UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State has recently reached an agreement with the University of Auckland in New Zealand to build towards a strategic partnership. Still in the beginning stages, the two universities are currently interested in developing and cultivating a community of faculty interested in collaborations. In addition, they are in the midst of creating a multi-year agreement which would provide resources — including financial resources — to foster these collaborations.
To do this, Penn State is working on creating a database to house information on topics of interest and faculty engagement. For more information on how to become involved in this partnership, please fill out the Expression of Interest form on the Auckland page of Penn State’s website.
The universities plan to hold a joint workshop in Auckland from Nov. 18-20. This workshop will develop cross-university collaborative ideas, using input from the Expression of Interest forms, in the form of pre-proposals or concept papers. These will inform the creation of a seed-grant competition in certain key areas of focus. An RFP (request for proposal) for this competition will be available after the conclusion of the workshop.
Over the past few years, Penn State has been building a Global Engagement Network (GEN). The GEN is intended to be a limited number of strategic, geographically distributed partnerships that foster deep and intellectually robust collaborations by leveraging complementarity between the universities. The partnership network vision is to ultimately provide a rich international collaborative environment whereby faculty and students can easily engage with colleagues abroad in teaching, research and service.
The developing network currently has strategic partnerships in Germany (University of Freiburg), Croatia (University of Split), China (Dalian University of Technology), Peru (Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria; Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú), Taiwan (National Taiwan Normal University) and Australia (Monash University).
With strong faculty engagement, Auckland will become the next in this group.
For more information on the Auckland partnership, contact Alexandra Persiko at axp1225@psu.edu.