WASHINGTON — Amie K. Lund’s long-distance collaboration with a researcher in France was a modest one. They published a paper together, exchanging drafts by email. But Dr. Lund, who studies the effect of air pollution on the heart and brain, wanted to learn an innovative cell-culture technique that her colleague had developed in his lab, and, as she said with a laugh, “you can’t just email a protocol.”
Thanks to a grant from the University of North Texas, where she is an assistant professor of biological sciences, Dr. Lund spent a week in Paris this spring. Not only did she pick up the technique, but the two scientists also brainstormed new projects and made plans to exchange students. After she gave a presentation on her work, Dr. Lund was approached by several more potential research partners. “It opened up new pathways,” she said of going abroad.
Dr. Lund’s time in France was supported by a new program to encourage North Texas faculty members to do global research, a joint effort of the university’s international and research offices.
Higher-education observers say that such collaboration is far from common at universities in the United States. Hampered by traditional organizational silos, turf battles or just plain inaction, offices that oversee research and those responsible for institutions’ global strategy too often fail to identify and work toward shared goals.
It is a missed opportunity in an era when research and researchers alike increasingly cross borders — one-quarter of all scientific papers now have co-authors from two or more countries, according to the National Science Foundation. And at research universities in particular, campus efforts to internationalize may ring hollow if they do not have research at their core.
“Either the research office needs an international section or the international office needs stronger research connections,” said Karen A. Holbrook, who stepped down last year as senior vice president for global affairs and international research at the University of South Florida. “It’s an unfortunate gap.”
One of the loudest voices calling for change is Richard Nader, vice provost for international affairs at North Texas.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Nader worked at the National Science Foundation, where he evaluated grant proposals for international research. Time and again, he said, he saw proposals that fell short because they seemed to lack a clear understanding of working across cultures. Maybe they did not take into account the challenges of dealing with intellectual property or human subjects abroad. Perhaps they were not taking advantage of sources of overseas support to expand their work.
“They could have benefited from the expertise of the international office,” Dr. Nader said of the proposals. When he left government for academia, he realized the problem: “International and research didn’t talk.”
American universities have a history of doing research abroad — land-grant institutions, in particular, have long done international research and development work — but Dr. Nader and others say that very legacy can make it easy to pigeonhole international research as the province of a few disciplines or departments, like agriculture or global health. And while individual faculty members may pursue projects abroad, they often lack systematic institutional support.
Part of the problem is baked into university structures, said Kiki Caruson, assistant vice president for research, innovation, and global affairs at South Florida. International and research offices typically serve different constituencies — students, for one, faculty members for the other. They may report to different parts of the university, and their leaders often have dissimilar academic backgrounds, with international office heads more likely to come from the humanities, and research administrators from the sciences.
For a long time, it was easy to ignore that divide, Dr. Caruson said. But now not only are collaborators more likely to be overseas; so too is the financial support for research. While federal funding in the United States remains flat, research and development budgets globally have more than doubled in the past 15 years.
At Washington State University, Jane Payumo holds the relatively new position of international research coordinator and connects faculty members to overseas grants. While the size of the awards is frequently modest, Dr. Payumo says they can jump-start projects.
Like North Texas, Washington State offers grants of its own to support international research, with more than 120 applications each year for a half-dozen awards. The university’s international and research offices also jointly host an annual forum for faculty members, bringing global veterans and international newcomers together to network.
Still, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of international offices’ playing a support role, acting as a handmaiden to university research goals.
Joanna Regulska, vice president for international and global affairs at Rutgers University, counters that it is no longer enough to make the argument that “we’re doing international for international’s sake.”
“We have to answer the question, How do we advance the priorities of the university?” she said.
Also, striking up research collaborations globally will be increasingly necessary for the next generation of academics, Dr. Regulska and others said. In fact, some of the international grants at North Texas are set aside for younger faculty members like Dr. Lund, the biological sciences researcher at North Texas.
International research can also be good for young institutions hoping to raise their reputations on a global stage.
While institutions like North Texas are just starting to better connect their international and research offices, Colorado State University has made international research partnerships the core of its global strategy for nearly a decade. Colorado State’s president, Tony Frank, said the “most profound” evidence he had that the university’s approach had made a difference was that faculty members used global opportunities as a selling point when trying to attract top researchers. “A decade ago,” he said, “you wouldn’t have heard that.”
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