Global Career Launch Offers Faculty-Led Student Internships Abroad
- Oct 5, 2020
Three UT faculty collaborating with institutions in Australia, Thailand and Mexico are the inaugural grant recipients of Global Career Launch, an innovative faculty-driven international internship opportunity for students to conduct research and gain career experience abroad.
Initiated in February 2020, Global Career Launch expands upon robust academic engagement among UT professors and their peers at institutions around the world by selecting UT students to join these faculty abroad in hands-on, in-country work. Faculty awardees receive a travel grant and stipend to oversee cohorts of up to 10 students. The program offers both in-person and virtual internship opportunities.
“The Texas Global Career Launch initiative advances UT’s goal to expand undergraduate and graduate research and high-impact transnational work experiences,” said Sonia Feigenbaum, senior vice provost for global engagement and chief international officer. “The program leverages our faculty’s collaborations with peers across the globe to open exclusive opportunities to live and work or conduct research abroad.”
2020 Grant Recipients and Projects
Benny Freeman
Professor, McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering
William J. (Bill) Murray, Jr. Endowed Chair in Engineering
Cockrell School of Engineering
(Monash University, Melbourne, Australia)
As a professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, Dr. Freeman’s research explores the relationship between polymer structure, processing and properties. For Global Career Launch, Dr. Freeman will build on a long-standing research partnership with Monash University in Melbourne, Australia to provide opportunities for UT students whose research interests lie in the membrane separation space, a concept used in developing high-performance polymers for various industry applications such as drug delivery devices and plastic food packaging. The internships will match undergraduate and graduate students with Monash faculty and students will intern in research laboratories with the goal of co-authoring peer-reviewed research publications and conducting research seminars and lectures.
Hirofumi Tanaka
Professor, Department of Kinesiology and Health Education
Director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory
College of Education
(Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand)
Professor Hirofumi Tanaka, whose research effort has been directed toward the influence of aging and lifestyle modifications on cardiovascular disease risk and functions in humans, will collaborate with Dr. Ann Suksom, the head of the exercise physiology program at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, to provide research assistantship opportunities for UT students interested in kinesiology and the cardiovascular system. UT students will work alongside faculty and students in Chulalongkorn University’s state-of-the-art exercise physiology laboratory to conduct fitness evaluation tests that will add to the broader understanding of physical fitness and athletic performance in transgender adults.
David Eaton
Bess Harris Jones Centennial Professor in Natural Resource Policy Studies
LBJ School of Public Affairs
(Multiple organizations in Mexico)
Dr. David Eaton's current research focuses on U.S.-Mexico environmental cooperation, new methods for evaluation of air pollution emissions, shared groundwater and water conservation in Texas. Global Career Launch will expand his partnership with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) while providing UT students with the opportunity to work on cross-border collaborations in several locations across Mexico focused on environmental issues such as air quality monitoring and water management initiatives, resulting in applications for both Texas and Mexico.
