Global Advisors Council Education & Research Awards, 2026

Global Education Award

The Global Education Award for Internationalizing Curriculum offers a tiered set of awards ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 to support UCLA faculty and departments/programs to internationalize their curricula. The goal of the award is to expand UCLA's reach as a global university. The award may be used to revise a current course; design a new course; or design a new program, concentration or track. Courses and programs may be oriented to undergraduates, graduate students, professional degree candidates or candidates or students in non-degree programs. See RFP[link]. Congratulations to all the award recipients, and many thanks to the Global Education Award Committee (Marjorie Elaine (Chair), Sadath Sayeed, and Veronica Herrera) and Global Advisors Council reviewers for their contributions to the process.

Global Health Pathway-UCLA Pulmonary Critical Care Fellowship Program

Joanne Bando

Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care

This proposal seeks to establish a formal, longitudinal Global Health Pathway within the UCLA Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Fellowship Program. Building on UCLA's strong institutional commitment to global health education and an existing long-standing partnership with a Medical Center in Malawi, this initiative will create a structured, sustainable, and ethically grounded training pathway for fellows pursuing careers in global health. We seek the opportunity to train future leaders in a field where the global burden of disease is substantial and disproportionately affects low-resource settings. The recent establishment of an intensive care unit at our partner site in Malawi provides a timely and compelling foundation to expand this collaboration into a bidirectional exchange in Pulmonary and Critical Care clinical training. The proposed pathway emphasizes sustainability, reciprocity, and alignment with local priorities.

Integrated Watershed Systems

Alberto Casillas Trasviña

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Integrated Watershed Systems is a new graduate course in Civil and Environmental Engineering, designed to teach watershed analysis as coupled surface water and groundwater systems through an explicitly international and comparative engineering lens. The course is organised around three engineering challenges that are acute in California yet globally relevant, and that are rarely taught together: managed aquifer recharge for water security, the effects of wildfire on recharge and water infrastructure, and the engineering dimensions of transboundary aquifers. Each theme pairs cases from the western United States with analogous settings in regions underrepresented in U.S. engineering curricula, including South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and Latin America. Weekly readings draw on non-U.S. research groups, remote guest researchers from low- and middle-income country institutions contribute to three sessions, and a collaborative synthesis project asks students to compare engineering responses across multiple international settings. The course will be offered as an elective within the MS in Water Resources and Coastal Engineering, building on the existing 250A and 250B sequence.

M.A. in Global Music Education

Lily Chen-Hafteck

Music Performance, Education and Composition

A new degree program, M.A. in Global Music Education, will be created by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music with the support of the UCLA Global Education Award. This program will address a critical gap in UCLA's offerings, providing a much-needed graduate pathway for music educators seeking career advancement. By intersecting the school's prestigious programs in music education and ethnomusicology, this degree offers an unparalleled, interdisciplinary approach to global music pedagogy. Lately, there has been momentum in music education to diversify curricula. This shift stems from the need to better reflect diverse student demographics, advance cultural equity, cultivate intercultural understanding and a global mindset. While many teachers are eager to bring global music knowledge into their classrooms, they often lack the professional development opportunities to do so. This program bridges that gap, based on juxtapositional pedagogy. While providing a foundation in music education philosophies, pedagogies and research methodologies, this program will address perspectives from cultures of the world to juxtapose with the conventional Western music paradigm, especially those that have historically been underrepresented in academia such as the musical cultures from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and so on. By integrating these cultures into the coursework, students will experience diverse viewpoints, develop intercultural understanding, and gain global competencies. Ultimately, the program aims to equip graduates with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to become forward-thinking leaders in music education who can confidently navigate international perspectives and connect deeply with diverse communities.

Energy Generation, Storage, and Integration: A Global Graduate Course on Power and Energy Systems

Xiaofan Cui

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

This project will create a new graduate course, Energy Generation, Storage, and Integration, that teaches power and energy systems through a global and comparative framework. The course will examine renewable generation, battery energy storage, electric vehicles, microgrids, inverter-based resources, high-power loads, and grid integration using case studies from China, the United States/California, Europe, and selected low- and middle-income regions. Students will learn how technical, economic, policy, and infrastructure conditions shape engineering choices across different power-system architectures, rather than treating the U.S. grid as the default model. Award support will be used to develop the syllabus, international case studies, assignments, assessment rubrics, and data-supported project materials. The resulting course will strengthen UCLA graduate energy education by giving students a durable, globally oriented foundation for analyzing generation-storage-grid strategies, regional constraints, equity, sustainability, and implementation tradeoffs.

Adding Researcher Voices from Mexico, Japan, and Romania to Psychology 239, Qualitative and Mixed Methods in Psychology, Education, and the Social Sciences

Patricia Greenfield

Psychology

In Psych 239, I teach that one of the strengths and goals of qualitative inquiry is to give voice to groups whose voices are notably absent from the social science literature. Some international examples of this in the last five years have been qualitative studies of Orthodox Jews in Israel, refugees from North Korea in South Korea, Jamaicans in Jamaica, Mayans in Chiapas, Mexico, and Bedouin citizens of Israel. Namibia and Thailand were added this past year to the revised course, supported by my first Global Education Grant. The focus in this list has been on the international diversity of participants. My new grant focuses on the international diversity of researchers. It focuses particularly on highlighting the voices of researchers from groups whose voices are notably absent from the social science literature. I will replace international studies authored exclusively by U.S. researchers or by other outsiders with studies authored or co-authored by international researchers studying phenomena in their own countries or communities. In other words, research articles in this year's syllabus representing an exclusively outsider perspective will be replaced next year by articles that include an insider perspective. The focus will be particularly on including countries that whose research voices have been absent or underrepresented in U.S. academia. Last year, researchers from Namibia and a Bedouin community in Israel participated in the seminar via Zoom. Adding to last year's list of underrepresented international perspectives will be researchers from Romania, Mexico, Thailand, and Jamaica. Via Zoom, all will discuss their research with a multidisciplinary group of graduate students in Spring 2027.

The University: A Global History

Susanne Lohmann

Political Science and Public Policy

I will develop and teach an upper-division Political Science course titled The University: A Global History. The course will employ the vehicle of the university—its 850-year rise and global spread; its individual instantiations and nation-state orientation; its research and teaching contribution to functionally differentiated society—to insert a global mindset into the minds of undergraduate students at UCLA. To this end I utilize a scaffolding pedagogy that places the individual student at the center of three onward-and-outward radiating architectures defined by time/generation, space/place, and function/specialization. Students will gain a dynamic sense of history as it extends into possible futures; a grounded sense of family, neighborhood, town, subnational region, nation, supranational region, and the world at large; and a coordinated sense of fitting into various functionally differentiated systems, both as a liberal arts-shaped citizen and a university-trained professional.

Global HIV Landscapes - Epidemiology, Experience, and Evidence-Based Action

Matthew Mimiaga

Epidemiology

While HIV is a global epidemic, academic discussions often remain centered on Western perspectives. This course shifts that focus by examining HIV through the lived experiences and expertise of researchers, practitioners, and community leaders from high-burden regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Organized into region-specific modules, the course combines epidemiologic and global health frameworks with live virtual sessions that explore how local healthcare systems, policies, and socio-cultural contexts shape the epidemic. Students will engage with international experts, analyze locally developed case studies, and participate in discussions that emphasize community-driven knowledge and culturally responsive public health practice. By the end of the course, students will have developed a critical, transnational perspective on HIV that prepares them to collaborate effectively in diverse global health settings and supports UCLA's commitment to international public health education.

Comparative Urban Planning

Paavo Monkkonen

Urban Planning and Public Policy

This project is a revision of the course Comparative Urban Planning. The goal of the course is to delve into the idea that urban planning “works better” in some cities/countries, by examining the scope of urban planning to produce high-quality urban environments and the contextual factors that constrain or enable its apparent effectiveness. To do that, the course compares national, regional, and local urban planning practices in five urban areas and their countries, one from each of the four major world regions (the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe) and the US. In the first iteration of the course, we studied Mexico City, Mexico, Chengdu, China, Accra, Ghana, Lyon, France, and Los Angeles, California. Through the case studies, we explore how governments develop plans, the power balance between local and higher levels of government, and the relationship between planning, taxation, and spending at the local level. We did some reading of actual planning documents, but in retrospect, this area would benefit from more preparation. Therefore, the revision will focus on a deeper pre-analysis of the case study city's planning documents in order to teach students through them in a structured manner.

Bridging Cultural Nutrition Gaps in Chronic Kidney Disease: A US–Jamaica Curriculum Initiative: Global Kidney Health: Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) / Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic (CKM) Syndrome Nutrition and Disparities Across the United States and Jama

Susanne Nicholas

Department of Medicine / Division of Nephrology

Chronic kidney disease is a rapidly growing global noncommunicable disease and a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. However, substantial disparities exist in outcomes driven by differences in health systems, workforce capacity, and access to nutrition-based care. Nutrition is central to CKD management. yet it is highly context-dependent and shaped by cultural dietary practices, local food systems, and resource availability. The course on Global Kidney Health is entitled "Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) / Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic (CKM) Syndrome Nutrition and Disparities Across the United States and Jamaica." The course will be co-taught by faculty at UCLA and the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, in collaboration with the Jamaica Ministry of Health and Wellness (MOHW), In-Service Education Unit (Nurse Education). The course uses Jamaica as a focused comparative setting to examine these issues alongside the United States. Jamaica provides a distinct health system and dietary context, and the course benefits from direct expertise of co-instructors with clinical and research experience in Jamaican kidney care, ensuring primary rather than secondary perspectives.

Engineer Intelligent Systems

Yang Zhang

Electrical and Computer Engineering

This project supports the design of a new course, Engineer Intelligent Systems, to expand UCLA's engineering curriculum in ways that prepare students to design intelligent systems for real-world global deployment. The course will introduce students to the design of intelligent systems that operate across diverse international contexts, including settings with different languages, privacy expectations, infrastructure constraints, cultural norms, and institutional priorities. Rather than treating internationalization as a single lecture topic, the course will embed international perspectives throughout the quarter through lectures, readings, case studies, assignments, and project evaluation. Students will study technical topics such as sensing, inference, multimodal interaction, robustness, embedded and edge deployment, and system evaluation, while connecting these topics to globally situated use cases in areas such as healthcare, education, assistive technologies, manufacturing, agriculture, logistics, and public services. Assignments and the final project will require students to compare design decisions across countries or communities, redesign systems for low-resource or multilingual settings, and justify how their designs respond to local needs and constraints. The resulting course will provide a durable new offering for UCLA engineering and a reusable model for integrating international perspectives into technical education.

Global History of Capitalism

Meng Zhang

History

The Global Education Award will support my redesigning of HIST 12D, Inequality: Global History of Capitalism into a fully asynchronous online course to be offered in Summer Session C in 2026. This revision will significantly deepen and systematize the course's internationalized curriculum while adapting its structure, assignments, and assessments for an intensive six-week format without sacrificing intellectual rigor or student engagement. HIST 12D is a General Education course that introduces students to the global history of capitalism from circa 1500 to the present. From its inception, the course has been designed to counter the Western-centric tendencies that continue to shape the teaching of economic history by foregrounding regions and communities historically underrepresented in U.S. academia, including parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It integrates international perspectives across the entirety of the course—through readings, lectures, and assignments—rather than treating them as supplemental or episodic. The proposed revision will focus on adapting this internationally integrated curriculum to an asynchronous online format. This will involve reconfiguring lectures into modular video segments, redesigning assignments to foster sustained engagement and critical reflection in a compressed timeframe, and developing new forms of assessment that reinforce global and comparative analysis. By supporting the redesign of HIST 12D, the Global Education Award will enable the creation of a sustainable, scalable model for delivering an internationally grounded, critically engaged curriculum to a broader student population.

Global Research Award

The Global Research Award offers seed grants of up to $20,000 and global research grants of up to $50,000. The goal of the award is to advance globally engaged research and contribute to inclusive excellence. Seed grants are awarded for up to one year's work to launch a new partnership, pilot a new research project or test new research methods in a global context. Global research grants are awarded for up to two years of work to advance an existing research project, enhance one or more international partnerships, expand the scope of an existing domestic research project, or engage students and other partners in a research initiative that addresses a global issue(s). See RFP [link]. Congratulations to all the award recipients, and many thanks to the Global Research Award Committee (Rachel Deblinger (Chair), Shelleen Greene, and José Luiz Passos) and Global Advisors Council reviewers for their contributions to the process.

Co-design, development, and pilot testing of an AI-assisted hybrid chatbot to support HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake, adherence and persistence in Vietnam

Paul Adamson

Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine

HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is highly effective for HIV prevention, yet its public health impact depends on sustained uptake, adherence, and long-term persistence. Vietnam has rapidly expanded PrEP services and now has one of the largest PrEP programs in the Asia-Pacific region. However, many individuals discontinue PrEP within the first few months, highlighting the need for innovative, scalable approaches to support ongoing engagement. This UCLA-Hanoi Medical University (HMU) collaborative project will co-design, develop, and pilot an AI-assisted hybrid chatbot to support PrEP delivery and persistence in Vietnam. The project combines qualitative research, human-centered design, and AI to create a culturally responsive digital tool that provides motivational interviewing informed support, PrEP education, medication reminders, and clinic navigation. We will first assess the needs and preferences of PrEP users, PrEP-eligible individuals, healthcare providers, and community based organizations. Those findings will guide the iterative development and pilot testing of the chatbot to evaluate usability, accuracy, user engagement, and preliminary utility. Building on a long-standing UCLA-HMU collaboration, this project expands the partnership into AI-enabled HIV prevention while laying the foundation for future collaborative research, training, and implementation studies. The resulting model has the potential to strengthen PrEP delivery in Vietnam and inform HIV prevention efforts in other resource-limited settings.

Translating groundwater recharge and management strategies across hydroclimatic and institutional boundaries: A California, US-Baja California, Mexico collaboration

Alberto Casillas Trasviña

Civil and Environmental Eengineering

Groundwater sustains agriculture across the world's semi-arid regions, yet in many of the basins most at risk the monitoring data needed to estimate recharge and guide management are minimal or absent. Methods refined in data-rich systems such as California's San Joaquin Valley cannot be applied directly, leaving water managers without the tools to assess sustainability or plan interventions. How can recharge estimation approaches developed where data are abundant be adapted for basins where they are scarce? A binational collaboration between UCLA and the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education at Ensenada (CICESE) takes up this question by linking ongoing recharge research in the San Joaquin Valley, conducted in collaboration with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, to the Valle de Guadalupe, a viticultural region in Baja California facing intensifying groundwater stress. The work adapts water balance and model-based methods to data-limited conditions and quantifies how data availability shapes recharge estimates and their uncertainty. Through reciprocal research visits, graduate student training, engagement with the local groundwater management stakeholders, and open-access release of data and tools, it builds a sustained partnership and a transferable framework for similarly data-scarce basins across Latin America and beyond.

Multilingual repertoires in forced migration: Language practices, ideology and integration in the Ukrainian Diaspora across the United States, Norway, Germany and Israel

Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan

Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures/ Center for World Languages

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has transformed the linguistic lives of millions of displaced people, yet we know little about how forced migration reshapes multilingualism. This UCLA-led international collaboration brings together researchers in the United States, Germany, Israel, and Norway to investigate the multilingual repertoires of Ukrainian refugees across their home and host-country languages. Combining sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches, the project examines language use, code-switching, language attitudes, and integration across diverse migration contexts. The international collaboration aims to establish a shared research infrastructure and comparative methodology that will advance research on multilingual adaptation under conditions of forced migration while generating evidence to inform educational practice, integration policy, and support for refugee communities worldwide.

Coalitional Carbon Mapping and Spatial Empowerment: Partnering with Amazonian Communities in Pará

Yue Li

Geography

This proposal aims to establish a new international research partnership between UCLA and Indigenous, Quilombola, and traditional extractivist communities in Pará, Brazil, to advance community-led forest conservation through spatial science and carbon mapping. By combining local ecological knowledge with GIS, remote sensing, participatory mapping, and GPS-based field data collection, the project will strengthen territorial governance, support land rights advocacy, and improve forest carbon monitoring. Through field visits, collaborative workshops, and hands-on spatial training, the project will build local capacity while fostering equitable knowledge exchange and long-term research partnerships. Deliverables include community forest atlases, geospatial datasets, training materials, and open-access resources that promote sustainable forest management, climate resilience, and inclusive scientific collaboration.

Housing and Migration in the Americas: The Reality behind the Rhetoric

Paavo Monkkonen

Urban Planning

This project responds to the housing impacts of recent migration flows across the Americas, both on individuals' conditions in terms of health and finances, but also on the political discourse around migration and housing. We hope to address a gap in academic and public discourse by developing a comparative and globally relevant research framework for understanding how migration interacts with housing systems across the Americas. The project has two components. First, to compare immigrant housing conditions across the 35 countries of the Americas using secondary data from national censuses. Second, we will develop a conceptual framework that synthesizes the academic literature on migration and housing affordability. Rather than treating the relationship as uniform, we will identify the main variables that mediate how different housing markets absorb new people and households. The project is a collaboration between UCLA researchers and TECHO, a Latin American organization focused on housing poverty and informal settlements.

Tracing Global Food Pathways in a Changing Climate: Africa & the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora

Harold Torrence

James S. Coleman African Studies Center (to house the grant, if awarded)