I came to Munich with my school backpack, a small cooler, and one checked suitcase, trusting that whatever else I needed I’d find once I got here. Ten months later, at the close of the grant period, I had two dissertation chapters, a software package, a set of collaborators I hope to keep working with, along with a broader sense of what all I’m able to embark upon and accomplish.

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The 2025/2026 Fulbright Germany cohort at orientation, right at the start of the year.

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The Work I Came To Do

What was the problem I came to Munich to work on? My Fulbright project, “Managing the Multiplicity of Analysis Strategies for Robust Research Outcomes,” was hosted by Dr. Sabine Hoffmann at the Institut für Statistik at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU Munich), and it starts from something that’s easy to state and harder to parse and work out, which is that when several competent analysts are handed the same dataset and the same question, they rarely produce the same answer. Each of them has to decide how to define the exposure and the outcome, which confounders to adjust for, how to handle missing data and ambiguous events, and which model to fit, so that a single question corresponds to a whole space of defensible analyses rather than to one. The variability on its own would be tolerable (and interesting in its own right!); what does the damage is variability combined with reporting only the specification that produced the most publishable result, which inflates confidence and helps explain why so many findings don’t replicate.

Working in Dr. Hoffmann’s group with two German population-based cohorts and one running question about cardiovascular risk, the year produced four things: a tutorial for applied epidemiologists, written with a generous group of collaborators who taught me a great deal along the way; a methodological framework that grew out of a gap I noticed while writing that tutorial and that now forms a chapter of my dissertation; a co-authored paper led by a fellow student, currently under review; and the forkflow R package with its companion open-access book.

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Fourteen Countries, Ten Venues

Outside the Palace of Nations in Geneva, before my presentation.

How far does a methodological question travel once you carry it around a continent? I presented at ten venues across Europe during the grant period and visited fourteen countries over the course of the year, namely: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Although I enjoyed all of my travels, my conference stops in Geneva, Switzerland (where I presented at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Security and Ethics, at the Palace of Nations) and in Madrid/Alcalá de Henares, Spain (where I spoke at the first European University Alliance for Global Health (EUGLOH) Conference on Pedagogical Development and chaired a session) were the most memorable and intellectually stimulating. The other academic talks and posters took me across the rest of the continent on other adventures, and one of them was a guest lecture on the other side of Munich, which felt like the most brief (yet one of the most beautiful) set of connecting train rides the whole year.

Most of these trips I made alone, into venues and cities where I knew absolutely no one, and I found that these experiences changed me at least as much as the papers did. An international career used to be something I admired in other people, and it’s now something I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to start.

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The Fulbright European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization Seminar

The Fulbright EU-NATO Seminar cohort at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, February 2026.

What changes when you get to sit inside an institution you’ve only read about? The Fulbright European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (EU-NATO) Seminar ran from 24 to 28 February 2026 and answered that question five days in a row. We began in Luxembourg with an introduction to the European Union and a reception at the U.S. Embassy, and the following morning we were briefed on a pending case at the Court of Justice of the European Union and then sat in on the hearing itself, after which the President of the Court and a judge of the General Court joined us for lunch and spoke about how the Court reasons with a generosity that made the day even more extraordinary than it already was.

The rest of the week in Brussels moved through the European Commission, the European Parliament, NATO Headquarters, and the U.S. Missions to both the European Union and NATO. This densely informative week enabled me to see where (in terms of physical locations I got to visit and bureaucratic practices I got to tangibly learn about) research I have contributed to has been cited and used in policy, and to learn the mechanisms by which that happened. Following a citation trail from an academic paper into a recommendation and then into something a government does was gamechanging for how I think about my own work in trustworthy data science, and it made the case for reporting analytic choices carefully and reproducibly feel much less abstract, since somebody downstream is relying on a single number that could just as defensibly have been several.

The seminar ended over dinner near the historic (and gorgeous!) Grand Place. I am grateful to Jace Jasper for organizing the entire week so thoughtfully, and to Fulbright Germany for selecting me as one of just a handful of delegates from our commission’s grantees to attend.

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Transatlantic Classroom and Community Engagement

With the Amerikahaus München team, whose Ask an American program sent me into German classrooms.

Some of the most satisfying hours of the year had nothing to do with statistics. Through the Ask an American program at Amerikahaus München I visited German classrooms to answer questions about life in the United States, including an English lesson with class 8a at the Friedrich-List-Gymnasium in Gemünden, where I talked about my family, growing up in California, school, university, and my hobbies. The school very kindly wrote about the visit here: „Ask an American“ – eine etwas andere Englischstunde in der 8a.

I also spent the year as a Fulbright Traveler with Reach the World, connecting a high school German classroom in the United States to my research and my life in Germany, and I was given the distinction of Best Traveler-Educator Collaboration in early spring for that work. The journal is public and can be read here: Alyssa’s Journey to Germany.

The rest of the year outside the office included volunteering at the Munich Security Conference, pro bono artificial intelligence engineering with the Technical University of Munich Social Artificial Intelligence Club for clients including United Nations Women and Initiativgruppe e.V., a Bavarian folk dance course through the university sports center, and open swimming at the Olympiaschwimmhalle. I also got lucky enough to snag the very last ticket to hear Werner Herzog speak in person (and show a movie!) at the film museum in the center of Munich and experience an evening I could not have talked my way into anywhere else.

Fulbright Germany Thanksgiving, November 2025.

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What Germany Turned Out To Be

Marienplatz in spring, with the Neues Rathaus behind the tulips.

I came knowing Germany through its research literature, as a place that produces thorough and exacting methodological work. My Fulbright year added an understanding of where that exactness comes from by experiencing German research values firsthand, including the willingness to discuss a disagreement in good faith until it resolves, the assumption that any scientific claim should be defensible from multiple angles, the seriousness with which everyone treats rest and life outside work, and the aspiration not to let any finite resource go to waste.

However, alongside these new understandings, the kindness of the German people is what I’ll remember the most. I’d been told to expect reservedness, and what I found was a warmth that never publicizes itself but shows up consistently in neighbors (who walked me through unfamiliar paperwork), colleagues (who switched to English without being asked whenever I looked lost), and even strangers (including a random family who got me onto the next Deutsche Bahn train home, in first class no less, once for free!). Gemütlichkeit turns out to describe an everyday practice of how Germans make sure people (especially visitors) are cared for and comfortable, and if I ever leave Germany, I will sorely miss it.

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What I’m Taking With Me

This was my first time living outside the United States, and what I gained alongside the research experience is a kind of courage I didn’t know was available to me. Ten months of building a life in a country whose language I was still learning, of paperwork and apartment hunting and the slow work of making friends, showed me how much I’m able to take on, and how much help I’d be given whenever I asked for it. I no longer treat working abroad as a departure from a plan, since it’s now become the plan (I’m staying in Germany through my defense in 2027).

My thanks to Dr. Sabine Hoffmann, who supervised this year with unfailing generosity, and to her group and the Institut für Statistik for taking me in; to Fulbright Germany and the German-American Fulbright Commission; to Amerikahaus München and to Reach the World; to my advisors Prof. Brian Caffo and Prof. Stephanie Hicks and chair Prof. Liz Stuart at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who made room for a year abroad in the middle of a dissertation; and to the 2025/2026 cohort, who made a large country feel like a small and reachable one. The papers and the software from this year will have their own life, but the most durable result is that I now attempt things I would have never dreamed of before my Fulbright.

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This site (my personal website, AlyssaColumbus.com) is not an official site of the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed on this site are entirely those of myself, Alyssa Columbus, and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.