The sixth annual International Connections Reception, hosted by Global Affairs on March 4, brought together the UC Davis community in an online forum to celebrate several award and grant programs, including the 2021 recipients of Global Affairs Seed Grants for International Activities. These grants are offered in partnership with the Office of Research and the individual colleges and schools to faculty taking on innovative research, service, and engagement projects around the world.

UC Davis Professor Beth Rose Middleton, chair of the Native American Studies Department in the College of Letters and Science, has long had an interest in the Caribbean. A 2020 Global Affairs Seed Grant has allowed Professor Middleton to develop courses on the Indigenous Caribbean and to develop exchanges and collaborations with Garifuna leaders.

UC Davis has been named a finalist for two PIEoneer Awards, which celebrate innovation and achievement across all components of international education, by The PIE News, a leading independent media company for a global community of professionals. For the 2020 awards, UC Davis has been selected as a finalist of the Progressive Education Delivery Award and the Sustainability International Impact Award.

Earlier this summer Global Affairs held a virtual grantee “coffee hour” to generate questions from and answers for grantees about engaging with their global partners during the pandemic. As part of the event, Global Affairs staff asked faculty recipients of Global Affairs grants (Seed Grants for International Activities, Grants for Advancing Sustainable Development Goals, and Grants for Regional Faculty Groups) about creative ways they have found to carry out global partnership and grant-related activities when it isn’t possible to meet in person.

Ladson Hinton is a geriatric psychiatrist, social scientist and professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the UC Davis School of Medicine. With over two decades of interdisciplinary and intercultural research under his lab coat, he has become an expert on the sociocultural dimensions of dementia-related illness—and the caregiving this calls for.

According to the 2015 World Alzheimer’s Report, over the next 40 years the number of older adults with dementia in Vietnam and other low and middle-income countries will nearly triple. The five-year grant from the National Institute on Aging aims to address these changes. The project is the first of its kind in Vietnam and builds on preliminary work conducted over the past five years with seed funding from UC Davis Global Affairs.

Global Affairs partners with UC Davis faculty to take on global innovative research, service, and engagement projects. The interdisciplinary projects help develop new partnerships, long-term collaborations, and opportunities to advance the health for people, animals, and the planet.

For the third year, UC Davis honored those on campus advancing the research, teaching, and service mission of UC Davis through their international engagement with Chancellor’s Awards for International Engagement. The annual reception and awards ceremony also featured the announcement of the Academic Senate’s inaugural Excellence in Teaching in Study Abroad Awards for Academic Senate and Academic Federation members—which were followed by recognition of this year’s recipients of various Global Affairs grant and development programs.

Imagine—a veterinarian, an engineer and a human ecologist working together on the design of a chicken coop. Now, consider the impact this multidisciplinary collaboration could have on improving food safety, production efficiency, food security challenges and animal welfare for villages in the developing world—in ways that are economically, environmentally and socially sustainable.