The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) as Stanford University has entered a partnership with The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) that creates a new academic year fellowship based at CASBS.
The first CUHK-Stanford University CASBS fellow will take residence in September 2019 with the full 2019-20 CASBS class.
The partnership provides for one fellow per year, extending through the 2023-24 academic year. At that time, the parties together will evaluate the program and discuss extending it beyond the initial five-year term.
The prospect of a fellowship arrangement took shape in early 2018 when CUHK president Rocky Tuan, already scheduled to participate in a medical research symposium at Stanford, added a CASBS visit to his itinerary. In addition to receiving a tour of the Center’s buildings and grounds, Tuan met with CASBS director Margaret Levi, deputy director Sally Schroeder, development director Susan Hansen, board member Roberta Katz, and a group of fellows from the 2017-18 CASBS class.
From there discussions advanced quickly. In the ensuing months, Schroeder collaborated with Shally Fan, CUHK’s Director of Academic Links, on language details and specifics. They signed a memorandum of understanding in July 2018.
Mr. Chien Lee, Chairman of the Bei Shan Tang Foundation, played an important role in connecting the two institutions and their principals. Lee is both a member of CASBS’s board of directors and Vice Chairman of the Council of CUHK. He earned bachelor’s, master’s, and MBA degrees from Stanford and has served on the university’s Board of Trustees, the Board of the Stanford Alumni Association and, currently, the Board of Stanford Health Care.
The fellowship, open to CUHK faculty members working in the social and behavioral sciences, promotes interdisciplinary intellectual exchange. As with fellows from all of the CASBS’s partner programs, CUHK-Stanford CASBS fellows will undergo rigorous vetting on both ends. Leading CUHK scholars first will apply internally, with review by appropriate deans and a central panel at CUHK. (Learn about eligibility and the application process on a web page created by CUHK’s Office of Academic Links.) Those selected by CUHK then will engage CASBS’s standard application process.
“The Chinese University of Hong Kong is very pleased with the establishment of this partner fellowship program with CASBS at Stanford” said CUHK’s Shally Fan. “It will allow our faculty members to meet with bright-minded scholars from diverse academic disciplines worldwide, strengthen their collaboration networks, and advance their research. We believe this prestigious opportunity will help pull people together to provide multi-disciplinary solutions to critical social problems.”
The agreement with CUHK accelerates the internationalization of the Center’s activities and outreach, particularly in Asia. The first Stanford-Taiwan Social Science fellow, under a partnership with the Science and Technology Policy and Research Center of the government of Taiwan, spent the 2017-18 academic year in residence at CASBS. That partnership enters its second year in 2018-19. A fellowship partnership with the National University of Singapore (NUS), signed in spring 2017, will enter into effect during the 2018-19 academic year.
“We are a major draw for the highest caliber scholars worldwide, and the partnership with CUHK reinforces the Center’s capacity to build collaborative global relationships in an effort to push the bounds of quality social and behavioral science research,” said CASBS’s Sally Schroeder. “We think CUHK scholars will add a great deal to the intellectual life of the Center, and really look forward to hosting the first as a CASBS fellow in 2019.”
Learn about all of CASBS’s partner programs, foreign and domestic