Urvi Neelakantan
Assistant Professor, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences

Coming from a developing country like India and then spending several years in the United States, I had seen tremendous opportunities as a researcher to learn from the experience of one country and apply it to others. I had also observed that students relished learning about issues facing countries and societies different from their own. Knowing this, I was eager to add an international dimension to my own research and teaching, but I was also daunted by the challenge of where to begin. When I first heard about the ACES Global Academy, it sounded like the perfect place to start.

The program brought together seven scholars with very diverse interests. We were fortunate to have mentors among the ACES Global Academy fellows who had suggestions for projects and contacts in other countries. With their help, it was not long before we discovered a unifying theme: studying diabetes and obesity in Mexico using a multidisciplinary approach that called for the expertise of all the scholars in the group.

With this goal in mind, the scholars visited with experts on campus, in Chicago, and in Washington D.C. to learn about resources that could support an international program. For example, a visit to USAID in Washington D.C. helped us understand what funding agencies look for in a research proposal. These visits, combined with regular meetings over the semester, laid the foundation for our trip to Mexico.

The trip to Mexico was the highlight of the Academy experience, and exposed us to the most important issues facing the country. We visited leading international agencies including the World Bank, CIMMYT, USAID, and FAS, where we heard different experts’ viewpoints about the challenges facing Mexico in agriculture, trade, health, and biodiversity. The meetings sharpened some of our planned research ideas and raised plenty of new and interesting potential research questions. Our visits to university campuses and participation in symposia in Queretaro and San Luis Potosi brought to light our common interests and introduced us to researchers with whom to collaborate on future projects. By the end of the trip, we had established firm partnerships with researchers in Mexico as well as equally important relationships with the other scholars in the group.

The ACES Global Academy experience laid a strong foundation on which to build an international research and teaching program. It was particularly successful in helping us establish interdisciplinary collaborations both within the college and with Mexican partners. The scholars could not have asked for a better group of people to share the experience with. We are now looking forward to reciprocating the hospitality of the researchers in Mexico with a conference on campus next fall.