United States of America - Collaboration

Research connections between the US and Oxford are strong and growing: The US is the largest source of international research collaborators and also the largest source of international research funding at Oxford, with funding from federal (government) agencies in the USA becoming an increasingly important part of the wider research funding portfolio at Oxford over recent years. In addition to funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Oxford researchers have been successful in securing grants and contracts from a range of other US federal agencies such as the Department of Defence (and its sub-agencies such as DARPA, Office of Naval Research, US Air Force) and the Department of Education and Department of Energy.

Furthermore, the USA is home to the largest concentration of Oxford’s co-authors in its academic and scientific publishing. The University collaborates most frequently with Harvard University followed by Johns Hopkins, Yale, Wisconsin and MIT.

Oxford was recently ranked number one in the world for the study of medicine by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2011-2012, so it is not surprising to find Oxford medics collaborating extensively with one of the US’s top medical research institutions, the National Institutes of Health.

Jenner Institute
The Jenner Institute was founded in November 2005 to develop innovative vaccines against major global diseases. The current HIV Vaccine Programme at the Jenner Institute is seeking to develop a vaccine for the HIV virus. Based jointly at the Weatherall Institute for Molecular Medicine and the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology the programme is designing, developing and carrying out clinical trials on a number of vaccine strategies with the hope of developing an effective drug to combat the disease. Part of this programme is being carried out in collaboration with the Vaccine Research Centre in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. Funding for this part of the programme is provided by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

National Institutes of Health Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Programme
The National Institutes of Health Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Programme was started in 2001 in recognition of the fact that the most innovative and exciting biomedical research is increasingly a global and collaborative process. The programme leads to an Oxford doctorate, and is designed to train outstanding students in various areas of biomedical research.

Students split their time evenly between two world-class research centres – Oxford University and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland – and are supervised by leading researchers in both places. Scholars (6-8 per year) are fully funded and must be US citizens or permanent residents with a US bachelor’s degree. Current students on the course are researching areas such as HIV Vaccines, Pharmacology, Neuroscience, Stem Cells, Immunology and SARS.

Established in 2001 to build on longstanding connections between Oxford academics and to further strengthen ties between the two universities, the collaboration between Oxford and Princeton is now three-pronged: student exchange, a joint postdoctoral programme (the Global Leaders Fellowship Programme), and research collaboration seed funding.

Student Exchange
The student exchange programme has been running since 2002. While formal student exchanges take place at undergraduate level, there are also less formal graduate exchanges that take place on an ad hoc basis at the faculty or department level. Each year, up to 10 undergraduate students from each university, in Biochemistry, History, Engineering, and Physics and Philosophy, spend a half or full year at the other university.

Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship Programme
In 2007, Oxford and Princeton launched the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship Programme, a postdoctoral programme in world politics and political economy for scholars from developing countries. Starting in 2008, six fellows are appointed each year; they spend one year at Oxford and one year at Princeton. In Oxford they are based at the Department of Politics and International Relations and in Princeton at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The programme will create a network of scholars and practitioners with expertise in the key issues surrounding globalisation.

Seed Funding
A major aim of the formal collaboration agreed between Oxford and Princeton was to encourage research collaboration and access to one another's research facilities. To facilitate this, Oxford and Princeton began providing seed funding for joint research projects n 2003.  The seed fund has supported 65 projects since its inception on projects as varied as ‘Marriage and Youth in Contemporary India’, ‘Metabolomic analysis of severe malaria’, and 'How does the brain encode memories?'

Oxford-Princeton Music
In the Faculty of Music, the Oxford-Princeton Partnership was established as a research partnership in music theory and analysis with colleagues in Princeton’s Music Department.  The partnership encourages closer research collaborations between the two institutions; to rethink definitions and boundaries of musical analysis and to consolidate Oxford as a leading UK centre for music theory. The group holds an annual Analysis Symposium at which faculty members and graduate students both present work on the practice of music analysis.

Researchers at Oxford are involved with a wide range of collaborations with US partners in the field of astrophysics.

•    In August 2012 it was announced that technology developed by scientists at Oxford University will play a key role in a mission to Mars. Experts at the University and from Imperial College London are supplying a seismometer for an American mission to delve under the skin of the red planet.

•    In May 2011, Oxford University led a team of physicists including astronomists from a range of US universities including University of Maryland; University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Cornell University, which pioneered the 3D mapping of weather activity on Saturn. The team used observations from both an orbiting spacecraft (NASA's Cassini) and ground-based telescope (ESO's VLT) at thermal infrared wavelengths, in order to build a picture of the weather on Saturn which had previously been impossible using only visible light observations. They uncovered that what had until that time been thought of as a very calm and relatively weather free planet was in fact a hotbed of meteorological activity and violent storms.

•   In August 2011, Oxford astrophysicists were part of a team which discovered the brightest and closest supernova (exploding star) of its type observed for 40 years. Scientists from the University of Oxford made the discovery with their colleagues from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) collaboration at Caltech, and collaborators from Columbia University, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, and the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) using a robotic telescope in California.

•    In March 2010, an international team, including scientists from Oxford University and NASA JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) at Caltech, the University of California, and the University of Arizona investigated the heart of our solar system’s largest storm on Jupiter. The team used thermal images from the Very Large Telescope (Chile), Gemini Observatory telescope (Chile) and Japan’s Subaru telescope (Hawaii) to uncover an incredibly complex structure in what was previously thought to be a simple storm system.

•    In January 2011, the same team of Oxford planetary astrophysicists analysed the debris from a massive impact on Jupiter which had caused a huge hole in its surface. They discovered that it was the result not of an icy comet as had previously been thought, but of a rocky asteroid the size of the Titanic. This result was highly pertinent because it was the first time that a comet had been monitored hitting the planet, which was previously thought to be impossible due to the fact that comets have very steady orbits.

Research collaborations in the humanities between Oxford University and scholars in the USA have increased in recent years, and include postgraduate students as well as academics.

A team of linguists at Oxford’s Phonetics Laboratory and colleagues at the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania recently collaborated on ‘Mining a year of speech’, a project to create the world’s largest searchable database of spoken English sound recordings. The database consists of an entire year’s worth of recordings of English words (7½ million words) and is intended as a resource for a wide range of users including teachers, English language students, linguists, historians and members of the public. The project used a variant of automatic speech recognition technology to label every word and every vowel and consonant in the recordings and a demonstration search engine so that enquirers can rapidly find examples of the bits of spoken English they are looking for.

Oxford’s collaborative links are not only about academic research; student and academic staff exchange is also a key aspect of the University’s relationship with many international partners.

•    Undergraduate law students from Oxford University and the Hauser Global Law School Program at New York University’s School of Law have the opportunity to apply for an exchange programme which allows them to study in the partner institution for 2 academic terms in their 2nd or 3rd year.

•    In 2010, Oxford University and Columbia Law School announced The Columbia-Oxford Alliance in Law and Finance. This exchange programme offers 3rd year Columbia law students the chance to study law at Oxford for 2 academic terms through its Masters in Law and Finance curriculum, and in exchange allows Oxford graduates to audit Law School courses and conduct research under the guidance of faculty members. In addition, faculty members from both law schools will also participate in the exchange to facilitate academic interaction and new teaching experiences.

•    Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP) at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies collaborates closely with the Centre for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. PCMLP provides a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the playing out of human rights debates in media systems and the impact of media changes on democratic values and economic development.

•    The two institutions jointly host the annual Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute. This event brings together young scholars and regulators to discuss important recent trends in technology, international politics and development and its influence on media policy. Participants come from around the world; countries represented at previous summer institutes include Thailand, Kenya, China, Brazil, Egypt, Nigeria, Jordan, Italy and Bosnia, among others.

Since 1996, the Department of Materials at Oxford and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT have sponsored a mutual undergraduate exchange. Students can apply to attend the other university for two academic terms in either their second or final year of study.

In 2012, the Oxford Geoengineering Programme at the Oxford Martin School, in collaboration with partners from Harvard University and Heidelberg University, organized the Oxford Summer School on Geoengineering Research. The programme seeks to engage with society on issues associated with geoengineering and to conduct research into some of the proposed techniques, and the summer school complements this by providing information on the current state of developments in the field with a focus on communicating research to the public and to policy-makers.

Oxford is a member of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), an alliance between ten of the world's leading research-intensive universities who share similar visions for higher education, in particular the education of future leaders. Fellow IARU members include the American universities Yale and UC Berkeley, as well as other research-intensive universities around the world.