Dawn Ford of Hixson, who said she intends to study European planning for avian influenza and efforts in environmental protection, is the recipient of a 2007 Marshall Memorial Fellowship.

The emergency operations coordinator at the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Health Department is among 55 Americans tapped for the program, which provides rising leaders, ages 28-40, with three weeks of travel to foreign economic centers and education on the nation's role in trans-Atlantic relationships.

Announcing the honor during a recent visit to Chattanooga was Neil Sumilas, 31, program officer for the Washington, D.C.-based German Marshall Fund of the United States' fellowship initiative.

"Marshall Fellows meet with European unions and economic developers and take away ideas they can implement in their own communities," he said of the program, now in its 24th year.

"They also get an awareness of how we fit into the geopolitical climate. I meet a lot of fellows who say they learned more about the United States while they were in Europe than they have at home."

For a decade, the program's European counterpart has brought fellows from 19 countries to Chattanooga, the smallest of 11 cities on an itinerary that also includes Chicago and San Francisco. But Ms. Ford is only the fifth fellow tapped from this city, said Eleanor Cooper, local coordinator.

The experience was a springboard to networking, according to Wade Hinton, 31, a 2005 Marshall Fellow whose participation entailed treks to Brussels, Berlin, Paris and Bratislava among other sites.

"One member of my group was a recent candidate for Georgia Secretary of State and I campaigned for him," said the Chattanooga attorney with the firm of Snipes, Robinson and Hinton. "I'm also still in touch with fellows in Miami and Los Angeles. I expect those to be lifelong relationships."

He said some of the operating institutions he saw in Europe may offer Chattanooga applications, such as an affordable-housing development in Lyons, France, that evoked this city's Hope 6 Project, and program partnerships in Hamburg, Germany, reminiscent of Chattanooga's cluster initiatives.

As a Marshall Fellows candidate, Ms.

Ford wrote an essay in which she described her primary job responsibility as pandemic influenza planning for Hamilton County -- work that she said would likely be enhanced by learning about how European nations are addressing similar problems.

That expressed interest helped her nomination to earn the nod, according to Mr. Sumilas. He said, "Some attributes we look for in fellows are vision, a sense of purpose and intellectual curiosity."