Globetrotting

In a fluid and confusing world, the University of Pittsburgh takes a lead in international research.

A mysterious virus infiltrates an Asian city, and the repercussions rocket across the world as thousands of tourists and foreign students studying in America become labeled as potential carriers of the virus.

The United States approves legislation relaxing industrial environmental standards, prompting its industrialized global partners to react angrily.

In a classroom in a small corner of the world, children learn to hate a country they have never visited and people they have never met.

In another small corner of the world, the Russian government admits an unspecified amount of weapons-grade nuclear material has gone missing from a former Soviet republic, and Western nations ramp up security.

Because global distances and boundaries are more regularly breached than ever before, the world has grown more accessible, more complex, and potentially more dangerous. International study is no longer an option for American academic institutions. It’s a necessity.

With this in mind, the University of Pittsburgh made a strategic and steady effort in recent decades to emerge as one of the most respected and effective institutions in the area of international research and education.

Just about every school and department at Pitt has an international research component, from law and business to philosophy and anthropology, from engineering and communications to English and economics. In the here and now, Pitt researchers combat the spread of a deadly virus—severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. They connect American business entrepreneurs with leaders in Brazil, South America’s biggest economy, while working with their European colleagues to understand transnational crime syndicates.

Pitt students, meanwhile, tap into the undercurrent of global change and graduate from the University prepared to help a shrinking world sustain itself.

Global Reach

It’s not at all a stretch to say that Pitt’s reputation in international research reaches around the globe. This is, naturally, by design. Former Chancellor Wesley W. Posvar, once a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force, recognized early on in his leadership at Pitt that the world was a fluid place demanding the introspection of academicians. In response, he founded, in 1968, the University Center for International Studies (UCIS). Today, UCIS shares a building named after Posvar with another key element of Pitt’s international expertise, the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), along with other University schools and programs.

For more than three decades now, UCIS has been a leader in advancing global dimensions in the arts, sciences, and professions. A University-wide organization, UCIS encompasses centers for area studies and focuses on topical specializations in international studies.

Rather than offer degrees to students, UCIS centers and programs award certificates of attainment to candidates for academic degrees from the University’s other schools. Through UCIS, students can pursue degree-track studies while taking advantage of diverse educational opportunities through, say, the European Union Studies Association, the Latin American Studies Association, Study Abroad, or Semester at Sea, a global studies program that involves approximately 600 students from across the United States and abroad.

Likewise, instead of appointing its own faculty, UCIS connects faculty from other schools with opportunities for international scholarship. As such, UCIS coordinates the growing number of international research, teaching, and public service initiatives at Pitt.

Take, for instance, Thomas Rawski, a professor in Pitt’s Department of Economics who has secured funding for conferences in Toronto and Pittsburgh on the economic transition of China since the late 1970s, through a $90,000 award from the National Science Foundation.

More recently, as large groups of people face threats from infectious diseases, Julius S. Youngner, Distinguished Service Professor emeritus in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, has been appointed to an international scientific panel investigating SARS. Fifty years ago, Youngner and Jonas Salk developed the vaccine for the worldwide scourge known as polio. Today, Youngner’s global hand guides a Singapore Agency for Science, Technology, and Research panel, helping to review grant applications for SARS research and to make recommendations to Singapore government officials about priorities of research into the deadly disease.

“Every year, hundreds of UCIS-affiliated faculty and students conduct field research across the globe,” says William Brustein, UCIS director. “If you want to understand an issue, it is not sufficient to have only American information and an American orientation. You find similar problems in different countries that also share global problems. And most research breakthroughs are done in groups; through international partnerships, you find that foreign scholars challenge you.”

Specialized Centers of Research

One of the ways Pitt effects a global perspective on study conducted here in the United States is through national centers of research tied directly to regions or subjects. There are several at Pitt: the Asian Studies Center, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Russian and East European Studies, the International Business Center (IBC), and the Center for West European Studies—which includes the European Union Center.

The IBC, for instance, founded in 1990 as a joint venture of UCIS and the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, builds international expertise among business faculty and students at selected institutions of higher education across the United States. Just this past winter, meanwhile, Pitt’s Center for Latin American Studies hosted a Brazil Business Briefing in an attempt to link Western Pennsylvanians wanting to explore business opportunities with one of the biggest members of the World Trade Organization.

The European Union Center, a center of particular importance, focuses on a continent of U.S. allies reshaping themselves into a union that has become a player in the international market and in unstable regions.

Formed in 1998 as one of 10 such centers in the United States funded by the European Union (E.U.) (there are now 15), Pitt’s European Union Center explores issues of applied public policy and the process of European political, economic, and legal integration. Combining the availability and resources of this center with those of the Center for West European Studies allows researchers and scholars to address European themes across disciplinary lines.

Most recently, the center has been involved in a number of research projects that tap the strengths of schools and organizations at Pitt and other institutions across the United States and beyond. One project examines E.U.-U.S. cooperation in preventing computer-related crime. Another project is comparing state and local government fiscal crises in Germany with those in the United States. A third is pulling together six transatlantic partner institutions to explore the economic, legal, and political implications of the U.S. federal experience for the E.U.

“Since 1998, the European Union Center has successfully linked E.U. studies with policy studies and initiated transatlantic and regional research, policy, and outreach networks,” says Alberta Sbragia, director of both the Center for Western European Studies and the European Union Center.

Not long after the center opened, in the fall of 1999, Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, paid a visit to Pitt as part of the center’s lecture program. It was the first time Juncker saw the towering Cathedral of Learning. For most of the students and faculty who attended the lecture at the 21st Century Club, it was the first time they had met a prime minister.

In the audience, arms rose in advance of questions about policies, the euro currency, and the integration of more European countries into the European Union. The lecture served an important function of the E.U. centers nationwide—as a means for the European Union to inform U.S. citizens about itself and its current issues. Juncker would go on during the following year to collaborate with Pitt faculty to open the Graduate School for Comparative Public Policy in Luxembourg, at which Pitt graduate students now conduct research abroad.

Sbragia says it’s important for Americans to learn about the European Union because of its potential for global growth. The U.S. government has traditionally supported the integration of nations into the European Union because it is a larger entity with a stronger economic base than the single nations of traditional Europe. In the long run, the European Union is a better partner for the United States than a dozen small countries, says Sbragia. The more Pitt works with members of the European Union, the more Pitt will play a role in its development.

“Our research initiatives have engaged both graduate students and a diverse group of faculty,” Sbragia says. “The center’s transatlantic exchange programs, international symposia, policy conferences, Web sites, newsletters, and policy papers have facilitated and enhanced E.U.-related policy research on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The research networks in which the European Union Center participates must now address complex issues surrounding the exciting challenges faced by the European Union as it approaches enlargement. This will serve as the focal point for our future activities.”

Policy Matters

Back in 1957, a decade before UCIS was established, former colonies around the world were newly independent and facing the challenges of creating democratic systems, developing their economies, and building the capacity to manage operations and deliver services. At the same time, the Cold War dominated U.S. foreign policy. That year, Donald Stone had a plan. Stone founded GSPIA with a broad mission that included conducting research on the most pressing policy issues and providing education and technical support to both U.S. policymakers and leaders of developing countries. In doing so, he created a school that linked national and international policy and management, a model that continues to shape the school today.

The school’s focus and expertise were just as significant more than four decades later, when, in 2001, the United States faced the devastating blow of September 11 and the uncertainty that came with it. GSPIA faculty were involved instantly, advising policymakers and educating the public on issues ranging from transnational terrorism to disaster relief. Pitt Professor Don Goldstein, GSPIA’s military historian, was called upon to share observations reaching back to the last time the United States was attacked on its own territory—Pearl Harbor. Today, policymakers and media alike still seek GSPIA faculty expertise on U.S. military policy and on U.S. relations with our allies in an increasingly security-conscious and dangerous world.

Carolyn Ban, GSPIA dean, describes the school’s international mission in this way: “We are one of the top schools in the U.S. in international affairs and one of the few schools to offer a degree in international development,” she says. “Our approach to research and teaching is interdisciplinary. Our goal is not only to create theory but also to link theory to practice and, where appropriate, to have an impact on the policy process.”

While GSPIA maintains its strength in security studies, the school increasingly focuses on the complex issues of globalization in the program on global political economy, with work ranging from international monetary policy to the role of such new international players as the World Trade Organization. GSPIA faculty work closely with the Center for West European Studies, building strong ties to the European Union and studying the E.U.’s policymaking and regulatory processes. GSPIA Professor Martin Staniland took the lead in organizing a policy conference to bring together top U.S. and E.U. policymakers with representatives of the major airlines in a high-level meeting on U.S.-E.U. regulation of the aviation industry.

GSPIA also is working to adapt the school’s original vision to current global trends with its degree program in international development. The countries that achieved independence with great fanfare almost 50 years ago still face challenges of democratization, economic development, and capacity building.

“One of the most important changes has been the rapid growth of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), similar to nonprofits in the U.S., and the increasingly transnational nature of the NGO community,” Ban says. “GSPIA faculty are at the forefront of studying this phenomenon, and we are offering the only major in the country on NGOs and civil society.

“At the same time, developing countries are facing a terrible trade-off: how to develop economically without destroying their environment in the process. GSPIA faculty are examining how countries can plan for ‘sustainable development’ and how the impact of globalization on the poor in developing countries can be mitigated.”

The Student Focus

While a university should look beyond itself to effect change throughout the world, it has to influence a global perspective among its own students. Here, UCIS, GSPIA, and other schools have connected to produce some groundbreaking research and education programs for students.

UCIS, for instance, jointly sponsors the Center for Legal Education with the School of Law and the Institute for International Studies in Education with the School of Education. In September 2001, UCIS and GSPIA introduced the Global Studies Program, offering both undergraduate and graduate certificate programs that address global issues that transcend cultures and continents.

“The Global Studies Program is designed to provide students in any school of the University with global competence,” says Brustein.

In other words, Brustein says, the program gives students a chance to excel in different international settings. They learn about the major currents of global change and the issues arising from such change. They learn about global organizations and business activities. And, because they learn to communicate across cultural and linguistic boundaries, they graduate from Pitt with the ability to adapt to, and influence, different cultures.

Not stopping with education in 2001, Pitt also launched the Global Academic Partnerships (GAP) program, as part of the Global Studies Program, to strengthen interdisciplinary research on, and curriculum development in, global themes at Pitt, while enhancing the University’s international scholarly ties.

As an example of a program, sponsored in 2003-04 by UCIS and the International Business Center at the Katz Graduate School of Business, Paul E. Griffiths, a professor in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, and Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of anthropology, were awarded a grant for two workshops titled “Representing Genes.”

The workshops examined the different uses of the term “gene” in different fields of contemporary biology and its impact on interdisciplinary communication and public dissemination. The workshops involved participants from Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom, as well as from universities across the United States.

“When you study an issue, different perspectives and cultures give it a richness,” says Brustein. “Through GAP, UCIS is trying to facilitate the types of partnerships that can bring that about.”

Meanwhile, UCIS and the University Honors College have collaborated to bring studies and research together for students, developing the Research Abroad Program (RAP) to engage undergraduate students in faculty-led research programs overseas.

“In RAP, faculty members and students are given the opportunity to work as a team to contribute to an existing body of knowledge rather than simply disseminating or absorbing information,” says Brustein. “Professors benefit from the research insights, skills, and assistance of the students, and the students benefit from the hands-on, research-related experience in a real-world situation.”

After 9/11

A collaboration of GSPIA and UCIS, the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies is particularly designed to have a finger on the pulse of the post-September 11, 2001, world. Established at Pitt in 1988, the center, named for the American general many historians credit with saving the U.S.-backed effort during the Korean War, addresses emerging security challenges facing the United States and the international community.

The center’s most recent research efforts start from the central thesis that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon catalyzed the rapid emergence of a global security environment characterized by new threats, new security doctrines, new intelligence modalities, military assertiveness, and the widespread diffusion of new technologies with military applications.

“The United States appears to have declared a state of permanent emergency, emanating from the near-universal conviction that political authorities must deter and defeat another catastrophic terrorist event, especially one that might involve weapons of mass destruction,” says William W. Keller, director of the center since September 2002. “Whether other countries share the American view that the world has fundamentally changed is uncertain. What is clear, however, is that the implications of these perceptions will help to shape international security and economic affairs both for the United States and other countries in the foreseeable future.”

The Ridgway research program is designed to analyze the complex dynamics of the 21st-century global security environment, concentrating on rapidly evolving and emerging threats to international security, both abroad and at home. To this end, the center comprises specific research projects, substantive programs, and institutes. Each integrates the expertise of the scholarly policy and analysis communities to help understand the new security environment.

The Ford Institute for Human Security is a recent example of Ridgway’s efforts. Endowed through a $2.25 million gift from the Ford Motor Company, the institute, directed by GSPIA Professor Simon Reich, will address a broad set of challenges to human freedoms and international security. The institute’s efforts start from a basic premise: The sources of conflict and disorder in the world increasingly are found not only at the state level but also at the subnational and transnational levels.

“In today’s increasingly globalized world, the most pernicious threats to human security emanate from conditions that give rise to genocide, civil war, human rights deprivations, global epidemics, environmental degradation, forced labor, and malnutrition,” says Reich. “This new set of problems can be characterized as a shift from traditional threats focused on the territorial integrity of nations to global threats that center on the safety of individuals. Despite their evident gravity, the incremental evolution of challenges to human security often results in inadequate attention from policymakers, policy analysts, and the media.

“Unless they receive widespread media attention, many urgent problems remain unrecognized. To address human security needs, states must not only engage one another in seeking collective solutions, but must also collaborate with international organizations, corporations, and NGOs.”

The institute will focus on a series of concerns that encompass, but are not limited to, genocide (historical and contemporary); restitution and compensation for slave and forced labor; corporate social responsibility and human development; intrastate conflict and human rights; internal displacement, forced migration, and refugees; and environmental degradation and personal welfare.

“Pittsburgh is competitive with those cities and institutions with more cachet in international education and research, like the Harvards and the Princetons of the world,” says Keller. “There is a lot we can do at Ridgway to bring new perspectives to the sometimes well-worn and too accommodating intellectual tracks of international security studies.”

Global Health

International studies goes far beyond politics and war and economics. For every multinational corporation there seemingly is a third-world village plagued with disease. While public policy on an international level certainly requires the attention of academicians from UCIS and GSPIA, there is every bit as much demand for the international efforts of Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH).

“As I see it, there are three reasons for a program in global health,” says Bernard Goldstein, GSPH dean. “First, it helps our research when we collaborate. Second, we can learn a lot from such a program. And third, from a public health point of view, it is almost unethical for an American school involved in public health not to have a global dimension to its program.

“When I first arrived at the Graduate School of Public Health [in June 2001], I met with the faculty to talk about our ‘first tier’ and ‘second tier’ programs because I hadn’t seen an international health or global health program on the school’s Web site. But the faculty started to tell me of their research projects, and I was amazed to hear that we had something happening on every continent.”

Goldstein soon moved to formalize a program in global health sciences at GSPH, to study issues that transcend national boundaries. Today, the school has research and training programs overseas that investigate a number of health issues, including AIDS in India and Brazil and malaria in Kenya.

For instance, two Pitt researchers have received grants from the National Institutes of Health to initiate collaborations among scientists in India and the United States in the area of human genetics.

Daniel Weeks, professor of human genetics and associate professor of biostatistics in GSPH, and his colleagues are collaborating with the Chatterjee Group-Indian Statistical Institute Centre for Population Genomics in Calcutta, India. They are focusing their research-training project on genetic epidemiology and ethical conduct of human genetics research in India, with particular emphasis on statistical and computational genomics and molecular genomics.

Vishwajit Nimgaonkar, professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine, and his team are collaborating with scientists at the Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, in New Delhi, to conduct research training in psychiatric genetic epidemiology and ethics. In addition to conventional didactic and practical training in the United States, the program will involve supervised field training in New Delhi.

Another of GSPH’s international strengths, the Epidemiology Data Center designs, coordinates, and analyzes multicenter clinical trials throughout the world. Some 20 projects are underway at the Epidemiology Data Center, including the Bypass Angioplasty Revascularization Investigation 2D, or BARI 2D, a major international study about diabetes and heart disease. Meanwhile, the Supercourse, a GSPH project which was developed by Professor of Epidemiology Ronald LaPorte and provides public health-related lectures at no charge via the Internet, has over 15,500 faculty contributors from 151 countries, including six Nobel Prize winners. The Supercourse receives more than 75 million hits per year and may be the largest global health project in prevention education.

“The need for global studies is obvious for epidemiological issues,” says Goldstein. “We study the genome in the U.S., but there’s the saying: ‘The gene loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.’ So to study the genome, you want to find a population that is similar genetically and sharing the same environment. You find that kind of population in other places around the world, not in the U.S.”

Moreover, as the only American school of public health with a human genetics department, Pitt has an obligation to work around the world, Goldstein adds.

“In spite of enormous advances in medicine and technology during the past century, there is still massive poverty, inequity, suffering, starvation, and disease throughout the globe,” says Goldstein. “In the U.S., the effects of climate change and epidemics of emerging and resurgent diseases are more real than before. Schools of public health have a unique and vital role to play in addressing these critical issues in global health.”

Pitt and the World of the Future

What little doubt remained that Americans needed to better understand the world beyond their shores evaporated on September 11, 2001. Pitt and other key academic institutions with a special focus on international studies have little choice but to influence what ultimately evolves from that horrific wake-up call.

“As we look at the world today, and we see war and the spread of disease across boundaries and the need to share resources, we realize how important it is to interpret the mindsets of other people and learn to live together,” says Brustein.

“It’s also critical to remember that research breakthroughs most often come more quickly when the problems are studied by groups cooperating with each other. The work being done on AIDS or SARS, for example, is not confined to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rather, there is a global sharing of information. Pitt is a tremendous part of this collaboration, and we’re committed to making the world a better place for everyone.”

Leadership in International Research

Some important projects from Pitt’s other national centers of research within the University Center for International Studies:

•  The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs—through its Balkan Educational Partnership Program—has awarded $1.6 million to the Center for Russian and East European Studies to help university faculties in Balkan countries improve their programs in such specific disciplines as law, civic education, business administration, public administration, and political science.
• The Asian Studies Center hosted a research conference involving internationally recognized scholars on the relationship in Asia between medical systems and the formation of political community identity. Coordinated by Joseph Alter, a professor in Pitt’s Department of Anthropology, Asian Medicine: Nationalism, Transnationalism and the Politics of Culture presented research examining the way in which the historical and cultural development of medical practice in Asia is linked to the politics of nationalism, to transnational communication between different regions and countries within Asia, and to the way in which ideologies and power relations influence medicine.
• The Center for Latin American Studies’ (CLAS) Latin American Archeology Program, initiated in 1988 with a grant from the Howard Heinz Endowment, provides fellowships—primarily for distinguished students from Latin America to pursue PhD studies in archaeology—and publishes a series of bilingual volumes on archaeological research in Latin America. Besides bringing outstanding students from Latin America to Pittsburgh, the program has in its publications series a unique vehicle for disseminating results of archaeological research to the international scholarly community, including those in the Latin American countries in which research has been conducted. According to Kathleen DeWalt, CLAS director, 80 percent of the students in the program have been successful in securing dissertation funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF)—at a time when the NSF has funded only about 40 percent of such proposals.