LSU LBTC Executive Director Receives Fulbright Specialists Award
Courtesy of Wendy Luedtke
Charles D’Agostino, executive director of the LSU Louisiana Business & Technology Center of the E. J. Ourso College of Business, has been selected for a Fulbright Specialists project in L’Aquila, Italy, at the Universita’ degli Studi dell’Aquila during the month of May, according to the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
D’Agostino will be providing assistance to the university and city of L’Aquila, which was devastated by a major earthquake in April 2009. The university has asked D’Agostino to assist it in developing a business incubator and a business disaster counseling center, much like he did at the LBTC after Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike. The State Department brought administrators from the university in L’Aquila and several members of the government to Baton Rouge in 2009 to tour the LSU incubator and discuss with D’Agostino the programs that the LBTC offered to hurricane impacted areas and businesses of Louisiana. Once the tour and visit was concluded, they requested the State Department bring in D’Agostino to assist in replicating the incubator and the business disaster programs.
“Once again we are showing that LSU is an institution that can and does reach beyond the borders of Louisiana,” D’Agostino said. “This is another example of our model being adopted by another institution.”
According to D’Agostino, he is also attempting to bring along an official from LSU’s Stephenson Disaster Management Institute to discuss a possible joint venture.
“L’Aquila is very interested in that as well,” D’Agostino said.
Additionally, D’Agostino will lecture in the Department of Economics in L’Aquila on entrepreneurship and small business development and will work with university and community leaders in developing business recovery and business continuity programs for the many small business owners impacted by the earthquake. The LBTC has been awarded international recognition for both the incubator and the disaster recovery programs. Being named the 2005 National Business Incubator of the Year, receiving the 2006 Excalibur Award for business recovery programs and receiving the 2009 NBIA’s Most Innovative Program and 2009 Department of Commerce Economic Excellence Award attracted the attention of the Universita L’Aquila and prompted it to come to Baton Rouge to study the programs implemented by the LBTC.
D’Agostino is one of more than 400 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad this year through the Fulbright Specialists Program. The Fulbright Specialists Program, created in 2000 to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, provides short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) to prominent U.S. faculty and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at post secondary, academic institutions around the world.
The Fulbright Program, America’s flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 60 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have taught, studied or conducted research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the United States. More than 285,000 emerging leaders in their professional fields have received Fulbright awards, including individuals who later became heads of government, Nobel Prize winners and leaders in education, business, journalism, the arts and other fields.
Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement. Among thousands of prominent Fulbright Scholar alumni are Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS; Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; and Craig Barrett, chairman of the board of Intel Corporation. Distinguished Fulbright Specialist participants include Mahmoud Ayoub, professor of religion at Temple University; Heidi Hartmann, president and CEO, Institute for Women’s Policy Research; Percy R. Luney Jr., dean and professor, College of Law, Florida A&M University; and Emily Vargas-Barone, founder and executive director of the RISE Institute.
The Louisiana Business & Technology Center, an integral part of LSU’s E. J. Ourso College of Business’ Stephenson Entrepreneurship Institute, endeavors to enhance economic development in Louisiana through the support of existing small businesses and the development of new businesses. Established in 1988, the LBTC’s highly successful business incubator program has been honored as the National Business Incubator Association’s Incubator of the Year. For more information, visit www.bus.lsu.edu/lbtc or call 225-578-7555.