RIVERSIDE, Calif. : Solving the world's most challenging problems requires global collaboration among researchers and a new generation of problem solvers equipped to understand the perspectives of other countries and the impact of those views at home and abroad.

For decades, University of California, Riverside scholars have collaborated with colleagues in other countries on research such as improving crop yields in Africa, determining cost-effective ways of reducing child malnutrition in developing countries, and solving mysteries of the universe.

Hundreds of students study overseas every year. And the university is preparing to hire its first vice provost for international affairs to strengthen international engagement in research, study-abroad opportunities, and enrollment of international students.

“The world is very different than it was just two decades ago," said Anil Deolalikar, a developmental economist and founding dean of the School of Public Policy. “It is incredibly globalized. There is growing recognition that today's big challenges : climate change, poverty and inequality, war and conflict, energy and water insecurity, disease, and food safety : are global in nature and are intricately interconnected among themselves."

Opportunities to study abroad bring histories and culture to life in ways that textbooks, maps and photographs do not. The experience can be life-changing.

“The ability for my students of Roman history to see the remains of the world they are studying is incalculable," said Michele Salzman, professor of history. “It makes real the texts and concerns of Roman history. I see students grow every day as they realize that their assumptions about the world are not universal : not for ancient Rome or modern Italy. And being able to negotiate a foreign culture gives one a sense of confidence that they take home with them, as well as a certain subtlety in approaching life and problems they face."

Thomas Cogswell, a scholar of British history, said it wasn't until he arrived in London as a Fulbright scholar in 1978 that details from his studies in the U.S. “suddenly clicked into place once I saw the sites themselves and understood how the society functioned." For students who have not traveled outside California, the monthlong summer course he teaches in London “is invariably an intellectual transformation."

Exposure to new cultures, languages, and ways of thinking allows students to see, often for the first time, “that differences among people can certainly be important, but that we are also bound up by our similarities," said David Herzberger, professor and chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies. “It allows them to understand how the ways that we do things in the United States often are good and right, but just as often there are diverse and equally valid perspectives on the world."

International living and problem-solving experiences enable students to be competitive in today's globalized world. In a pool of similarly qualified applicants, for example, students with international experience can tout their ability to navigate another culture and language, insights gained about their own culture, and maturity resulting from this knowledge, Herzberger said.

Jeanette Kohl, associate professor of art history, took 10 graduate students to UCR's German sister university Friedrich-Alexander Universität of Erlangen-Nuremberg for a graduate workshop in June. For many of the students, it was their first trip to Europe : an essential experience for art historians : and an opportunity to view art and architecture studied in UCR classes, improve their German language skills, and collaborate with FAU faculty and students. The trip was part of a recent collaboration that saw FAU art history students and faculty visit UCR last year.

“If we want our students to think globally, initiatives like this collaboration with FAU are valuable tools of both a better, international education and intensified research across borders," Kohl said. “The experience of different research cultures is particularly important in our discipline. Art history requires traveling in order to see works of art in their contexts."

Rachel Zimmermann, one of the graduate students who visited Germany, said the experience of presenting her ideas in workshops at FAU improved her confidence as a developing scholar. In addition to viewing works of European art and architecture firsthand, she also was able to connect with a FAU student “to discuss the theoretical similarities underpinning our research, and we have since exchanged some emails regarding potentially helpful sources for our respective projects."

Global Research

UCR partners with universities throughout the world to maintain the highest standards of teaching and research, to keep up with academic trends, and to share innovations. The university currently has 170 agreements for collaboration with universities around the world.

The benefits of global research are numerous, Herzberger said. “It creates an international presence for the university and enhances our reputation in the broadest possible sense; it brings together different perspectives and skill sets related to whatever the topic is at hand; it enhances resource opportunities manyfold; it often solves a particular problem faced by a community or nation, or suggests an array of possible solutions to a problem; it often allows our students to participate in research that takes them outside their limited experience and thus exposes them to different ways of thinking."

Herzberger has done extensive work on the relationship between the writing of fiction and history during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the postwar period of the Franco regime (1936-1975), as well as democratic Spain (1977 to the present). He examines how the Franco regime used history to legitimate its standing as “the true and rightful heirs of the Spanish past, as well as to exclude from the past all those who did not fall within what the regime established as the authentic national identity."

For Deolalikar of the School of Public Policy, three decades of research with colleagues and policymakers in developing countries has raised hunger and malnutrition to the top of the policy agenda in much of Asia and Africa. In 2008 and 2012, he was invited to participate in the renowned Copenhagen Consensus to deliberate, identify and rank, with leading scholars from around the world, the most cost-effective solutions to the world's 10 biggest challenges, such as climate change, hunger, poverty, discrimination against women, war and conflict, illiteracy, and disease.

“The ranking of specific interventions based on how cost-effective they are forced researchers to get away from generalities and vague policy recommendations," he said. “I take some pride in the fact that my research has brought about, at least indirectly and with the help of the entire global community of researchers, some change for the better."

At any time, UC Riverside faculty members are conducting research and participating in collaborations around the world and those with potential world-wide impact. Here are a few examples:

• UCR is a founding member of an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN lab in Geneva, Switzerland, as physicists hunt for Higgs boson, the world's most sought-after particle.
• English professor Michelle H. Raheja received a Fulbright fellowship to study visual culture of one of the largest indigenous groups in Europe, the Sami people of northern Europe.
• Physics professor Gabriela Canalizo volunteers several weeks each summer in an orphanage in Malawi to raise awareness of science.
• Scientists are developing improved varieties of cowpea that will increase crop yield in several African countries. Cowpea is a protein-rich legume crop that plays a key role in sustaining food security for people and their livestock in Africa and Asia.
• UCR geologists were part of an international team that discovered the mineral qingsongite in Tibet. Nearly as hard as a diamond, it is an important technological material.
• Economist Steven Helfand is evaluating a United Nations agriculture sustainability project aimed at breaking the cycle of poverty in Brazil.
• Historian James Brennan is examining political violence and the “dirty war" in Argentina and, with scholars from Asia, Africa and Latin America, is studying the economic-social-environmental history of the global mining industry in the 20th century.