Stavros Piperidis, Stavros Malkidis and Maria Shiraef’s success stories serve as an example of the fruitful and rewarding collaboration between University of Macedonia graduates and the Fulbright scholarship program.

Stavros Piperidis graduated from the Department of International and European Studies and all throughout his studies years gained practical experience through internships at the Permanent Representation of Greece to NATO, NATO Rapid Deployable Corps Greece, the Center for Research on Democracy and Law, the UNESCO Youth Club of Thessaloniki, and Vouliwatch. He is currently a postgraduate student at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, pursuing a Master of Arts in International Relations (MAIR) and focusing on Security, Strategy, and Statecraft. Stavros is a SAIS Public Service Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow in Greece, and an Onassis Foundation Scholar. He also serves as an elected representative at the SAIS Student Government Association, working for the needs and concerns of the MAIR cohort.

Stavros Malkidis an alumnus of the 2017 Study of the U.S. Institutes for Student Leaders from Europe on Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He described his time on the SUSI program as an eye-opening experience during which he realized that he actually stood equal to some of the most ambitious and talented European students. As he quotes “Subsequently, I concluded that scientific and intellectual boundaries can only be overcome through synergies with talented people, who can also remind you of the importance of intellectual humility.”
Stavros graduated from the Department of Economics of the University of Macedonia and was recently selected as a Hayek Fellow and will begin coursework at New York University to study Economics.

In addition, Mary Shiraef, an American citizen currently a Ph.D. Candidate in political science at the University of Notre Dame was awarded a Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship Program and is currently in collaboration with fellow researchers from the University of Macedonia. Specifically, as M. Shiraef quotes ‘The key objective of the Fulbright Greece portion of my research program is to obtain a sample of data from cemeteries and the local civil registry that is comparable in substance to the one I collected in Albania. In particular, I proposed to capture first-name data that allows me to measure first-name diversity at the village level over time (divided between 10-year cohorts) as a proxy for identity persistence. Additionally, I am collaborating with the Public Opinion Research Unit (PORU), a top-tier survey institute associated with the University of Macedonia and run by Dr. George Siakas, to design a survey of my population on their political attitudes and identity transmission mechanisms’.