I have been sporting a small panda brooch on my lapel for the last week – a gift from Dr Zhou Xuedong, Dean of the Dental School at Sichuan University in Chengdu. She is leading a 26-strong delegation of university leaders from China, who are in the UK for a leadership study tour. They spent a week with us at York, discussing with colleagues here the topical issues of knowledge exchange, governance, reputation build and international research collaborations.
These are topics of great importance to the leading universities around the globe. It was heartening and illuminating to discover how much we had in common with the leaders of major universities in China. As well as learning from each other, we forged a strong professional network and friendships.
The visit to York ended with the China-UK Higher Education Forum on 25 October. As well as the Chinese delegation, representatives from 60 UK universities joined the conference to discuss the various forms of partnership open to universities. These include student mobility, research partnerships, strategic alliances, overseas campuses, work placements, staff exchange, professional business training – the list goes on. And it illustrates how varied the role of universities can be in the modern world.
I’m now looking forward to a return visit to some of the universities whose leaders were in York this week – Wuhan, Shandong, Jiangnan, to name but a few - and (of course) Sichuan, where I hope to see a real panda….
Hilary Layton
Director of Internationalisation
Wednesday 26 October 2011
Monday 10 October 2011
Working together to tackle Climate Change
Welcome to my first blog! I’m Harriet Cross, International Relations Officer and Worldwide Universities Network Coordinator. I’ve attended a couple of environment-related workshops in the last month so that’s what I’m going to focus on today.
One of the advantages of inter-disciplinary and multinational research is its ability to have an impact on real-world problems which can only be tackled by pooling knowledge, ideas and equipment. The University of York is working to tackle major environmental issues by bringing together over 100 faculty from 17 different departments and encouraging them to exchange ideas with counterparts in the UK and throughout the world.
On 6 October, York’s Environmental Sustainability Institute (YESI) and the Centre for Low Carbon Futures held a workshop entitled ‘Circular Economy – Innovative thinking for a sustainable future’. This brought together academic researchers from all over the UK with representatives of international corporations and Government departments to discuss how to respond to the twin challenges of increasingly limited global resources and rising demand for fossil fuel based products.
The participants agreed that the traditional linear approach to product and system design – make, use and dump – was no longer sustainable. Full cycle whole-system thinking presented an alternative option, and sustainability could give competitive advantage.
Ideas for real life solutions were exchanged, such as Business Schools being shop windows to the potential technology and business benefit of the circular economy; and the importance of better communication between the academic producers of information and the users of this information at the other end of the scale.
I hope that some of the collaborations discussed during this workshop might develop into international projects which will form part of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Adapting to Climate Change research group portfolio. There are already 21 of these WUN interdisciplinary research projects underway, with York already involved in Ocean acidification and Global water research. Watch this space for more information about York’s participation in WUN and my thoughts on how it adds value to our research and teaching objectives.
One of the advantages of inter-disciplinary and multinational research is its ability to have an impact on real-world problems which can only be tackled by pooling knowledge, ideas and equipment. The University of York is working to tackle major environmental issues by bringing together over 100 faculty from 17 different departments and encouraging them to exchange ideas with counterparts in the UK and throughout the world.
On 6 October, York’s Environmental Sustainability Institute (YESI) and the Centre for Low Carbon Futures held a workshop entitled ‘Circular Economy – Innovative thinking for a sustainable future’. This brought together academic researchers from all over the UK with representatives of international corporations and Government departments to discuss how to respond to the twin challenges of increasingly limited global resources and rising demand for fossil fuel based products.
The participants agreed that the traditional linear approach to product and system design – make, use and dump – was no longer sustainable. Full cycle whole-system thinking presented an alternative option, and sustainability could give competitive advantage.
Ideas for real life solutions were exchanged, such as Business Schools being shop windows to the potential technology and business benefit of the circular economy; and the importance of better communication between the academic producers of information and the users of this information at the other end of the scale.
I hope that some of the collaborations discussed during this workshop might develop into international projects which will form part of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Adapting to Climate Change research group portfolio. There are already 21 of these WUN interdisciplinary research projects underway, with York already involved in Ocean acidification and Global water research. Watch this space for more information about York’s participation in WUN and my thoughts on how it adds value to our research and teaching objectives.
Welcome to our Blog
Welcome to York’s international relations blog. We’ll be bringing you some of the highlights and interesting moments of our visits to partners all over the world, shining a light on some of our incoming delegations, and discussing the issues that challenge us in the world of international higher education.
This week, our Study Abroad team is moving into new offices on campus, where they will be obvious to even the most sleepy early morning student! We want to encourage as many students as possible to consider international opportunities as part of their degree studies. Look out for more about this in November.
Also in November, we’ll be visiting colleagues in India to discuss joint research projects, and to reconnect with alumni in Bangalore and Delhi.
And later this week, we host the China-UK Entrepreneurial Competition, with friends and colleagues from other UK universities and from China.
Please send us comments and queries on the blog – we look forward to hearing from you.
Hilary Layton, Director of Internationalisation
This week, our Study Abroad team is moving into new offices on campus, where they will be obvious to even the most sleepy early morning student! We want to encourage as many students as possible to consider international opportunities as part of their degree studies. Look out for more about this in November.
Also in November, we’ll be visiting colleagues in India to discuss joint research projects, and to reconnect with alumni in Bangalore and Delhi.
And later this week, we host the China-UK Entrepreneurial Competition, with friends and colleagues from other UK universities and from China.
Please send us comments and queries on the blog – we look forward to hearing from you.
Hilary Layton, Director of Internationalisation
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