Juggling Teaching and Research at Home and Abroad

Michael S. Hedrick, Department of Biological Sciences, California State University, Hayward, Hayward, CA 94542

In this presentation, I relate my experiences in establishing and maintaining a research and teaching collaboration with Dr. Tobias Wang, a colleague at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. I first met Dr. Wang when I was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and he was a graduate student at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. During those years we discussed research at meetings and communicated about our shared interest in amphibian cardiovascular dynamics. Upon completing my postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin in 1994 I began as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at California State University, Hayward (CSUH). During this period of time I maintained contact with Dr. Wang communicating by email and exchanging information about our research. It was at a 1997 Physiological Ecology meeting in Bishop, CA, where we met once again and decided we would try to get together and work on a research project. In the fall of 1997 I applied for, and received, an intramural paid leave grant to travel to Denmark. During that visit, in Spring 1998, I spent two months at Odense University, Denmark, where Dr. Wang was, at that time, a postdoctoral fellow in the Biology Department. During those two months I was introduced to an undergraduate student who wanted to spend time in California. When she completed her studies at Odense University she enrolled at CSUH as a M.S. student under my supervision. She finished her M.S. degree at CSUH (through Odense University) in 2000, and I traveled to Odense to attend her thesis defense and to work with Dr. Wang. In 2002, I traveled to Aarhus University, where Dr. Wang had been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Zoophysiology (http://biology.au.dk/zoophysiology). Although the first several years’ of our collaboration were devoted entirely to research pursuits, more recently Dr. Wang and I obtained a grant through the Danish Velux Fund to teach a one week graduate course in Neurobiology at Aarhus University. I normally teach this course at CSUH on a yearly basis and adapted it to fit in a short time frame for the graduate course. The Velux fund provided a stipend and travel for my family and me to live in Aarhus for one month. This course was offered for the first time in August, 2004, for M.S. and Ph.D. students. The course was successful enough that we felt it would be worthwhile teaching it again in Aarhus. Thus, we plan to offer the course again in Denmark in 2006 and have plans to teach the course at the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Rio Claro, Brazil, in 2006. In essence, what began as a research collaboration, funded through an intramural grant from CSUH, has blossomed into a combined research/teaching collaborative now funded externally in at least two countries. It is clear from my own experience that if one has the desire to form international collaborations, they can be accomplished through a variety of mechanisms at home and abroad. One needs to keep an open mind and look for support in unexpected places. My collaborative experience has been extremely rewarding and has grown in unimaginable ways since embarking on this journey.