The Story of GLOBE, Part 1

GLOBE 15 Anniversary | Feature Story | Part 1 of 2

The Story of GLOBE

Anthony ST. GEORGE, Oct 7, 2020

With the guidance and support of successive deans and interim and acting deans (Profs. Fiona Doyle, Al Pisano, Shankar Sastry, and Tsu-Jae King), associate deans (Profs. Paul Wright, Lisa Pruitt), and enthusiastic faculty, alumni, and friends too numerous to list, GLOBE has grown into Berkeley Engineering’s multi-faceted international research partnership support, education, and outreach center seeking to benefit Berkeley faculty, students, the Bay Area community, and the world at large.

History and Scope of Programs

Research Partnerships:

In the early years, I first supported the deans and faculty by exploring opportunities for large-scale research partnerships with numerous top institutions around the world, achieving earliest successes with Singapore (Singapore BEARS), expanding on to the Philippines (PCARI) and the People’s Republic of China (TBSI). Historically, the Berkeley campus did not have a great deal of experience developing intricate, cross-border partnerships, and I’m proud to say that our programs contributed to UC Berkeley developing greater expertise to assist all its Colleges and Schools to establish similar programs.

Educational Programs:

With the growth and success of the research partnerships, we were able to build relationships with partner universities in those initial countries and beyond, beginning with the Renaissance Engineering Program at Nanyang Technological University. 

In the following years, faculty relationships led to the addition of visiting student programs with Tongji University, Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU), University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), ShanghaiTech University, SRM University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-SZ)and National Tsinghua University, educating over 400 students in the past 7 years.

Visiting Scholars and Entrepreneurs:

In that same period, GLOBE also began a program to host biotech and other engineering entrepreneurs from Taiwan to foster the advancement of innovation in new areas of interest to Taiwan. Since 2016, BTB, LEAP, and ITRI Scholars have developed technologies and business ideas in a variety of areas ranging from robotics and BioMEMs sensors to 3D Printed Medical Devices. 

In the following year we also began a similar visiting scholar program sponsored by the Slovak Republic, which enables scholars from participating universities in the republic to visit UC Berkeley for up to six months to work with Berkeley Engineering faculty on advanced research projects in intelligent transportation systems. 

From these programs, we then began to launch programs to more directly benefit UC Berkeley undergraduates.  Article continued in Part 2 .