The Fulbright Canada Award for Outstanding Public Service

The preservation of our free society… will depend ultimately on whether we succeed or fail in directing the enormous power of human knowledge to the enrichment of our own lives and the shaping of a rational and civilized world order. It is the task of education, more than any other instrument of foreign policy to help close the dangerous gap between the economic and technological interdependence of the people of the world and their psychological, political and spiritual alienation.   

- J. William Fulbright, Prospects for the West, Harvard University Press, 1963

The Fulbright Canada Award for Outstanding Public Service, established by the Fulbright Canada Board of Directors, honours an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the public good and whose ideas reflect the values and priorities of Senator Fulbright. Through their actions, this person has played a role in bringing peoples, cultures, and nations closer, ultimately helping to address key challenges facing contemporary society.

The inaugural Fulbright Canada award winner, the Right Honourable David Johnston, former Governor General of Canada, was announced at a special ceremony in Calgary on May 1, 2013. A lawyer, Mr. John Devlin, was granted a Fulbright Award, in his honour, to pursue an LLM at Harvard University with a focus on comparative constitutional law in 2014. 

The second recipient, Dr. Shirley Tilghman, Princeton University’s first female President and one of America’s leading biomedical researchers, was announced at a special ceremony in Washington, D.C. at the Embassy of Canada on November 13, 2014.  A graduate student at Princeton University, Mr. Eliot Linton, was granted a Fulbright Award, in her honour, to conduct research at McGill University in the biological sciences in 2015. 

The Fulbright Canada Award for Outstanding Public Service reflects the values of the Fulbright Program and represents a clear statement with respect to our enduring commitment to social responsibility and our firm belief that vibrant public-private sector partnerships are critical to our collective future.

Award Details

Recipients of the Fulbright Canada Award for Outstanding Public Service must be citizens of Canada or the United States. They can be individuals or organizations drawn from the public sector, the academic community, the private sector, and civil society.

The award is set to be presented biennially at a special ceremony held on a rotating basis between major cities in Canada and the United States. Ideally, a Canadian citizen or organization will be selected for recognition at the Canadian ceremony and a citizen or organization in the United States of America will be selected for recognition at the American ceremony.

The award carries no cash value; however, a special Fulbright scholarship is offered to an exceptional graduate student working in an area that reflects the recipient’s interests and priorities.

The Foundation will accept nominations from interested parties for the Fulbright Canada Award on an ongoing basis, with nominators responsible for making the case for their candidate. The selection of recipients will be determined by an ad hoc committee of the Foundation’s Board of Directors.

For detailed information on this award and the process, please contact Sydney Sackett, at or 613.688.5521.

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