Chancellor Gordon Gee formalized a partnership with University of Cape Town Vice Chancellor and Principal Njabulo S. Ndebele (right) when he and a Vanderbilt delegation visited South Africa in March.
Agreement will enhance opportunities for black scientists
by Princine Lewis
Faculty from Vanderbilt and South Africa’s University of Cape Town (UCT) are working together to recruit and train more black scientists in South Africa.
Like African Americans in the United States, black Africans are underrepresented in the physical sciences, particularly in astronomy and space science.
Vanderbilt astronomer Keivan Stassun and physicists James Dickerson and David Ernst were among a group from the university that traveled to Cape Town in March. After a three-day meeting there, Stassun and Dickerson have begun work on exchanging ideas, research and students with their South African colleagues. The universities also have agreed to jointly build an automated telescope facility near Cape Town at the South African Astronomical Observatory.
Stassun and Dickerson’s work is part of a larger partnership between the two universities coordinated by the Vanderbilt International Office.
Under the agreement, Vanderbilt and UCT will be core partners in research and education initiatives benefiting students, faculty and staff. Both universities plan for this new partnership to extend beyond the typical student exchange program to include opportunities for collaborative research and study across several academic disciplines.
Chancellor Gordon Gee also traveled to Cape Town last month to meet with UCT Vice Chancellor and Principal Njabulo S. Ndebele and other university leaders.
“The University of Cape Town is a great intellectual, cultural and scientific center for the entire African continent,” Gee said. “Vanderbilt’s partnership with UCT will create enhanced opportunities for our respective students and faculty, as well as grow the global network of researchers in several important disciplines.”
Vanderbilt currently has a program with Nashville’s historically black Fisk University to increase the number of minority students pursuing doctoral degrees in the physical sciences. The program is on track to make Fisk and Vanderbilt the nation’s leading producers of minority physics and astronomy Ph.D.s in the United States. UCT has a similar program with historically black University of the Western Cape.
Stassun, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, is co-director of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-Ph.D. Bridge program and the Fisk Astronomy and Space Science Training program. He also is leading Vanderbilt’s participation in the astronomy research collaborations with UCT. He said workers have begun drawing up plans to build the new automated telescope facility near Cape Town that will allow the universities to search for planets around other stars.
He also plans for students from Fisk and Vanderbilt to make the trip from Nashville to Cape Town this summer and during the 2007 fall semester.
Dickerson, assistant professor of physics, and UCT physicists David Britton and Margit Harting are in talks to collaborate on research to produce novel nanocomposite metallic metals. Other research partnerships in the areas of nanoscience and materials physics also are in the works.
“What makes this partnership so attractive is not only the astronomy and physics research, but that we are developing the next generation of scientists – particularly those from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups,” Stassun said.
“I am very excited that we were able to walk away from our initial meeting with UCT’s faculty with immediate opportunities to work together. How well matched UCT and Vanderbilt are, in terms of our materials physics and nanoscience research and partnerships, was a pleasant surprise,” Dickerson said.
The South African government has made astronomy its primary area of science investment and has constructed the South African Astronomical Observatory, which houses the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) – the largest single-optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. Funding from South Africa’s government and grants awarded through the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-Intensive Astrophysics are being used to build the universities’ joint automated telescope facility near Cape Town.
The Vanderbilt International Office (VIO). coordinated the partnership with UCT. VIO is an integral part of the university’s international strategy, which includes offering a curriculum that embraces global perspectives, providing students with linguistic and cultural education to help them thrive in the global community, and fostering international research and teaching opportunities for faculty.
Joel Harrington, Vanderbilt assistant provost for international affairs who heads the international office, and Edward Saff, executive dean of Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science, traveled with Gee to Cape Town.
Harrington said Vanderbilt’s goal is to establish partnerships with six peer institutions around the world by the end of 2007 and an additional three or four over the subsequent two years.
“We are taking the approach of establishing core partnerships with a few world-class universities that provide exciting opportunities for research collaborations across all of our schools and disciplines. We want these to be deep, significant partnerships as opposed to the scattershot approach that often results from having hundreds of university partnerships without much depth,” Harrington said.
There will be opportunities for partnerships in any of UCT’s seven schools: Commerce, Engineering and the Built Environment, Health Sciences, Higher Education Development, Humanities, Law and Science.
VIO has established a new grants program to provide seed funding to establish selective international research collaborations and exchanges. All full-time faculty, staff and graduate and professional students are eligible to participate in the exchanges, but the Vanderbilt project director and grant applicant must be a tenured or tenure-track faculty member, or the equivalent at Blair School of Music.
Posted 04/04/07
