Judge Memorial alumnus receives Fulbright Award

Friday, Jun. 03, 2016

SALT LAKE CITY — Matt Kirkegaard, Judge Memorial Catholic High School Class of 2011 and a 2016 University of Utah honors graduate, received a 2016 Fulbright Award to study water security and international development at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

Kirkegaard will enter a Master of Science program to research the effects of regional integration on water cooperation and conflict, collaborating with the University of East Anglia’s Water Security Research Center. He would then like to pursue a public service career in U.S. environmental foreign policy or with multilateral organizations, he said.

The U.S. Fulbright program was established about 70 years ago to create mutual understanding and support peaceful relations between people in the U.S. and other countries. The program provides grants for international exchange for students and scholars to study, teach and conduct research, said Howard Lehman, director of the University of Utah Fulbright program and professor in the Department of Political Science.

“Matthew has already done some remarkable things and I am very pleased with his achievements,” said Lehman. “I look forward to what he does next after he completes the master’s program at the University of East Anglia.”

Kirkegaard is particularly interested in trans-boundary water politics, he said. In 2014 he studied water security issues in rural Costa Rica, and he spent last year studying Portuguese in southern Brazil as a Boren Scholar, with a focus on international water politics in the La Plata Basin, which included Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia.

The experience was life-changing, he said. “Living and immersing myself in a language and culture in which I had no background was a jarring experience, but it helped me grow and mature and showed me how much of the world I had yet to explore.” 

Kirkegaard also participated on a project in central India through the University of Utah, working on integrating gendered perspectives of water into urban sustainability, he said. “In other words, how water affects men and women differently, and how women can lead on water issues especially when they’ve been systematically shut out, but are most affected by those issues themselves.” 

The MV Foundation in India set up a program to empower women to govern their own water in rural areas for crops and the livelihood of communities, Kirkegaard said. The program allowed women to reverse the trend of migration from people into the city; “today those communities are thriving with ample water using traditional knowledge and techniques with a different view of women in society,” he said. 

Kirkegaard would like to combine all of this work and experience with what he will be doing at the University of East Anglia next year for his master’s program work on water security and international development, he said. 

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Kirkegaard became interested in water sustainability while studying at the University of Utah, he said. “I became much more aware of how insecure our water is here even though we’ve taken great measures to combat that through conservation,” he said. “But by the end of this century we are predicted to have roughly two-thirds less water available to us because we will have less snow pack for a variety of reasons related to climate change; shifting weather patterns and also rising temperatures. All of that jeopardizes our water security, and thus our way of life.”

Kirkegaard graduated from the University of Utah Honors College as a George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Scholar with bachelor’s degrees in political science and environmental and sustainability studies, and minors in Portuguese and Brazilian studies. 

His volunteer work included assisting The Nature Conservancy, the School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, the City of Salt Lake and Wasatch Community Gardens. As a University of Utah junior, he was awarded one of 50 Udall Scholarships from the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation.