UC Davis is committed to being a tireless advocate for international students and scholars. One case in point is the multidisciplinary work of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, led by founding director and international scholar Giovanni Peri.

We are saddened by the recent deadly attacks in Afghanistan, including at Kabul University, and we extend our deepest sympathies to our students, scholars, faculty, staff, partners, and all those affected. We join you with heavy hearts in mourning for the victims and for everyone affected by this tragedy.

The University of California, Davis, has been named as the only university to earn the 2020 Platinum Institutional Award for Global Learning, Research and Engagement from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, or APLU. As the highest honor from APLU’s Commission on International Initiatives, the award recognizes UC Davis’ institutional achievement in developing and implementing comprehensive and inclusive strategies across global learning, research and engagement.

In recognition of its extraordinary global learning, research, and engagement efforts, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today named the University of California, Davis the Platinum Award level winner of the 2020 Institutional Award for Global Learning, Research & Engagement. The Platinum Award is APLU’s highest-level award granted to a member institution in recognition of inclusive and comprehensive efforts to internationalize their campus.

Robert Irwin, a professor at University of California, Davis, has been working on a community-based digital storytelling project, Humanizing Deportation/Humanizando la Deportación, since 2016. The project website describes their mission and contains over 300 digital stories of more than 250 different people. These testimonial audiovisual shorts focus on the issues that migrants want to highlight regarding their experiences and their thoughts on the contemporary phenomenon of mass deportation.

The University of California, Davis, and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), along with nine other APRU member institutions have launched the pilot of the Asia-Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) Mentoring Program. The year-long pilot program is bringing together 30 mentor and mentee participants from 10 universities around the Pacific Rim region to grow the pipeline of aspiring women leaders, increase awareness of challenges that aspiring women leaders face, and introduce global and intercultural dimensions of women leadership across the APRU network and beyond.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose art negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in the United States and her native Nigeria through collage and photo transfer-based paintings, will give the seventh annual Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture at University of California, Davis, on Nov. 12 at 4:30 p.m.

Pamela Ronald, distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis, and with the UC Davis Genome Center, has been named a 2020 World Agriculture Prize laureate by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences, or GCHERA. She becomes the first woman whose work is recognized by the award.

The inaugural forum is set for October 21 3-4 p.m., is open to the UC Davis community, and will be hosted on Zoom. It will showcase UC Davis activities that contribute to the SDGs—featuring faculty and student presentations—and provide specific resources and upcoming opportunities.Registration is free and is open to members of the UC Davis community including faculty, researchers, scholars, staff, students, and alumni.

In the field of global education, change is inevitable. The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us how interconnected the world is, how global challenges manifest themselves locally and across borders, and how crises exacerbate other challenges such as poverty, inequalities, climate change, political tensions, and educational needs. The multiplicity of challenges reinforces the critical need for students to develop global awareness, skills, knowledge, and sensibilities – all of which make global education more important than ever.