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The Pan Pacific Center is working with Prof. James Stewart (ENSP) to develop an exchange program between SSU and the China International Science Center, an agency of the State Science and Technology Commission of the People's Republic of China. The current Director General of the CISC, Mr. Bai Xianhong, is an alumnus of SSU's ENSP program, and worked with Dr. Stewart when he was a student here. He has proposed an exciting and generous exchange program that would benefit SSU faculty, students, and the campus at large, as well as extending our relationships with a number of private sector businesses and public agencies in university's broader service area.
The CISC is the organization charged by the Chinese government with implimenting a wide range of ecologically related programs and projects in China, dealing with such diverse issues as responses to climate change, biodiversity, air pollution and vehicle emissions control, acid rain, and solid waste management. They also direct projects that involve some combination of economic and environmental factors, such as urban environmental planning and rural industrial development.
The basic premise of the exchange program would be that the CISC would send small teams of professionals for short term visits to Sonoma State, who would participate in intensive campus workshops and presentations relating to their areas of interest and expertise, as well as visiting relevant facilities in the area. In exchange the CISC would host SSU faculty from across any number of departments to participate in specific projects being conducted in China. We are also exploring the possibility of longer term exchanges for individual scholars and professionals.
The exchange program would be administered through the SSU Center for Pan Pacific Exchange, both because of the clear Pacific focus of the work, and because of the multidisciplinary and cross-campus nature of the CISC's interests in SSU, which now range from the ENSP program to geography, geology, biology, chemistry, business administration, and economics. The memorandum of understanding for the program is being drafted this month, with exchanges to begin as early as next spring.