Global Initiatives Program | Faculty Reports
ACES Faculty visits China Agricultural University
May 11- 18, 2019
Six ACES Faculty (Sam Fernald, Manoj Shukla, KC Carroll, Amy Ganguli, Hatim Geli, and Colby Brungard) and ACES Dean (Rolando Flores) visited China Agricultural University (CAU), Beijing through ACES Global Initiatives Program and CAU. Faculty attended a workshop on "Thrivability of Arid Agriculture under Changing Environment: Trends and Challenges." The ACES delegation held wide ranging discussions with CAU faculty and administrators in the College of Water Resources and Civil Engineering and College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering. ACES faculty also visited Shiyanghe Experimental station and Hongyashan Reservoir, and had productive interactions with graduate students. The trip was fully sponsored by CAU's Center for Agricultural Water Research.
ACES faculty enjoyed meeting with the CAU faculty and students. CAU faculty is friendly and also are doing good quality research. There is great potential for future collaboration. Faculty in general were happy to know the research focus of CAU faculty and their students, and four of the faculty have expressed interest in returning to China and CAU whenever a similar opportunity becomes available. NMSU faculty who have either not gone or earlier or been there for the first time got some contacts, and they would pursue future collaborations, although professional benefits of collaborations will take time. Some other members of the ACES team already have ongoing research collaborations, and they were able to work with the students on their manuscripts.
Generally, ACES delegates think that the ACES faculty must continue to communicate with CAU faculty and students to develop collaboration including trying to work on programmatic collaboration. Another next step would be to develop collaborative research funding proposals. A joint research project with fieldwork (in their experiment station) and modeling could be developed. Funding other sources (such as NSF) in China and USA can support international collaboration projects. I can get more info and see how this would work.
ACES Faculty is interested in developing collaboration in common research focus areas. Some are already doing while others are interested in getting involved in collaborative research leading to the coauthorship in papers in their area of expertise, for example, ground water remediation, soil physics, remote sensing modeling and measurement of ET over agricultural and natural landscapes.
CAU will explore the possibility of NMSU faculty teaching some courses at their campus. Some of the ACES faculty have taught at CAU during summer (summer school), while possibility of teaching a condensed course in their area of expertise is generally well received. Some of these could be on water management, remote sensing, modeling and measurement of ET over agricultural and natural landscapes and use of R software for agriculture. Some are not sure how it would be administered.
Some ACES faculty believe that the most productive collaboration has been with individual faculty. A joint grant proposal or research project, possibly a site comparison or joint analysis could be the next step. Another suggestion is to bring some students from CAU to the campus next year for a similar workshop/training. More collaborations among students could accelerate the existing cooperation. Other funding opportunities can be explored further, for example, CUAHSI program is a possible funding opportunity to support a training workshop. Overall faculty feels that the program is growing, and has the potential for additional growth, and must be continued.
