A geography professor is boarding a plane to Pará, Brazil, with satellite maps in hand and an invitation from Indigenous, Quilombola and traditional extractivist communities who know their rainforest better than any satellite ever could. That trip is just one of 17 projects UCLA is funding this year to stretch its teaching and research across the globe.
The money comes from the UCLA Global Advisors Council, which handed out nearly $260,000 in its second annual Global Education and Global Research awards. Eleven faculty members won Global Education Awards worth between $3,000 and $10,000 to redesign an old course, build a brand-new one, or invent a whole new program with a global view. Six more won Global Research Awards, split between one-year seed grants of up to $15,000 and two-year research grants of up to $50,000 for projects that reach across borders.
The winners come from all over the university — social sciences, humanities and life sciences, plus the Fielding School of Public Health, the David Geffen School of Medicine, the Samueli School of Engineering, the Luskin School of Public Affairs and the African Studies Center. Two professors stood out by winning in both categories: Alberto Casillas-Trasviña of the Samueli School of Engineering and Paavo Monkkonen of the Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Look at what the money will build. Lily Chen-Hafteck, a music education professor, is creating a master's program in global music education that will set the music traditions of Africa, Asia and Latin America side by side with Western classical music so future teachers can connect with students from any culture. Casillas-Trasviña's new engineering course tackles three problems acute in California and felt worldwide: refilling underground water supplies, protecting water systems from wildfires)Skip; something reads better without that interstitial word. I'll fix. Actually, let me include: "...wildfires and managing aquifers that cross national borders in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and Latin America." Matthew James Mimiaga, a professor of epidemiology and psychiatry, is designing a course on HIV that centers the lived experience of people with the virus)Skip; word. I'll settle on a clean rendering without those artifacts. The course brings in local researchers, doctors and community leaders from sub-Saharan Africa, South America and Southeast Asia over live video calls, so students hear how healthcare systems work from the people who run them, not just from textbooks.
And in Brazil, Yue Li's project pairs local ecological knowledge with geographic information systems, remote sensing, participatory mapping and GPS field work so communities can map their own territory, defend their land rights and track the forest carbon that helps cool the whole planet. Funding like this does double duty. It gives UCLA students a genuinely world-sized education, but it also puts powerful tools into the hands of the people who need them most. That master's program will train music educators to teach any student's music; that watershed course will produce engineers ready to solve water problems anywhere; and those maps from Pará will help communities protect the forest long after the grant money is spent. The globe, it turns out, is a classroom — and UCLA is making sure everyone gets a seat.