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Tye Sundlee ’08 is heading for the unknown this year, courtesy of a Fulbright grant. He’ll be living in an unfamiliar country speaking an unfamiliar language analyzing an unfamiliar health care system, and he’s looking forward to it.

Sundlee’s Fulbright experience began with boot camp, a language immersion program in Vermont where he pledged to speak only Russian for nine weeks. No text messages, calls or letters in English — no exceptions. Sundlee, who has spoken English, Japanese, Spanish and Danish, says, “It was probably the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done.”

From there he’ll head to Ukraine, where he’ll apply his economics degree toward the study of resource allocation in the country’s struggle against HIV/AIDS. Ukraine was a natural choice: The country has the highest HIV caseload in Europe.

Sundlee will work with the International HIV/AIDS Alliance looking at a classic problem for non-government organizations (NGOs): how to administer large sums of money without having them whittled away all the way down the supply chain, until there’s nothing left for the intended recipients.

In 2006 the World Bank suspended its tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS program in Ukraine because only 2 percent of the initial $60 million had resulted in services for the high-risk groups it was intended to serve: expectant mothers, street children, drug users, sex workers and prisoners.

“There’s always a question of where you apply your efforts, where you send donations for the greatest amount of good with the least amount of overhead or outright corruption,” Sundlee says. “I’ll be collecting sensitive information, so cultural awareness will be job one.”

Sundlee will use a technique that has maximized results in many countries, one based on evaluating past allocations in order to make effective decisions about future allocations. He’ll identify goods and services that were actually delivered, quantify the benefits and overhead of each program, and identify programs that deliver services most efficiently. Before his departure next year he’ll give his findings to the International HIV/AIDS Alliance to help them in their decision-making.