How about students and faculty – how will their opportunities be enhanced by these partnerships?

Let me start with the students. We believe that it’s vitally important that California students have an opportunity to engage in real projects, working in partnerships with students and faculty in other sectors of society and other regions of the world. In order to be really educated, in order to be an effective professional in an increasingly globalized society, these kinds of experiences are really vitally important. So providing opportunities where students can do more than simply sit in classrooms in partner regions, but actually engage in real interdisciplinary projects, will provide them with the kind of experiences that will be really important in preparing them for the professional challenges of the future.

In terms of faculty, as I said, existing faculty research collaborations are mostly one-on-one faculty engagements. By having larger-scale teams, it opens a lot of doors to us in partner regions and provides our faculty with the potential for their work to have greater impact. It’s when you have deep partnerships sustained over long periods of time that it’s easier to overcome a lot of barriers to the implementation of research results. In terms of intellectual challenge, in terms of professional opportunity, there’s a great deal to be gained by taking a “grand challenges” approach – coming together in larger-scale teams to address some of these important interdisciplinary challenges.

How did you get into this work?

I’ve been a material sciences faculty member from 1982 up until the present, the first eight years at MIT, then almost 15 years at the University of Washington before coming here in 2005. In 1997 I was asked by the then-president of the University of Washington, Dick McCormick, to lead a campuswide effort to rethink all things international. So I led a group with participation from essentially all fields – medicine, law, forestry, arts, engineering, etc. – to look at new models of international research and education and service. We developed a program called UW Worldwide to try to integrate international research and education and develop some pilot projects with Japan and China and with other regions as well. I learned a lot about the dimensions of higher education reform in the U.S. and in partner regions and got a lot of experience which serves me well at the University of California. Of course the scale of the University of California is our main strategic advantage compared to working in a single campus, even at a strong university like the University of Washington.

The other aspect of my personal professional background which brings to bear on this is working extensively in the engineering education reform movement in the U.S. and internationally, specifically working on the NSF-sponsored Engineering Education Coalition, which brought together multiple institutions around the U.S. to work on new approaches to engineering education. Though it was centered in the United States, we learned a lot of lessons in that movement about how to work on a multi-institutional basis and how to draw on the strengths of multiple institutions to provide enhanced opportunities for faculty and students.

What’s the next step? Where do these partnerships go from here?

The next steps are to continue bringing together a series of workshops where the faculty can flesh out more specifics about the areas of research collaboration, how they will involve students in research, and how they will make provisions for graduate student and faculty exchange. We’ll be having binational workshops with the partners from these various regions to move forward on a collective research agenda to look for mechanisms to gain additional funding, to bring in the industrial sector, and again to flesh out models for integrating this collaborative research into education.

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.