University of Michigan Looking Forward to Building a Strong Relationship with Its Brazilian Partners

Sueann Caulfield: When a call for proposals for a big high profile international visit by Mary Sue Coleman came, we responded to that by putting a proposal together that emphasized the longstanding collaborations in both of our areas; the social sciences broadly and the medical sciences broadly. Michelle Heisler: It just made sense that we bring together these lines of work and suggest that the President and the delegation go to Brazil. As the Medical School has been really thinking about developing bilateral synergistic partnerships over the last years, how can we develop a platform where we are bringing Brazilian students, residents, faculty, here to benefit from training and another opportunities and that we are bringing more Michigan students, residents, faculty to Brazil? And we're really building on the research collaborations and building on the infrastructure so we're able to do research whichis much better and stronger than each of the institutions could have done on their own. So some of the longer standing collaborations have been with some of our clinical and basic science researchers. A good example is that the University of Michigan has one of the main centers for treating and trying to understand adrenal cancer. The University of São Paulo is also a leading center for trying to understand adrenal cancer. With the two institutions working together, they have been able to get enough patients, they have been able to gather data, they have been able to work together on research and are really making important strides in understanding what causes this very fatal cancer. Sueann Caulfield: One of our primary objectives is to draw attention to the relationships that are longstanding and vibrant between U-M researchers and Brazilian researchers. Then secondly, we want to -- we are hoping that the visit by President Coleman will, by drawing attention to those collaborations, will encourage collaborators to continue and to expand the collaboration that they are doing, the work that they are doing. And then thirdly, we hope to identify areas of potential collaboration that we are presently unaware of. I will be in touch with historians at the State University at Unicampi, for example, and I will ask them, oh, I have a colleague who works in natural resources, do you have colleagues that are -- and they not only have colleagues, they have a whole center for the study sustainability and then they got in touch with each other and there is a lot of, sort of, excitement. Michelle Heisler: I think it's really a wonderful case of synergy, that there are things that we can offer them, but there is a lot that we can learn from Brazil. And I think that makes is especially exciting. I think Michigan, throughout all of our collaborations, we want to be the best partner. We really want to be other countries’ institutions’ best partner, and I think that there is really huge opportunities for that with our Brazilian partners.