ABOUT
The Santiago Center was officially launched in March 2012. It has mainly focused on organizing public programs featuring Columbia faculty, researchers, and students and covering themes that are in the frontline of the global and local public policy agenda. It has established extensive partnerships with Chilean academic community, government institutions, businesses, and NGOs to co-sponsor public programs and to develop relationships with local scholars and scientists in order to engage in joint-research projects.
The Center is engaged in recruitment efforts to inform Chilean students and professionals about the degrees and courses offered by Columbia in New York. It also helps in searching for research and internship opportunities in Chile for Columbia undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students.
OUR MISSION
- Assist Columbia University in the development and execution of its various research and teaching programs in Chile and the Latin American region
- Serve as a regional base, enabling the Columbia University academic community to interact on a local level with students, faculty, and alumni
- Leverage Columbia University's superb research capabilities to initiate projects focus in Chile and the South Cone on a variety of issues and to offer assessment, advice and solutions to support Chilean sustainable development.
- Promote the collaboration and exchange of professors and students, as well as the development of joint programs between Columbia University and local universities.
THE COLUMBIA GLOBAL CENTERS NETWORK
There are currently nine Columbia Global Centers operating in Amman, Beijing, Mumbai, Paris, Istanbul, Nairobi, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro and Tunis. The centers encourage new relationships across schools, institutes, and academic departments at Columbia.
Attuned to the priorities and unique circumstances of its host region, each center leverages the University’s diverse intellectual capacities from across the undergraduate, graduate and professional schools, and pursues a set of university-wide core activities that evolves over time based on the active engagement of faculty and students.
The centers help increase international content in the classroom; supplement the curriculum with international study abroad, internship opportunities, and course offerings; provide resources needed to attract students from abroad; facilitate research opportunities for Columbia students and faculty on globally relevant, interdisciplinary topics; and provide a point of ongoing engagement for international alumni.
Functioning as a network, the global centers encourage teaching and research that require working across disciplinary boundaries, having a presence in multiple regions, and engaging non-Columbia experts and scholars from those regions. Some of the centers’ programs and research initiatives are country-specific, some regional, and an increasing number are multi-regional, even global. The network is in its infancy, and each center has started by building strong links with universities and institutions in its respective region. The long-term ambition is that many programs will have a global reach and involve multiple centers in the network engaged in truly global conversations.