Tiffany Verga (Class of 2015)

Tiffany Verga (Class of 2015), a graduate of Curtin University, was awarded the 2023 Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship to further support her efforts towards curbing the detrimental effects of climate change.  

With this prestigious award, Tiffany (having completed a Bachelor of Arts and Commerce) will pursue a Master’s degree in Public Administration with a focus on Energy and Environment, sharpening her skills in environmental communication.  

The Fulbright Program is the world’s largest educational exchange scholarship program, with a 75-year history, sponsored by the US and Australian governments, which aims to increase bi-national research, collaboration and cultural exchange. The Fulbright Program, developed after World War II, has awarded scholarships to 370,000 students, academics and professors across 160 countries.  

Tiffany has always been passionate about using communications to drive positive change, but her passion for environmental communications was piqued when she attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, as part of a Global Voices Scholarship in 2021, where she was first introduced to environmental policy.  

Tiffany plans to use the opportunity to forge ahead with her plans to help shape Australia’s climate change dialogue and policy.  

This is not the first scholarship Tiffany has been awarded during her studies. In 2020, she won the prestigious Global Voices scholarship for her commitment to tackling the negative effects of climate change.  

Experiencing Beijing’s choking smog as a seven-year-old had such a huge impact on Tiffany that it helped shape her career choices 15 years later. She first witnessed the impact of climate change when she visited her extended family in China as a child and realised that clean air was something Australians took for granted.  

Like many of her generation, Tiffany refuses to believe the challenges facing the planet are too big for her to make a difference.