By CNN Political Unit
(CNN) — President Barack Obama plans to appoint former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to the board of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship program, the White House announced Thursday.
Giffords, who resigned from Congress after being wounded in a 2011 mass shooting, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1996.
The former congresswoman from Arizona has been heavily involved in the gun control debate with her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly.
In the wake of the Newtown elementary school shooting, the two have created the group “Americans for Responsible Solutions” to lobby Congress for new laws to combat gun violence.
The Fulbright program, sponsored by the State Department, provides grants to students and scholars in an educational exchange system that’s active in 155 countries. Congress established the 12-member board to oversee the program, as authorized by the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961.
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