995 to 1996 Kathleen taught at a bilingual preparatory school on the campus of a university in Mexico.

Kathleen received a Bachelor of Arts in History from Siena College in Loudonville, NY. She studied abroad for a semester in Madrid, Spain and then earned a Master of Arts in Latin American Studies from the University of Arizona.