For the second time in four years, Professor Jennifer Feitosa has earned a prestigious Fulbright Scholar award, joining a distinguished network of Fulbright alumni.
Feitosa, who is Associate Professor of Psychological Science and Director of the METRICS Lab at CMC, heads to Portugal this summer, where she will continue to build upon her 2023 Fulbright research project, which led her to Spain.
The Fulbright Program offers awards in more than 120 nations for “U.S. citizens to teach, conduct research, and carry out professional projects around the world.” The program is the U.S. government’s flagship international academic exchange initiative, advancing knowledge and innovation, fostering solutions to complex global challenges, and promoting peaceful relations between the United States and other nations.
In its recognition of Feitosa, the Fulbright Program noted that the 2026-27 award reflects Feitosa’s “leadership and contributions to society.” Shortly after receiving the Fulbright honor for the second time, Feitosa said she plans to continue “to bridge connections with different countries.”
Feitosa—who describes the core of her field as “organizational psychology”—focuses her research on teams, diversity, and measurement in the workplace. She has co-authored over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals and presentations at professional conferences.
With her Fulbright funding, Feitosa, who is originally from Brazil and trilingual (Portuguese, Spanish, and English), will work in conjunction with a Portuguese colleague she met in Spain. She’ll be based at Lisbon’s ISCTE Business School to work on her research project, “Enhancing Belonging for Workers with Disabilities in Virtual Teams,” with plans to expand upon her previous workplace-based integrated team belonging training, while adding a new specific population.
“We’re going to target neurodiverse workers to try to build social belonging from a team’s perspective, enhancing diversity and teamwork together in this training,” she said. “We are thinking through how we can make this training more accessible. I think it's going to be an exciting new pathway for this project.”
Feitosa credits Albert L. Park, Bank of America Associate Professor of Pacific Basin Studies and Associate Dean of the Faculty for Research at CMC, for helping her to strengthen her original 2022-2023 Fulbright application. Park, a multiple Fulbright recipient himself, offered insights into the process. She also highlighted support from her colleagues in the Psychological Science department, as well as from Beth Jager, Director of Sponsored Research in the Office of Advancement. In addition to her CMC support system, Feitosa cited the influence of: CGU Professor M. Gloria González-Morales, with whom she launched the Integrated Team Belonging Training study through a CGU Blais Challenge Award; Ramón Rico, who hosted her at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M); her advisor, Eduardo Salas, whose mentorship has guided her since her undergraduate years; and her husband, Diego, “whose willingness to embrace challenges has been a constant source of support.”
Before she heads to Lisbon in May of 2027, Feitosa is not shying away from ambitious activities. For instance, she recently traveled to New Orleans for the annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference, with six of her METRICS Lab students. Describing the conference as “premier in our field,” Feitosa said, “it was a phenomenal opportunity for … students to see the breadth of opportunities available.”
After all, involving CMC students in her research is “my number one favorite part of my job,” she shared. (At the METRICS Lab) “we have projects in every stage. I try to expose them to all phases, from beginning to end, of the research process.”