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| NEWSLETTER NO. 28 FALL 2003 | ||
| THE EDWARD A. CLARK CENTER FOR AUSTRALIAN & NEW ZEALAND STUDIES |
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| THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN | ||
Dr. Higley, who directs the Clark Center, observed that this generous support will permit a significant expansion of Center activities during the next several years. “It puts the Center on a firmer and more permanent footing,” he noted. The Silverton endowment complements the Jack S. Blanton Chair, the Caltex Professorship, and the Texas Instruments /James Voss Professorship that facilitated the Clark Center's founding in 1988 and that have sustained its operations ever since.
Fall became winter before I could find enough time to produce this issue of Yacker. As during the preceding two years, I continue to serve as chair of UT-Austin's large Department of Government, which counts more than 2,000 undergraduate majors. Running the department while also directing the Clark Center, as well as teach, makes for some rather full weeks and months. Happily, Frances Cushing, the Center's executive assistant, remains at her post and keeps the Center ticking over.
During the past fall semester, the president of UT-Austin, Larry Faulkner, was invited to participate in a meeting that would bring together the Vice Chancellors of Australia's Group of 8 research universities and the presidents of major American research universities, such as UT-Austin, which make up the Association of American Universities (AAU). The meeting took place at UC-Berkeley in late January, and its purpose was to canvas research collaborations between AAU and Group of 8 universities. President Faulkner asked me to accompany him to the meeting, which was attended by the Vice-Chancellors of A.N.U., Monash, and the Universities of Adelaide, New South Wales, Sydney, and Western Australia. From the AAU, in addition to President Faulkner, the presidents of UC-Berkeley, UCLA, UC-Davis, Stanford Univ., Syracuse Univ., and the Universities of Toronto, Virginia, Oregon, and Wisconsin-Madison, attended. The AAU president, Nils Hasselmo presided and Bob Berdahl, Chancellor of UC-Berkeley, was the host.
The meeting presented something of a challenge, however. For it is in the nature of large research universities that no one has an overview of what collaborations with what universities and countries are taking place. This is because research collaborations are normally initiated by individual scholars or small teams of scholars, they are often funded by external grants, and there is no reason for a university to maintain a comprehensive ledger of who is doing what in their hundreds of departments, laboratories, centers, and other units. Useful for the Berkeley meeting, therefore, would be a stocktaking of the research ties that one major American research university, UT-Austin, has with its Group of 8 counterparts in Australia.
President Faulkner asked UT-Austin deans and department chairs to inform me of current research collaborations among scholars in their units and Group of 8 scholars. Yacker readers may be interested to see the result, which shows the sheer scope and multiplicity of these collaborations. This is presented below and on the next page without, I hope, going into excessive detail.
John Higley
UT-Austin Research Collaborations with Group of 8 Universities, 2003-04
Business
UT-Austin's School of Business maintains a BBA semester exchange of students with the Univ. of New South Wales, and it operates MBA semester exchanges with the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at U.N.S.W. and Melbourne.
Engineering
The Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) regularly hosts faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and senior level undergraduate students from Adelaide and U.W.A. The ICES's Prof. Graham Carey works closely with the applied math and engineering faculty at Adelaide, in particular. Funding is by ICES.
The Microelectronics Research Center is engaged in a collaborative project with the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at U.W.A. The project is funded at a significant level by DARPA.
The Department of Chemical Engineering collaborates informally with Prof. Yiu-Wing Mai at Sydney to investigate rubber toughened plastics and polymer nano-composites. Prof. Yiu-Wing's group has helped the UT-Austin group with fracture techniques, and the UT-Austin group has taught Prof. Yiu-Wing's group about processing and formulation.
The Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering collaborates with counterpart researchers at U.W.A. in the field of oil and gas exploration. Funding is shared by the two universities.
Law
The School of Law has active faculty and student exchange programs with Sydney, Melbourne, and A.N.U. One Law School faculty member has a joint appointment in A.N.U.'s Faculty of Law. Other Law School faculty members travel frequently to A.N.U., Sydney, and Melbourne as visiting lecturers, consultants, and the like. For example, the Director of the Tarleton Law Library at UT-Austin, Prof. Roy Mersky, serves as consultant to several Group of 8 law libraries.
Liberal Arts
As with the School of Law, there is a very large traffic of scholars in the College of Liberal Arts and counterpart scholars in Group of 8 Faculties of Arts. Much of this occurs through or in connection with the Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies, the activities of which are summarized in this and previous issues of Yacker.
Natural Sciences
The Institute for Fusion Studies (IFS) has a formal collaborative and exchange program in theoretical plasma physics with the Department of Theoretical Physics in A.N.U.'s Institute for Advanced Studies. Research foci are (1) Control of differential transport in quasi two-dimensional flows, with applications to micro and macro fluid constituent separations; (2) Modeling interactions between turbulence and shear flows in two-dimensional plasmas. The program is jointly funded by the Australian Research Council and the US Department of Energy.
The Department of Computer Sciences collaborates with the A.N.U.'s Department of Computer Science to solve problems in programming language implementation and memory management that arise as the “bottleneck” between processor cores and memories tightens. At least five published papers co-authored by UT-Austin and A.N.U. scholars have resulted from this collaboration. Funding is provided separately by UT-Austin and ANU.
The Department of Molecular Biology has a collaborative research program with its counterpart at Queensland. The research focus is brain gene changes in alcoholism, using brain samples from Australia. The analyses are carried out both in Austin and Brisbane. Two published papers co-authored by UT-Austin and Queensland researchers have so far resulted. The research is supported by a US National Institute of Health grant to the department at Austin, with a subcontract to the Queensland department.
The Department of Integrative Biology has a group that collaborates with a counterpart group at Melbourne, from which the Austin group has obtained antibodies of DMRT-1 to study the sex determination process in the red-eared slider turtle. Funding is primarily by UT-Austin.
Social Work
The Center for Social Work Research collaborates with the Alcohol and Drug Research Center at Queensland University of Technology in research on substance abuse.
UT Social Work Interns at Flinders Multiply
The successful program directed by UT-Austin's Prof. Jane Kretzschmar, which sends Social Work graduate students to Flinders University in Adelaide as interns, is increasing in size. Whereas three UT students have done internships at Flinders in each recent year, in 2003-04 seven UT students are doing clinical or administrative internships there.
ANZSANA 2004
Recent Visitors to the Clark Center
Prof. Ross Milbourne, Vice Chancellor of Univ. of Technology Sydney
Prof. Rob Robertson, Executive Director, UTS
Prof. Archie Johnston, Dean, Faculty of Engineering, UTS
Prof. Homer Le Grand, Dean, Faculty of Arts, Monash
Dr. Carl Ungerer, Senior Advisor to Leader of Opposition, Simon Crean
Prof. Deryck Schreuder, Vice Chancellor of Univ. of Western Australia
Prof. Paige Porter, Dep. Vice Chancellor, U.W.A.
Dr. Tim Rowse, A.N.U. and holder of Harvard's Chair in Australian Studies, 2003-04
Harry Ransom Center 3.362
The University of Texas, Austin, TX 78713-7219
Telephone: 512/471-9607 Fax : 512/471-8869 email: yacker@www.utexas.edu
Website: www.utexas.edu/depts/cas/
This Newsletter was not printed with state funds.
