How does California benefit from this effort?

California benefits by continuing to have access to – and we believe the potential for more effective collaborations with – some of the best research institutions and some of the best minds in the world. Yes, we have incredible research capacity, but our partner institutions are very well chosen, and they have superb capacity too.

We also continue to benefit from attracting some of the best minds to come to the University of California, either for degrees or for short-term exchange. The other way we benefit really depends on a case-by-case basis on the research topic – but there are kinds of activities that are better done in other regions than in California, or more easily done. Some problems simply cannot be addressed without working across national boundaries – global climate change, other environmental issues, emerging infectious diseases, areas where multinational alliances are really essential in terms of the character of the problem we’re addressing.

For example, in the case of our UC-India initiative, one of the most exciting emerging activities is a TB consortium led by QB3, the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, spearheaded by UCSF, but with participation from faculty from a variety of UC campuses. We’re pulling together with Indian partners from governmental research labs, from academia and from the pharmaceutical industry in India a consortium to look into drug discovery and development for tuberculosis. In that case, the Indian pharmaceutical industry has a very strong motivation to work on development of drugs that can actually be brought to market in the most cost-effective way and address the pressing problem of TB in India, which has the world’s greatest prevalence of TB. On the UC side we have some of the best cutting-edge research in the early stages of drug discovery, and on the Indian side they’ve got fantastic capacity in medicinal chemistry and capacity for clinical trials – and the huge populations exhibiting these diseases. So it really makes sense to merge the strengths on both sides to have a collective binational effort to address this huge challenge.

A couple of other projects also illustrate the character of the new collaborations we are forging. In our effort with China, called the “10+10,” we bring together the 10 UC campuses with 10 of our most important partner universities in China, to address common pressing practical challenges. An exciting example is a collaboration to address planning for sustainability in wilderness areas. We are working with Yosemite National Park, and with a Chinese park in Sichuan Province called Jiuzhaigou National Nature Reserve. Teams of UC and Chinese faculty and students are developing projects in such areas as biodiversity, hydrology, climate change and park management issues. This project promises enormous opportunities for UC students to engage in exciting multidisciplinary work in a fascinating part of China, as well as to contribute in a very practical way to issues facing the future of our wilderness areas back home in California.

Another example comes from the work of our Canada-California Strategic Innovation Partnership, or CCSIP. Through CCSIP, we have catalyzed five working groups, including a team focusing on cancer stem cells. It turned out that when we brought our faculty together to talk about opportunities in stem cell research, they discovered that between California universities and some of our key partners in Canada, we have the world’s greatest concentration by far in the emerging and vitally important field of cancer stem cells. They have put together a very comprehensive and ambitious plan. It was very gratifying to have their work recently highlighted in the trade mission of Governor Schwarzenegger to Canada, and the Ontario provincial government announced a $30 million commitment to the work of our cancer stem cells team during the governor’s visit to Toronto.

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What would you like to read about in future editions of Our University? Send your comments and story suggestions to donna.hemmila@ucop.edu. Our University is produced by Strategic Communications, University Affairs, UC Office of the President.