Fact Sheet : Engaging Globally
Nearly 10 years ago in Botswana, a country with one of the world's highest HIV/AIDS infection rates, Penn Medicine built a small program to train local healthcare providers. Today, Penn's engagement in Botswana has grown into a broad, interdisciplinary health-focused program, and serves as a model for the university's future global engagement. As part of this initiative, Penn partnered with the University of Botswana to construct the country's first medical school and helped establish an NIH-funded Center for AIDS Research.
Advancing global inquiry. Prominent research universities can play an important role in addressing complex global issues. Penn generates knowledge and expertise about global problems such as HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability, and rapid responses to humanitarian disasters.
Promoting academic partnerships. Great 21st-century universities such as Penn must engage dynamically with communities all over the world. Penn's academic partnerships extend to China, India, Africa, Latin America, and beyond. The number of Penn students who study abroad has grown by 14 percent since 2004, and our global network of Penn alumni continues to expand.
Embracing a global exchange of ideas. Global engagement also is evident on campus. Penn ranks 4th in the United States in the percent of international students enrolled, making us the academic home to the largest contingent of international students in the Ivy League. Applications from around the world have increased by 84 percent since 2004, with the largest increases coming from China and India, where enrollment has increased two-fold.
The Penn World Scholars Program recruits the most talented students from developing countries, providing them with a foundation at Penn to return to their countries and become global leaders.
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Number of Students Studying Abroad Annually Since 2003
The number of Penn students studying abroad has increased 63 percent since 2003, putting Penn at the top of the Ivy League for study abroad.
Engaging Globally
The Penn Compact embraces the notion that a great 21st-century American university engages dynamically with communities all over the world to advance the central values of democracy and to exchange knowledge that improves quality of life for all.
With outstanding international faculty, the largest international contingent of students in the Ivy League, and a strong track record of translating cutting-edge theory into effective practice, Penn is a leader in contributing vital research and on-the-ground support to communities in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Many of our schools and centers collaborate with partner institutions around the world. Penn is now moving forward to nurture these networks and to encourage more innovative, cross-disciplinary solutions to global problems.
In 2005, Amy Gutmann made her first official visits to alumni and families in India, China, and Singapore to enlist their support for the University's global agenda. Penn's international alumni are prominently positioned to play vital roles in promoting their nations' growth and progress across many sectors.
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Penn Advancing Global Inquiry
Prominent research universities can play an important role in addressing complex global issues. Penn generates knowledge and expertise about global problems such as HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability, and rapid responses to humanitarian disasters.
President Amy Gutmann is a co-founder of the Global Colloquium of University Presidents, a growing network of international university presidents who advise the Secretary-General of the United Nations and contribute to the solution of global public policy programs. Since its founding in 2007, the colloquium has addressed academic freedom, international migration, climate change, the role of science in meeting global challenges, and in 2011 at Penn, will address advancing the status of women in the world.
While governments, multinational corporations, and international and nongovernmental organizations are largely responsible for flattening the world socially and economically, constructive global engagement also must occur locally among individuals and communities. Penn is leveraging its vast experience by engaging individual communities, organizations, and governments to promote positive global change.
Some examples:
Penn's presence in Botswana, an African nation with one of the world's highest HIV/AIDS infection rates, is a model for our global engagement initiatives. In 2001, a group of School of Medicine faculty members traveled to Botswana to set up a program to train local healthcare providers. Today, Penn has partnered with the University of Botswana to construct a new medical school, the first in the nation, and has helped establish an NIH-funded Center for AIDS Research.
Penn's Center for Advanced Study of India is the only research center in the United States devoted to the study of contemporary India, where Penn has among the strongest ties of any American university. In 2010, the Center received a $2 million grant from the Government of India to study international migration from India. The Wharton School's customized executive education programs in India are models for expansion throughout Asia.
Penn Medicine students and faculty founded the Guatemala Health Initiative in 2005 to improve the health in the town of Santiago Atitlán. The initiative's goal is to develop effective, sustainable, culturally sensitive health interventions that can be put into practice through participatory research and clinical and cultural experiences The initiative includes supporting the local hospital through medical and nursing student clinical rotations; raising funds, medical supplies and personal support; and organizing community health projects in Santiago Atitlán; and educating the Penn community about health and human rights in Guatemala.
Penn's Department of Biology is studying global climate change in a remote but important location: Mongolia. Scientists predict that some of the most extreme temperature increases associated with global warming are expected to occur in Northern Mongolia, and increases in both the temperature and the length of the growing season are already apparent. Penn's project is a collaboration involving the faculty in Ecology and Evolution, part of the Department of Biology, together with collaborators at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the National University of Mongolia, the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. The project is supported by a five-year NSF grant, and is designed to advance training of graduate and undergraduate students from Mongolia and the United states, collect data to help develop policy on land preservation and management in Mongolia and to help the scientific community better understand the future consequences of global warming and climate change.
Global initiatives at Penn advance through a wide range of world-leading centers, programs, and institutes, including the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Center for Global Communication Studies, Center for Health Disparities Research, Center for Public Health Initiatives, Genome Frontiers Institute, Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business, the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership, the Institute for Urban Research and the Lauder Institute. A full list of all global centers, programs and institutes can be found here: www.upenn.edu/provost/global_centers
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Penn has more than 200 international partnership agreements with more than 150 institutions in nearly 50 countries.
China
All 12 schools at Penn have a partnership of some kind with an institution of higher education in China.
In March 2010, Penn signed a university-wide agreement with Peking (Beida) University in Beijing, building on numerous school-level partnerships and relationships. The Annenberg School for Communication, School for Dental Medicine, Law School, and Wharton School of Business at Penn all have academic partnerships with their Peking counterparts to facilitate student, faculty, research and other academic programs between the schools.
In particular, Penn's Wharton School has a strategic partnership with Peking's Guanghua School of Management, established in 2007, which promotes academic collaboration, faculty and student collaboration, and a joint research initiative on firms and markets. Dean Thomas Robertson renewed this partnership in a 2010 visit to Beijing.
The Penn-Tsinghua T.C. Chan Center for Building Simulation and Energy Studies was founded in 2006 and forms the centerpiece of Penn's relationship with Tsinghua University in Beijing. Located jointly on the Penn and Tsinghua campuses in the U.S. and China, T.C. Chan researchers create leading-edge, energy-efficient strategies for high-performance buildings and sustainable environments around the world. T.C. Chan is one of the only academic centers devoted solely to sustainable building models and research in the world. In addition, the School of Law and School of Engineering and Applied Science have agreements with Tsinghua for student and faculty programs in the United States and China.
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Peru
Penn, through its School of Medicine, has developed a partnership with the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH), a prestigious private university in Lima, Peru. UPCH includes schools of Medicine, Dentistry, Natural Sciences, Public Health, Veterinary Medicine, Nursing, Psychology, and Education, and is home to the Alexander von Humboldt Institute of Tropical Medicine, one of the most prestigious tropical medicine institutes in the world.
The partnership benefits from the longstanding relationship between UPCH and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Pennsylvania Hospital, which includes clinical instruction in obstetrics and gynecology. Penn researchers are also currently collaborating with UPCH on research on Chagas disease in Arequipa, Peru.
In addition, a number of potential collaborative projects between UPCH and Penn are being explored, including clinical research training for UPCH faculty and research on issues related to mother-child health, food and nutrition, tropical medicine and parasitology, and antimicrobial resistance.
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Botswana
Penn's engagement in the sub-Saharan country of Botswana is focused on four major areas: clinical care, global health training, research, and education. The clinical care program– largely funded through the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) and the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships (ACHAP)– focuses on HIV and TB treatment and women's health at the two main government referral hospitals in Gaborone and Francistown. Penn medical students and residents have the opportunity to spend time engaged in global health activities through rotation programs in Botswana. Dental medicine students can spend four weeks there, supporting the dental care system by serving as dental assistants, and students from across Penn can spend time in Botswana during the summer completing internships. Penn undergraduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences also have the opportunity to study abroad at the University of Botswana.
Penn signed an MOU with the University of Botswana in 2006 and has more than 20 research projects in the country, many of them involving collaborations with colleagues at the University of Botswana, most notably with the medical school that Penn was key in helping to found. The UB School of Medicine enrolled its first class in 2008, and Penn Medicine faculty helped design its internship and internal medicine residency curriculum. In addition,a number of faculty members from both schools are working together on HIV research; faculty members from the University of Botswana School of Nursing have spent time at Penn; and last year, a faculty member in linguistics was hosted by Penn's African Studies Center.
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School Partnerships
In 2007, Wharton renewed its partnership with the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad, India, for five more years. ISB is a unique institution created in 2001 with two U.S. business schools (Wharton and Northwestern's Kellogg School) and 50 of the world's top corporations.
The School of Social Policy and Practice has just launched the Penn-China Civil Society Initiative, a program to assist the budding non-governmental sector in China, signing an MOU with officials from the Beijing Normal University. The School will serve as a collaborative advisor in developing China's NGO and philanthropy sectors, and in creating joint-research publications on the philanthropic sector and surveying the state of Chinese philanthropy.
In August 2010, the Law School announced a new partnership with the University of Hong Kong for a new JD/LLM double-degree exchange program, offering students at both schools a unique opportunity to spend their third year at the partner school and complete a Master of Laws program.
The School of Engineering and Applied Science is a member of ConRuhr, a Consortium among the German universities: The University of Duisburg-Essen, Ruhr University Bochum, and Technical University Dortmund partner to facilitate student exchange, summer study programs, faculty visits, and research collaborations.
SEAS also has a decade-old partnership with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, with an initiative in IT-related outreach, an international development summer institute in Africa for undergraduates, and a faculty capacity building initiative.
The School of Veterinary Medicine partners with Ross University in Domenica for hands-on student and faculty training; and maintains partnerships through the USDA for veterinary students to travel to Chinese universities for clinical training.
Embracing a Global Exchange of Ideas. Global engagement also is evident on Penn's Philadelphia campus. Penn ranks 4th in the United States in the percent of international students enrolled, making us the academic home to the largest contingent of international students in the Ivy League. Applications from around the world have increased by 84 percent since 2004, with the largest increases coming from China and India, where enrollment has increased two-fold.
The College's undergraduate curriculum includes foreign languages, cross-cultural awareness and global studies. Students are using these requirements as a springboard to explore their global interests. Penn offers instruction in more than 50 languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese and Dutch. In addition to the language courses offered as part of degree programs, the Penn Language Center allows the University to offer a variety of less commonly taught languages. These programs included languages not offered through typical programs of established departments and include Bengali, Cantonese, Panjabi, Pashto, Tamil, Igbo, Gaelic and Wolof, as well as many others.
Since 2004, Penn students have won five Rhodes, five Marshall, 116 Fulbright, and 13 Gates Cambridge scholarships. Their projects through these prestigious scholarship programs have been wide-ranging, including one Rhodes Scholar, who worked both at Taishan International Bank in Taiwan and Credit Suisse in Hong Kong and spent a summer in Mexico doing field research with FINCA International before co-founding an innovative bank and business incubator for street youth in Lagos, Nigeria. One of Penn's Marshall Scholars earned a degree in philosophy, politics and economics and then pursued a master's in comparative social policy at Oxford University in England.
Since 2004, Penn students have won five Rhodes, five Marshall, 116 Fulbright, and 13 Gates Cambridge scholarships.
Penn's global campus does not consist of buildings, centers, and parks. Rather, it defines itself through the pursuit and exchange of ideas that lead to deeper understanding and effective solutions to the pressing global issues of our time. Penn's global campus includes an internationally diverse community of scholars and practitioners who collaborate routinely with distinguished counterparts around the world. The University is launching several new initiatives that will foster an even more dynamic global perspective.
Penn's World Scholars Program recruits the most talented students from developing countries, providing them with a foundation at Penn to return to their countries and become global leaders.
The Penn World Scholars Program broadens our international student body. The class of Penn World Scholars that entered Penn in 2010 is the largest ever, with 12 students, five of those from African countries. This year's scholars come from Brazil, Colombia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Jordan, Kenya, Latvia, Nepal, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.
Penn's Distinguished International Scholars program was started in 2007 to bring important global scholarly leaders to campus in ways that are directly integrated with ongoing undergraduate courses and in visits that last at least 10 days. Each guest delivers lectures, meets with faculty and students, and is integrated into the College House programs. Scholars have included Jaswant Singh, Juan Carlos Castilla, and in 2011, James Zhaojie Li.
A globally renowned focal point for scholars of ancient cultures, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology reveals how ancient peoples perceived their role on earth. The Museum integrates its rich collection of artifacts from every continent with themed presentations that allow us to see more deeply into today's world through the prism of past cultures and civilizations.
In February 2011, "Secrets of the Silk Road" opens at the Penn Museum. The exhibition's only stop on the Eastern coast of the United States contains more than 150 objects, 700 to 3,800 years old, including well-preserved mummies from the deserts and mountains of China. The exhibition illustrates early human migration and cultural interactions previously unimagined in the desert crossroads of Central Asia.
For more than 40 years, Penn's Institute of Contemporary Art has presented innovative exhibitions of artists, architects, photographers, and designers of international renown. The ICA recently assembled the works of three generations of European and American artists to explore the mythic and art historical significance of Cologne, Germany, which served as the global epicenter of contemporary art in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The Morris Arboretum extends our appreciation of the world's ecology with its collection of exotic international plants and through interdisciplinary and scholarly programs. Each year interns from all over the world come to study the complex relationships between plant life and human life. Many of the Arboretum's international interns have gone on to assume key environmental and horticultural leadership positions throughout the world.
Several of Penn's interdisciplinary centers receive federal support under Title VI of the Higher Education Act which provides grants for higher education institutions to establish, strengthen and operate language and area-or international-studies centers. The Africa Studies Center, the Center for East Asian Studies, the Middle East Center, the Penn Lauder Center for International Business Education and Research and the South Asia Center at Penn all support language instruction as well as interdisciplinary teaching and research aimed at understanding the people and cultures where those languages are spoken.
The Annual Wharton India Economic Forum was founded at Penn in 1996, and is the leading business forum focused on India in the United States, drawing the top scholars and leaders from around the world.
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