Original post: Keio University News (18 May 2023)  The Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion implemented a pilot mentoring program in AY2022 to promote women’s empowerment and leadership development at Keio University. In AY2023, Keio will be launching it as an official program for the first time and is accepting applications until May 31 from interested full-time faculty members of Keio University to join the program. Vice-President Akiyo Okuda welcoming the participants In March, a closing ceremony was held for the AY2022 pilot program, where President Itoh presented certificates of completion to 19 mentor-mentee pairs, a total of 38 participants. At the closing ceremony, each pair offered comments on the program. The mentees mentioned the advantages of the program, such as being able to network beyond their affiliated faculty and discuss joint research with other staff they met through the program. They also highlighted the benefit of being able to discuss how to manage research groups or labs as well as common pitfalls and tendencies for women in management. The mentors commented on the importance of putting their own experiences into words and thought that it was good that they were forced to speak about topics they previously dared not broach with their younger colleagues. Both mentors and mentees affirmed that their experiences in the program were fruitful. In her welcome address at the ceremony, Vice-President Akiyo Okuda touched on the importance of forming individual connections to build a larger network and expressed her determination to continue promoting women’s empowerment in a unique Keio style. President Itoh presenting certificates of completion to program participants This program was formulated through consultation with faculty members (WG members) who participated in the Asia Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) program conducted by the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), of which Keio University is a member. The structure of the program has been tailored to fit Keio University by incorporating its characteristics. Keio University believes that its women leaders should be at the forefront of school management, promoting reforms and pioneering new paths forward. The university anticipates that more women will be able to play an active leadership role by leveraging on their experience gleaned from this program based on “learning while teaching, teaching while learning,” a foundational ethos of Keio University since its establishment.

The Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Program (APWiL) is set to continue its important work with the confirmation of Professor Dawn Freshwater as the new APWiL Presidential Champion. Professor Freshwater, who serves as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Auckland, is a member of the APRU Steering Committee, has been an advocate for gender equity in higher education, and is a supporter of the APWiL Mentoring Program. A globally recognized leader in world-class universities for several decades, she became the University of Auckland’s first female Vice-Chancellor in 2020 after serving as the University of Western Australia’s Vice-Chancellor and Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Registrar for six years. Professor Freshwater was the first female Chair of the Go8 Research Intensive Universities in Australia. She is also a member of Chief Executive Women (CEW) and Global Women New Zealand. Professor Dawn Freshwater, APWiL Presidential Champion, Vice-Chancellor, University of Auckland “We are happy to have confirmed a new Champion who has such an extremely strong track record of pushing for gender equity while also being very familiar with the work of the APWiL Mentoring Program” said APWiL Co-Chair Professor Joanna Regulska “We believe Professor Freshwater will be an extraordinary advocate for the goals of APWiL and our signature mentoring program.” The APWiL Mentoring Program was launched in 2020 in response to the APRU 2019 Gender Gap report finding that Pacific Rim universities had made little progress in advancing women into university leadership positions during the previous 5-year period, despite a number of initiatives at the university level. By pairing mentors and mentees across economies for mutually inspiring exchanges under a year-long commitment, the APWiL Mentoring Program offers leaders at APRU universities an opportunity to grow the pipeline of aspiring women leaders. It encourages participants to take on the many challenges that aspiring women leaders are still facing within the region. The APWiL Mentoring Program is currently more than halfway through the 3rd cohort, which involves 45 mentoring pairs from 24 institutions. In addition to the one-on-one mentoring relationships, the program has also held three seminars so far for the 3rd cohort, on the topics of imposter syndrome, intersectionality, and effective communication and negotiation within leadership. “It has been an amazing journey with our 3rd cohort so far. Participation in the three seminars has been encouraging, inspiring, and stimulating. This mentoring program provides a safe space to discuss struggles and successes that are pertinent to women, as well as providing a fantastic opportunity to learn from successful women and men leaders” said APWiL Co-Chair Professor Yvonne Lim. The program can be possible thanks to the collaboration of all partners and a nuclear international APWiL Mentoring Team integrated by Kimberly Bellows, Chelsey Hawes, and Joanna Regulska from UC Davis; Yvonne Lim from Universiti Malaya; and Adriana Rojas and David Quimbayo from the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU). While institutional recruitment for the 4th cohort of the program is now closed, the APWiL Mentoring Program team encourages interested members of the APRU network to consider joining this important gender equity initiative in the future.

Written by Patrick Owen Tuaño Original Post of University of the Philippines Office of International Linkages The APWiL Mentoring Program provides international and intercultural opportunities for the empowerment, professional growth, and development of aspiring women leaders within APRU (Association of Pacific Rim Universities). The APWiL Mentoring Program conducts mentorship through one-on-one sessions, seminars, and hands-on workshops. The program intends to grow the pipeline of aspiring women leaders in APRU, identify professional opportunities for growth and skills development, increase the awareness of challenges that aspiring women leaders face, connect senior leaders at APRU institutions with emerging women leaders, introduce global and intercultural dimensions to leaders across APRU and beyond, and advance ethnic, cultural, and gender diversity of partner institutions. With over more than 20 participating higher education institutions, the APWiL Mentoring Program is a year-long commitment matching a mentor and mentee from one of the participating APRU member universities. Up to two mentors and mentees can represent per university. These mentors and mentees will be paired up with different women from the APRU network, and they shall participate in one-on-one meetings, seminars and workshops that will provide opportunities to develop their leadership skills and obtain insights from other women leaders with the APRU network. They will also have the opportunity to network with senior leaders within he APRU institutions. The APWiL Mentoring Program is a one-year program that requires commitment from its participants. For the second cohort of the APWiL Mentoring Program, the orientation and kick-off were held in November 2021, and it concluded with the graduation ceremony held on October 2022. For the University of the Philippines, two representatives participated for the program. Dr. Nina M. Cadiz was nominated as a mentor, and Dr. Samantha Erika Mendez was nominated as a mentee for the 2nd Cohort of the APWiL Mentoring Program. The orientation for the program began on November 2021, and workshops were held all throughout the year every two to three months. A mid-program survey and assessment was conducted in April 2022. The APWiL Mentoring Program concluded with a closing seminar and graduation ceremony that was held in October 2022. The 3rd Cohort of the APWiL Mentoring Program is currently on the way, with the orientation and kick-off being held last November 2022, and the program concluding in October 2023. From the University of the Philippines, Dr. Amaryllis Tiglao-Torres and Dr. Ma. Victoria R. Raquiza are currently participating as mentors, and Asst. Prof. Irish de Ocampo and Ms. Maritess Cruz are currently participating as mentees. More about Asia Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) Program, visit here. More about APWiL Mentoring Program, visit here.

Asia Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) successfully held the APWiL Mentoring Program 3rd Cohort Orientation on November 9. The 3rd Cohort is more than three times larger than that of the pilot program and involved four more mentoring peers than the 2nd Cohort, 47 mentoring pairs from 24 institutions reflecting the interest and need from academics and universities alike. Of these 24 institutions, seven have participated in all 3 cohorts, 12 have participated in two of them, and there are five 5 newcomers this year. The APWiL Mentoring Program is a year-long commitment matching a mentor and mentee from one of the participating APRU member universities to provide mentoring, and international and intercultural opportunities for the empowerment of aspiring women leaders within APRU. Empowerment remains an urgent task, given the persistent complex social and economic barriers to women’s advancement in leadership in academia. “Each year, I say I’m truly excited about the APWiL Mentoring Program, and then there is a next year, and it’s bigger and larger and deeper,” said APWiL Co-Chair, Professor Joanna Regulska, Vice Provost and Dean of Global Affairs at UC Davis, in her opening remarks at the 3rd Cohort Orientation. “The program’s continued growth and additions of new participants underlines the need for this kind of investment in women leaders across higher education,” she added. Regulska went on to note that APWiL is excited to partner with the 3rd cohort participants and welcome mentors and mentees into the program: “I would like to formally welcome you, mentors, to the APWiL Mentoring Program. Thank you for volunteering your time and supporting the growth of the next generation of women leaders. And I would like to formally welcome you, mentees, to the program. We are so excited that you have decided to invest in yourselves and your futures” said Regulska. APWiL Mentoring Program Manager, Kimberly Bellows, Intercultural Programs Coordinator at UC Davis, presented an overview of the cohort’s structure and important logistics explaining that mentoring pairs set their own schedule of at least bi-monthly virtual conversations as anchored by the Mentoring Agreement and Pre-Assessment form. Mentors and mentees were then split into breakout rooms by role where expectations and logistics were discussed in depth. APWiL Co-Chair, Professor Yvonne Lim, Associate Vice-Chancellor (Global Engagement) at Universiti Malaya, encouraged participants by recalling that her mentor position in the pilot Cohort led to a meaningful and special friendship between her and her mentee, illustrating that the program is a great bilateral opportunity for both mentors and mentees to learn to grow and connect and to work across differences of all aspects. “What my mentee was sharing with me made me reflect about the different stages in my own career when I was facing similar issues,” Lim said. “I think it helped me to be more empathetic to colleagues who are at different stages of their careers. And this helps me to be a better leader and communicator” she added. Time will tell what the next year holds in store for the third cohort participants. APWiL and everyone at APRU welcomes all new participants of the mentoring program and wishes them success in the year ahead! APWiL Mentoring Program 3rd Cohort Participants Mentor Megumi AKAI, Osaka University Kim BARRETT, University of California, Davis Kum-Kum BHAVNANI, University of California, Santa Barbara Alison BUTLER, University of California, Santa Barbara Leila CARVALHO, University of California, Santa Barbara Nikki CHUN, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Ivy CHUNG, Universiti Malaya Irma ERANA, Tecnológico de Monterrey Michele FORD, The University of Sydney Alisa FREEDMAN, University of Oregon Aya HAGISHIMA, Kyushu University Suzi HONG, University of California, San Diego Te Kawehau HOSKINS, The University of Auckland Lori IDETA, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Sooyeon KIM, National University of Singapore Sri KURNIAWAN, University of California, Santa Cruz Yeng Ming LAM, Nanyang Technological University Cassandra LEE, University of California, Davis Jeannette LEE, National University of Singapore Sang-Hee LEE, University of California, Riverside Yoon-Jung LEE, Korea University Huinan LIU, University of California, Riverside Ellis MENG, University of Southern California Susette MIN, University of California, Davis Juliana NG, The Australian National University Mee Kam NG, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Suzanne NIELSEN, Monash University Kyoko OHARA, Keio University Akiyo OKUDA, Keio University Stefanie Shamila PILLAI, Universiti Malaya Tracy POON TAMBASCIA, University of Southern California Thomas PREISS, The Australian National University Ma. Victoria RAQUIZA, University of the Philippines Jayashri RAVISHANKA, UNSW Sydney John RUNDLE, University of California, Davis Joanne RYAN, Monash University Celine Parreñas SHIMIZU, University of California, Santa Cruz Moon Jung SONG, Korea University Jiro TAKAI, Nagoya University Jemaima TIATIA, The University of Auckland Amaryllis TORRES, University of the Philippines Karla VALENZUELA, Tecnológico de Monterrey Adriana VERGES, UNSW Sydney Serena YANG, University of California, Davis Kristin YARRIS, University of Oregon Gillian YEO, Nanyang Technological University Mentee Shana BROWN, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Frances BYRNE, UNSW Sydney Eunsu CHOI, Korea University Sohyun CHUN, Nagoya University Maritess CRUZ, University of the Philippines Jennifer DAN, University of California, San Diego Faithe DAY, University of California, Santa Barbara Irish Joy DEOCAMPO, University of the Philippines Micaela DÍAZ-SÁNCHEZ, University of California, Santa Barbara Ding DING, The Australian National University Rachael HAINS-WESSON, The University of Sydney Fiona HO, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Poh Choo HOW, University of California, Davis Tracy HUANG, UNSW Sydney Yoko IBUKA, Keio University Kaori IDEMARU, University of Oregon Sachiko KAZEKAMI, Keio University Vera KELLER, University of Oregon Hyejeong KIM, Korea University Kuriko KUDO, Kyushu University Charity LEE, Universiti Malaya Yanran LI, University of California, Riverside Nayeli MARTÍNEZ CONSUEGRA, Tecnológico de Monterrey Lauren MAY, Monash University Yujie MEN, University of California, Riverside Fernanda PENALOZA, The University of Sydney Radhika PRABHAKAR, University of Southern California Katherine RALSTON, University of California, Davis Uma RAVAT, University of California, Santa Barbara Alicia RILEY, University of California, Santa Cruz Carolina SENÉS, Tecnológico de Monterrey Yong Adilah SHAMSUL HARUMAIN, Universiti Malaya Shaheen SIKANDAR, University of California, Santa Cruz Nadia SINGH, University of Oregon Eunice TAN, National University of Singapore Jinna TAY, National University of Singapore Stephanie TEVES, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Eleanor VANDEGRIFT, University of Oregon Nicole VARGAS, The Australian National University Grace WANGGE, Monash University Chen-His WONG, Nanyang Technological University An-Min WU, University of Southern California Mao YAGIHASHI, Osaka University Xiao YANG, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Yizhao YANG, University of Oregon Xiao LUO, University of California, Santa Barbara More information about APWiL Mentoring Program.

The participants of the 2nd cohort of the APWiL Mentoring Program successfully completed the program culminating with a virtual Graduation Ceremony on October 22. Involving 87 mentors and mentees from 26 different institutions, the 2nd Cohort’s footprint was nearly three times larger than that of the pilot program, reflecting the interest and need from academics and universities alike. The APWiL Mentoring Program is a year-long commitment matching a mentor and mentee from one of the participating APRU member universities to provide international and intercultural opportunities for the empowerment of aspiring women leaders within APRU. Empowerment is an urgent task, given the persistent complex social and economic barriers to women’s advancement in leadership in academia. In the regional context, gender stereotypes and diverse social norms of the many cultures spanning the Pacific Rim creates wide implementation gaps in gender equality and women’s empowerment initiatives in higher education institutions. The 2nd Cohort facilitated one-on-one mentoring sessions, goal setting and assessment, virtual workshops as well as standalone networking sessions. “Obviously, the program is an opportunity for learning and growth, and it was good to see that you have developed personal confidence and skills, while you have also promoted gender equity and diversity, which clearly is something that you should continue working on,” said Sabrina Lin, Senior Advisor to the President at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, former APWiL Co-chair in her celebratory remarks at the Graduation Ceremony. “I was happy to see an assessment of a mentor-mentee pair who were actually able to meet face-to-face in Europe, which indicates that things are opening up for more of this kind of opportunity,” she added. At the start of the Graduation Ceremony, attendees were asked to introduce themselves and discuss their personal experiences in the 2nd Cohort. Mentee Samantha Shune, an Associate Professor and the Director of the Communication Disorders and Sciences Program at the University of Oregon, wrote that she made a great personal connection with her mentor, discovering that they shared similar interests, backgrounds, and goals. This sentiment was shared by many who expressed gratitude to their mentor for the support. Mentees Samantha Shune, Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines, and mentee Sanetta de Toit, Senior lecturer, Master of Occupational Therapy Program Director, FMH Student Life Academic Director, Occupational Therapy at the University of Sydney both secured grant funding with the support of their mentors. Other participants noted implementing communities of practice at their institution along as well as change to their programs that they run. The Graduation Ceremony also featured talks by two mentor-mentee pairs, Professor Nina Cadiz (mentor) and mentee Associate Professor Yung-Fen Huang (mentee), and Associate Professor Chihiro Tanikawa (mentor) and Associate Professor Dr. Wan Nurazreena Wan Hassan (mentee). Dr. Nina Cadiz, Professor for Plant Biology at the University of the Philippines, described her experience of mentoring Huang Yung-Fen, Associate Professor for Agronomy at National Taiwan University. “Initially I thought I would be mentoring Yung-Fen to help her developing special academic skills in line with my own expertise, but I quickly found that this is not what the program is mainly about,” Cadiz said. “Rather, it is mainly about emphasizing women empowerment and boosting aspirations,” she added. Dr. Yung-Fen Huang, Associate Professor for Agronomy at National Taiwan University said of her experience in the program, “I have learned from the mentoring program that we need to be open to what life wants to teach us, and it helped me to confirm that we need time to grow and to know the world.” Dr. Chihiro Tanikawa, Associate Professor of Orthodontics at Osaka University, shared about her reason for joining the program saying, “the academic gender distribution in Japan is obviously not good, so my purpose for participating in this program was to communicate with women academic leaders to learn about situations in different countries and to chart out the next steps,” Dr. Wan Nurazreena Wan Hassan, Associate Professor of Paediatric Dentistry & Orthodontics at Universiti Malaya, shared that one of the achievements for her and Dr. Tanikawa was a collaboration that they are currently pursuing: “my mentor and I decided to go for a grant collaboration, and a few days ago our grant has been shortlisted, so hopefully everybody will cheer for us.” The graduation ceremony highlights the impact that the program has had on the participants and the commitment they have made in themselves. “It is wonderful to see how many of you have really decided to invest in yourself and to take the time to think about what you want to achieve, how you want to achieve it and how you want to engage,” said Joanna Regulska, Vice Provost and Dean of Global Affairs, Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women Studies at University of California, Davis, and APWiL Co-Chair. All of the testimonials from the 2nd cohort participants are available on the APWiL website. “Women are valuable resources and asset to the nations and communities and mentoring in some ways is necessary to ensure that you know we are well equipped and well prepared to assume leadership positions in our respective institutions,” said Yvonne Lim, Professor of Parasitology at Universiti Malaya, and APWiL Co-Chair. The 3rd cohort of the APWiL Mentoring Program will kick off in early November 2022 with orientation for the 94 mentors and mentees joining the program.

The APRU Asia Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) program has confirmed its new co-chair, Prof. Yvonne Ai-Lian Lim (former Director of International Relations Office, Universiti Malaya). The appointment period will be for an initial term of three years commencing on 1 September 2022.  The new APWiL Co-Chair is joining Prof. Joanna Regulska (Vice Provost and Dean – Global Affairs and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis). As her first move of action, the co-chair is engaging in the organization of the 3rd Cohort of the APWiL Mentoring Program and overseeing the strategic framework and direction of the APWiL Program by taking an active role in the development and implementation of program activities to advance gender equity across the APRU network considerably. She brings a unique perspective as she participated in the pilot year of the APWiL Mentoring Program as a mentor. “It is important that we have a critical pool of women representation in leadership and management as women bring different approaches, dimensions, and perspectives in conflict resolution as well as the art of elegant negotiation and diplomacy,” says Yvonne Lim. Professor Yvonne Lim, at the University of Malaya. 2018 Yvonne Lim is a professor at the Department of Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya (UM), Kuala Lumpur and a council member of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia (ASM). Her research focuses on host-parasite interactions and the epidemiology and control of neglected tropical diseases primarily among the indigenous communities. Currently, together with researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA, her team is further elucidating the role of gut microbiota-helminth association with nutritional status and inflammatory responses. She has published more than 240 scientific papers, 9 book chapters and 3 books. She has supervised more than 30 postgraduate students to completion. She was a visiting fellow at the Department of Veterinary Science, University of Melbourne, Australia and visiting professor at the Department of Molecular Parasitology and Tropical Diseases, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She recently completed her Fulbright Scholar Program at the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA. Prof. Yvonne Lim is taking over leadership from Dr. Sabrina Lin, Senior Advisor to the President at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, who will finish her term on 31 October 2022. Dr. Lin guided, in collaboration with Prof. Regulska, APWiL strategy since 2019. She collaborated in creating the two APWiL Mentoring Programs, which have impacted more than 100 professional women from APRU universities. With these programs, APRU reinforces its goal to advance gender equality worldwide. The Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Program (APWiL) aims to drive change in gender equality while taking into account the various contexts in which this pursuit of gender equity takes place across APRU member universities.

Original post on Tec News Written by: Mónica Torres Five Tec de Monterrey’s professors were selected to participate in a mentoring program of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) to support the empowerment of aspiring women leaders. The School of Engineering and Sciences (EIC) and the School of Medicine and Health Sciences (EMCS) teachers joined the Asia-Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) Mentoring Program. The five representatives have had the opportunity to work with mentors and people who receive mentoring via Zoom, and who work in more than 60 universities belonging to APRU. “At Tec de Monterrey, we are very proud to participate in what is considered the first formal version of the program,” said Adriana Rojas, leader of Institutional Networks and Alliances at the Center for the Recognition of Human Dignity. As a common goal, the program seeks to provide international and intercultural opportunities for the professional growth and development of women. More than an effort to combat gender inequality From the School of Engineering and Sciences (EIC), participating in this initiative: María Ileana Ruiz Luz María Martínez. On the other hand, from the School of Medicine and Health Sciences (EMCS): Gabriela María Ruiz Nancy de los Ángeles Segura Silvia Lorraine Montes. In the academic and labor world, the opportunity gap is one of the most visible challenges that continue blocking the progress and participation of women in their jobs, explained Dr. María Ileana Ruiz. “As a woman, we cannot question whether or not we are capable of doing something, we have to do it and, usually, we have to achieve it without showing any weakness,” reflected Ruiz. According to the APRU, women from universities in the Pacific Rim have made relatively little progress in gaining access to leadership positions in the last 5 years, despite the presence of institutional initiatives. “On the participation of women in different professional areas, we swept, but it is in leadership competitions where we still see a panorama dominated by men,” explained Professor Silvia Montes. The APWiL pretends to promote change by taking into consideration the several contexts in which this search for gender equity in universities takes place. “We start by seeing what makes us different, but then we realize what unites us, and in the end, we understand that we are part of the same community,” Rojas said. Meet the Tec women who took the challenge To be part of this ongoing initiative, which began in October 2021 and intends to conclude in September 2022, the five teachers from the areas of Engineering and Medicine were invited to apply. These professors joined the experience as part of the 94 participants from 26 institutions that were involved, a noticeable increase from the pilot in 2020, which registered 30 participants from 10 institutions. “Being selected is a distinction. They value your professional career, but also that you can transmit knowledge, strategies, resources, and support to other professors and researchers”, assured Dr. Gabriela Ruíz. After being designated as mentors, these Tec women were paired with different professionals at universities around the world, from the United States to Australia. “Being part of this program as a mentor is a challenge and satisfaction. I have the honor of having two mentees and I am learning a lot from them”, shares Dr. Nancy de los Ángeles. Human relationships that go for long While the teachers have highlighted the honor of being part of this APRU initiative, most of them agree that the real gift of this experience was the professional and personal relationships they formed. “My experience was with a professional in the area of ​​psychology with whom I was amazed. Because of her training, I thought that she should teach me, but we learned together,” said Dr. María Ileana Ruiz. Rojas highlights that, with this mentoring initiative, women can demonstrate how there are different avenues to collaborate on gender equality throughout the world and based on common concerns. “I had the opportunity to meet a teacher from Korea who started a YouTube channel during the pandemic to teach her children to read in a fun way,” said teacher Silvia Montes. “Not only was she an excellent academic, but she cared about supporting other working moms, and it’s these kinds of experiences that made me realize I wasn’t alone,” she reflected. Being able to collaborate with colleagues and students from different parts of the world working for equality and professional growth is a vision shared by Tec mentors for the future of this initiative. “If they find the opportunity to participate in this type of program, I think it is always good to give something back to the community that we have benefited from,” exhorts Dr. Gabriela. “I think the answer to the current environment is these kinds of activities that allow us to get closer to and between women. We can change what we are experiencing, this is my way of fighting”, concluded María Ileana.

The APWiL Mentoring Program reflected on International Women’s Day on March 8, featuring three female academic leaders sharing their experiences initiating change in higher education. International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Find the recording of the powerful event on our YouTube channel. “The pandemic made us more reflective of who we are, where our place in the academic community is, and it made us realize how connected we are, even from afar,” said Derlie Mateo-Babiano, Associate Professor in Urban Planning and Assistant Dean, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Melbourne. Speaking as the APWiL Mentoring Program workshop’s moderator, Mateo-Babiano added that “it also made us acknowledge the important role that women and girls play in creating a shared path to a more gender-equal world.” Karima Bennoune, Homer G. Angelo and Ann Berryhill Endowed Chair in International Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis, said that in the current situation with the pandemic and the war in the Ukraine, it is vital for women to build global connections. Bennoune pointed out that on International Women’s Day in 1917, Russian women demonstrated for bread and an end of World War 1. “It is very important that we remember the lessons of history, because it helps us make the positive changes that we need so desperately need in our world today,” Bennoune said. Bennoune drew the stories from the research she did for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, published in 2013. Chiapei Chou, National Taiwan University’s Executive Vice President, for her part, described how she was trained in civil engineering, a heavily male-dominated field. During the first two decades of Chou’s academic career, she was one out of only two women among 55 faculty members. “However, I have never felt that being a woman affects my professional life,” Chou said. “I am a mother of two, so I have learned how to be very attentive to my students, which made me very popular with the students and helped me in my academic career,” she added. Marian Mahat, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, shared her experiences of starting her PhD studies relatively late in life and then having to interrupt the studies to follow her husband to another city to further his career. Mahat has since divorced, both her parents have passed away, and her child developed mental health issues during the pandemic. “Like most people, I struggled to find a balance between life and work, and Covid-19 made the situation even worse for women academics,” Mahat said. “But I wrote seven books in five years, and I see this as a way to give back to academia and provide an opportunity for me to connect with academics from around the world.” One book in particular, aptly named, “Women Thriving in Academia,” sets out to empower women in academia to unite in sharing their stories, inspiring and encouraging one another. Please visit the event webpage for more information.   About APWiL and the APWiL Mentoring Program As leaders, the universities of APRU are committed to leading by example, addressing gender imbalances on their own turf through various initiatives. The Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Program (APWiL) aims to drive change in gender equality while taking into account the various contexts in which this pursuit for gender equity takes place across APRU member universities. The APWiL Mentoring Program is a year-long commitment matching a mentor and mentee from one of the participating APRU member universities to provide international and intercultural opportunities for the empowerment of aspiring women leaders within APRU.

The annual APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize is now accepting applications for outstanding research work that strives to improve women’s health and economic well-being, and charts the way for more inclusive growth. The winning entry will receive USD 20,000 and the two runners-up will receive USD 5,000 each. The prize, first launched during APEC 2019 in Chile with the support of Merck, aims to encourage the development and usage of sex-disaggregated data and promote gender-based research within APEC. As women across the world were hit especially hard during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly those who serve as unpaid caregivers, more research is needed to support solutions and advancements that allow women to stay in the workforce as the world rebounds. “We know that women in the region are overrepresented in industries hit hard by the pandemic—food, services, hospitality and tourism, to name a few,” said Renee Graham, the Chair of APEC Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy. “While our focus is to narrow disparity and improve women’s economic participation, we must also ensure that we pay attention to women’s health, safety and well-being.” Thailand, host economy of APEC 2022, is prioritizing inequality and imbalance this year by integrating inclusivity and sustainability objectives in tandem with economic goals. “To ensure an inclusive recovery from COVID-19, which has disproportionately impacted women and girls, we must implement evidence-based, gender-sensitive policies,” said Kannika Charoenluk of Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security. “Original research, backed by data and evidence, will be crucial in ensuring a gender-intentional recovery and future growth model.” Since its inception in 2015, the APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies initiative has improved women’s health through public-private partnerships. One key outcome has been the cross-sector collaboration in creating a policy toolkit—a compendium of the issues, actions, and implementing elements for improving women’s health across five areas. The areas are: workplace health and safety; health awareness and access; sexual and reproductive health; gender-based violence; and work-life balance. Applicants to the 2022 APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize can be individuals or teams, with the stipulation that one official participant must represent an APEC member economy. Applicants do not need to come from academia, as long as the research is evidence-based and addresses at least one of the pillars outlined in the Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Policy Toolkit. The prize winner may choose to present their research to APEC gender experts in the public and private sectors on the margins of the 2022 APEC Women and the Economy Forum, hosted by Thailand. “Now more than ever, we need to promote research that supports our collective effort in alleviating the economic burdens women face in the workforce,” said Hong Chow, Executive Vice President and Head of China and International of Merck Healthcare. “By using science, we can provide evidence-based information to policymakers and business leaders so that the right measures get implemented to improve women’s health so women can join and rise in the workforce,” she concluded. Interested candidates may access the prize application form through this link. The application deadline is Tuesday, 31 May 2022. For more information, please visit the APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies website or contact [email protected] with any questions.   For further details, please contact: Masyitha Baziad +65 9751 2146 at [email protected] Michael Chapnick +65 9647 4847 [email protected]

Written by Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications, UCLA Original post on UCLA International Institute UCLA participants in the APRU Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Mentorship Program. Top row, from left: Mentors Cindy Fan, Christine Dunkel Schetter, Victoria Sork and Janina Montero. Bottom row, from left: UCLA mentees Derjung Mimi Tarn, Margaret Peters and Yuen Huo. (Photos:UCLA or provided by subject. Janina Montero photo by Jintak Han/ Daily Bruin. Graphic courtesy of APWiL/ APRU.) “The Asia Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) Mentoring Program has been invaluable for me,” says Derjung Mimi Tarn, M.D., professor of family medicine at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “The program created a safe space to discuss struggles and successes that are pertinent to women, and provided a wonderful opportunity to learn from prominent female leaders. Unfortunately, the problems faced by women in academic medicine are not isolated to one university or country, but are shared globally,” added the doctor, who also has a Ph.D. in health services. “This mentoring program gave me the opportunity to develop a global support network, to learn about the unique challenges of those from different countries and cultures and to reflect on how to build on the experiences of others in my own leadership roles.” Tarn was one of three UCLA representatives to participate in the initial APWiL Mentoring Program pilot year (2020–21), which paired 15 mentors with 15 mentees at 10 of the 61 member universities of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU).* Margaret Peters, associate professor of political science at UCLA and a member of the current APWiL cohort, comments, “I am greatly enjoying working with my mentor, Mark Edele, who is at the University of Melbourne [Hansen Professor of History and deputy associate dean, faculty of the arts]. He has provided great advice and it is very interesting to learn how different universities function around the world.” APRU, UCLA and APWiL APRU is a network of leading research universities located on both sides of the Pacific that facilitates the exchange of ideas and collaborative research to devise effective solutions to the challenges of the 21st century. UCLA is a founding and active member of APRU. Chancellor Gene Block is the current APRU chair, Vice Provost for International Studies and Global Engagement Cindy Fan is former co-chair of its International Policy Advisory Committee and in 2019, UCLA hosted the 23rd APRU Annual Presidents’ Meeting as part of its Centennial Celebration on campus. APWil Co-Chair Joanna Regulska. (Photo: UC Davis.) The APWiL Mentoring Program was created in 2020 as part of a larger strategy to close the gender gap and give diversity efforts greater traction across APRU member institutions. The program is co-chaired by Joanna Regulska, vice provost and dean of global affairs at UC Davis, and Sabrina Lin, Ph.D., senior advisor to the president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), former HKUST vice president for institutional advancement and a veteran of the IT industry. (See a recent op-ed by the co-chairs on the impact of the pandemic on women in academia.) Day-to-day program operations are managed by Kimberly Bellows and Chelsey Hawes of UC Davis Global Affairs. APWil Co-Chair Sabrina Lin. (Photo courtesy of APWiL/APRU.) “I am inspired by the conversation among women of APRU member institutions about the challenges we face, but more importantly, by the opportunity to engage in intercultural and collective effort to support women’s leadership in our institutions,” said Regulska. “Advancing women’s empowerment and global engagement are my two most critical commitments, and this program offers both. The fact that just in the second year of the program existence we have tripled participation speaks volumes to the need for such global conversations, but also interest on the part of women and the commitment of their institutions to advance women’s leadership,” she added. UCLA Vice Provost Fan and Christine Dunkel Schetter, distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry and associate vice chancellor of faculty development at UCLA, participated as mentors during the program’s pilot year. Fan worked with Surabhi Chopra, associate professor of law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who had worked as an attorney in nonprofit organizations before starting an academic career. “I can honestly say that, without the many mentors in my professional life, both men and women, I would not have aspired to senior leadership in academia,” said Fan at a graduation ceremony for the first APWiL cohort. “I found that listening is the most important criterion in the mentor’s job description. … [And] I’ve found that the most important experiences that I have shared are my own failures. I’ve learned so much from false starts, mistakes and setbacks.” Graphic courtesy of APWil/ APRU. Recognizing the difficulties of gaining traction In remarks to the first cohort of APWiL mentees last fall,** Dawn Freshwater, vice chancellor of the University of Auckland (New Zealand), highlighted the lack of improvement in the number of women university leaders at APRU member institutions in the preceding half-decade (see “2019 APRU Gender Gap Report”). In a similar vein, Fan pointed to findings from a 2017 publication of the American Council on Education, which documented that women have earned more than 50 percent of all doctoral degrees in the U.S. since 2006, but as of 2015, held only 32 percent of full professorships in U.S. degree-granting institutions. University of Auckland Vice Chancellor Dawn Freshwater. (Photo: University of Auckland.) Freshwater — like Fan, a first-generation college graduate who became a university leader — stressed the importance of informal leadership for changing organizational culture. “[I]n my experience, policies are one thing… but their existence alone isn’t enough. Policies must be implemented by their leaders’ commitment to their purpose and they can only be successful where there is an environment and organizational culture that supports them. “[W]hat I have witnessed and experienced is that good intention without meaningful interaction and meaningful engagement across the whole of the institution is irrelevant. So, for me, I focus as a leader on building culture.” Effecting change requires consistent focus, she emphasized. Gender equity in universities is more imperative than ever, given the impacts of the global coronavirus pandemic on young female academics, said Freshwater. “As leaders we must act to ensure careers are not permanently scarred by COVID-19 disruptions. We know that early-stage female researchers are some of the most seriously impacted members of our university communities as a result of the pandemic. “Their work has had to be put on hold as lockdowns forced them home and to full-time childcare and home responsibilities. Research output for women has… decreased, especially for women with children under the age of five, and systemic racism faced by women of color has worsened.” Whether universities are responding to the gender and equity gap, the climate crisis or the pandemic, Freshwater said, “Diverse and inclusive leadership holds the key to meeting these challenges for the future. “This means women. It means women of color. It means young women. It means women with disability. It means people of rainbow communities. It means university leadership within our universities must reflect society.” APWiL co-chair Sabrina Lin identified another key component in advancing women into university leadership: male allies. “Without the advocacy of our male allies, I think it would be very difficult to improve diversity overall,” she said. UCLA participants weigh in on the challenges As APWiL Co-Chair Regulska noted, the mentoring program has tripled in size in its second year, with 87 participants across 26 APRU member universities. UCLA participants in the 2021–22 cohort include mentees Margaret Peters and Yuen Huo, professor of psychology; and mentors Janina Montero, vice chancellor-student affairs emerita, and Victoria Sork, distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and former dean of life sciences. Several of these participants, together with Vice Provost Fan and Dr. Derjung Mimi Tarn of the program’s first year, shared their thoughts on some of the priorities identified by Freshwater and Lin. APWiL held an orientation for its second cohort of mentors and mentees in early November 2021. Graphic courtesy of APWiL/ APRU. The pandemic has hit women academics in medicine particularly hard, said Tarn. “Female researchers have definitely been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Women have had more work-life conflicts than men, and more are suffering from depression. “Among physicians, gender disparities in mental health have increased. Without immediate intervention to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on these young researchers, many who would otherwise have been successful will end up leaving academia.” Peters concurred, “This is a very important issue right now for all academic parents, but especially women, upon whom the burden of caregiving usually falls. “It is great that UCLA is providing more funding and providing clock extensions, but I think more needs to be done,” she continued. “I constantly hear about faculty who are thinking about leaving the profession because they are burned out, having had little time for research. I think the university should think about providing additional sabbaticals for those who have suffered a disproportionate impact due to their care duties during the pandemic.” On the need for male allies, Tarn remarked of her experience in medical academia, “I can’t say enough about them. They are critical to improving diversity and gender equity. My strongest and most effective supporters have been male faculty members who stood up for me and supported me during my career. “I have had strong female allies as well, but often other men were more receptive to the thoughts and opinions of other men [i.e., male allies]. Without these supportive men, I would likely have left academics early in my career.” Huo, a current program mentee, agreed. “This effort should not be a ‘woman only’ issue. Initiatives and policies to support women can be most successful if people at the institution — men and women — work to change norms. “What resonated with me is hearing UBC President Santa Ono (a male ally) mention that men have historically nominated each other for awards and positions and that in his TED talk, he started the hashtag #nominateher to encourage both men and women to promote talented women in higher education. I think that’s an exciting movement.” (President and Vice Chancellor of the University of British Columbia, Ono is the current APWiL presidential champion.) Janina Montero, whose long and distinguished career in student affairs included the creation and management of enduring mentorship programs, noted that one of her greatest mentors was a male professor. “I don’t see women as being the only ones who can provide career guidance and a push to other women. But we have more direct experience — we’re the ones that bear the children, if you will — and that affects the way we do our work,” she commented. “Women who have families or who have both a job and a set of personal responsibilities — there’s a degree of juggling, really wrestling with more than juggling, those multiple demands. “I feel it’s important for older women like me to engage with professional women going through this kind of questioning: ‘How do I take the next step?’ ‘Do you juggle?’ ‘How do you juggle? ‘How do you view particular opportunities?’ How do you seek particular opportunities?’ In its second year, the APWiL Mentoring Program began offering online seminars to current and past program participants and created a private website where they can interact and share information. Gracphic courtesy of APWiL/ APRU. With respect to organizational culture, former UCLA mentee Tarn reflected, “Informal leaders can be instrumental in cultivating supporting environments. Women need trusted informal leaders who they can approach for support and advice.” Montero commented, “I think there has been progress in organizational culture, but I think we all need to be thinking in more inclusive ways. For example, if there are no women or no people of color applying for a position, ‘Nobody applied’ is no longer the answer. “I go back to the structural reality. What do you want your hiring pools to look like? What opportunities do you give your faculty? Who are you giving opportunity to, in terms of conferences, committee work and exposure? Are you paying attention that if today you give it to Peter, are you going to be sure to give it to Sally or Molly the next time? Montero stressed that to be effective, a commitment to equity and diversity must be present at all levels of management of a university — “not only among the obvious leadership, but also among boards and trustees. If they don’t see the value in these goals, that will permeate the pyramid and the culture. “Diversity is never a one-way street. It’s stunning how much a diversity of voices — especially if you give people the opportunity not to be there just as a potted plant, but to contribute — produces an outcome that is infinitely better than a more homogeneous approach.” * APRU member universities that participated in the pilot year were the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Keio University (Japan), Osaka University (Japan), University of British Columbia (Canada), UC Davis (USA), UCLA (USA), University of Malaya (Malaysia), University of New South Wales (Australia) and University of Sydney (Australia). ** To view the video of the pilot program graduation ceremony, copy and paste this link into your web browser: https://bit.ly/3JrGPcv. Read the APRU article on the second cohort of the APWiL Mentoring Program here.

Original post on UC Davis Global Affairs The University of California, Davis, and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) launched the second cohort of the Asia-Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) Mentoring Program, kicking off with 87 participants, nearly three times the number during its pilot year. The program is focused on providing mentoring to aspiring leaders from 25 institutions in the APRU network. Now in its second year, the APRU APWiL Mentoring Program offers leaders—both women and men—at APRU universities an opportunity to grow the pipeline of aspiring women leaders, increase awareness of challenges that aspiring women leaders face within the region, and introduce global and intercultural dimensions to leaders across the APRU network and beyond. The pilot program in 2020-21 served 30 participants from 10 universities. The program is led by co-chairs Sabrina Lin, senior advisor to the president at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), and Joanna Regulska, vice provost and dean of Global Affairs and a professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at UC Davis. Along with Global Affairs at UC Davis and HKUST, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at UC Davis is a co-leader of the initiative. This collaboration is also supported by Jackie Wong, director of network and student programs, and Anya Wong, program officer, from the APRU International Secretariat. “The first APWiL Mentoring Program cohort was filled with wonderful connections between mentors and mentees. Now, with almost triple the number of enthusiastic participants in our 2021-22 cohort, we have a tremendous opportunity to continue forming a lasting collaborative network of women global leaders in academia. It is critical for the empowerment of women across the world to engage in intercultural conversations and recognize the commonality of challenges, but also of great opportunities as showcased by the participants. This program aims to create both formal and informal spaces where meaningful dialogues can take place,” said Regulska. A Framework For Success Jessica Bissett Perea, one of the mentees from the first cohort in 2020-21, chose to participate in the APWiL program to explore opportunities for leadership that could help her in her future pursuits. Her meaningful connections have helped further her understanding of the various leadership structures and practices throughout organizations. “I was extremely fortunate to be paired with an experienced and dynamic mentor, Dr. Yvonne Lim Ai Lian (Health Sciences), Director of International Relations and Professor of Parasitology. Her thoughtful and supportive mentorship and guidance helped me to better appreciate the densities of university leadership styles and how these styles do (or do not) align with Indigenous leadership styles. I am very pleased to report that I have significantly expanded my network of women leaders,” said Perea. Building on the success of the inaugural program, APWiL has the potential this year to influence even more participants like Perea. Organizers look to increased programming to give them ample opportunity to encourage networking and dialogue between mentees and mentors. “The pilot program this past year was well received by the mentors and mentees. I am thrilled to see the tremendous growth in the number of universities supporting the program, and a three-times increase in the number of mentor and mentee participants,” said Lin. “With continued efforts in our matching process and in adding more webinars and networking activities, I look forward to a rewarding experience again this year.” The increased growth within the second cohort led organizers to return to some of the infrastructure used in the planning of the first cohort. The individual matching process used this year to pair mentors and mentees is the same method as last year. They brought back a template for a mentoring agreement, allowing mentees to outline goals to help mentors focus on areas of interest and development. Organizers also took significant learnings from their year of hosting remote workshops. Building on this framework, the APWiL team is already seeing connections form across the globe. “We’re off to a great start,” said Chelsey Hawes, study abroad enrollment and operations officer in Global Affairs and program manager of the APWiL Mentoring Program. “Mentors and mentees have met at least once so far and joined us for our orientation program and first seminar, Women’s Representation in Higher Education in the Pacific Rim, in partnership with the American Council on Education and the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. During this seminar, we heard from scholars from Australia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia on the commonalities and differences in barriers to women’s advancement in leadership and how each country is addressing or not addressing these barriers.” These partnerships between universities, mentors, mentees, scholars and others are the heart of APWiL. For this program, success is greater than the number of participants and events; success is rooted in connections and the positive impact of forming networks. “It has been a pleasure to work with the APWiL program and to be affiliated with other universities in the U.S. and around the world. I believe in the power of collaborative networks, working together for common goals, and connecting across boundaries for mutual advancement. We have so many commonalities across the globe that can unite us. This program provides women with opportunities to be in community with other scholars from other schools, to be encouraged, and to be equipped with additional tips for success that will contribute to their ability to be change agents within their spaces. When we are engaged in work as an international community, we have a chance to see the world differently, to enhance our understanding, and to be more comprehensive in our own jobs, as we apply the new, and broader world perspectives that programs like APWiL provide,” said Renetta Garrison Tull, vice chancellor of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at UC Davis. To further support the second cohort, APWiL leadership has grown too. Kimberly Bellows, intercultural programs coordinator in Global Affairs, joined the team as the program coordinator for the APWiL Mentoring Program. “I’m very excited to be supporting the APWiL Mentoring Program as it begins its second year,” she said. “From attending the pilot program’s graduation ceremony, I know how impactful the program was on that first cohort, and I’m looking forward to supporting the second cohort’s journey. We’ve heard from current mentors and mentees that their first meetings have gone well, and it’s truly inspiring to see their goals and plans for the coming year.” Carrying The Momentum Forward The success of APWiL continues to spread as its influence extends beyond its participants. Fulfilling its promise of inspiring leadership, the program’s mentors and mentees are having an effect on other connections and communities. “The impact that the program has had on both mentees and mentors is beyond what I could have imagined,” said Hawes. “Following the first cohort, there were mentors and mentees who started women in leadership groups on their own campuses modeled after APWiL, mentees who held networking events and workshops on DEI as it pertains to women’s gender equity at their institution, and a mentor and mentee who formalized the relationship between their two institutions through an agreement where they held a monthly seminar series for folks at both institutions during the fall term.” Time will tell what the 2021-22 cohort will be inspired to develop next. Nearly 90 participants from 25 institutions include six UC Davis faculty and administrators: Cynthia Carter CHING, University of California, Davis (mentor) Jennifer CURTIS, University of California, Davis (mentor) Lisa TELL, University of California, Davis (mentor) Norkamari Shakira BANDOLIN, University of California, Davis (mentee) Christine MCBETH, University of California, Davis (mentee) Cecilia TSU, University of California, Davis (mentee)

Written by Joanna Regulska and Sabrina Lin Original post on Nikkei COVID-19 has added new challenges for women.   © AP Joanna Regulska is co-chair of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities’ Women in Leadership (APRU APWiL) Program and vice-provost and dean of global affairs, professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies, University of California, Davis. Sabrina Lin is co-chair, APRU APWiL, and senior adviser to president of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. COVID-19 has brought with it the blurring of our personal and professional lives. In the field of higher education, where career advancement depends so much on hitting numbers, including publication numbers, citation numbers, grants earned, students advised, women have been hit the hardest. At the onset of the pandemic, the virus resulted in women’s decreased research productivity. Initial evidence suggests that while women academics working from home are submitting fewer manuscripts and external funding submissions, their male counterparts are submitting more. Despite assuming fewer leadership positions in general, the pandemic has also given rise to the glass cliff effect, or the overrepresentation of women advancing to leadership positions during periods of crisis when the risk of failure is highest. Indeed, COVID-19 has added new challenges for women in academia. But to peg the pandemic as a vacuum out of which these implications arose would be narrow-minded. Social inequities in academia have existed for decades. The field itself emerged at a time when, typically, male academics received the support of their stay-at-home spouses. Once women did enter the field, they were often met with gender-based obstacles to achieving tenure, being granted promotions, or simply earning the same respect afforded to their male counterparts. The pandemic has shone a glaring light on disparities that date back longer than we wish to admit. We can begin to make amends by first acknowledging the full spectrum of complexities that women face, ones that are inextricably linked to other systemic barriers. Women are the backbone of the care economy, what might be better termed as the “actual” economy, and the reality is that most women do not have the luxury of separating work from home. The care economy can be defined as any care — child care, social or domestic services — provided in formal and informal settings. Women around the world, particularly in Japan, were already doing most of the world’s unpaid care work prior to the pandemic, and COVID-19 has only amplified this burden. A report by the International Labor Organization identified unpaid care work as the biggest impediment to women’s formal employment, affecting 21.7% of women compared to 1.7% of men. Such obligations often result in women devoting less time to their career advancement. In some cases, causing them to postpone promotions or leave the field of academia altogether. One step in the right direction could be incorporating care work into teaching evaluations, which tend to disfavor women. As it stands, many academic institutions put too much weight into evaluating professors based on their research output. It is time for us to ditch the publish or perish pretense that has become so prevalent in academia. This method is simply not viable today and especially disadvantages women who are contributing to multiple areas of university life in addition to research. While women make up the majority of undergraduate and master’s degree holders, their representation in research is only 28% globally. Such underrepresentation varies by country and discipline, and while in some cases gender parity in research is almost achieved, in many other instances there is a long path ahead to meeting such a benchmark. How can we better support women in academia? It comes down to dialogue. During the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) virtual annual presidents’ meeting, international experts in higher education came together to discuss the impacts of COVID-19 on women academics. The conclusion we came to was simple: there is no such thing as a best fit solution. Challenges women face in academia are not always plain to see, often materializing in subtle ways, like when women are not considered to serve on certain committees, when their contributions during meetings are appropriated, or when they are silenced by louder voices. Rather than assuming you know what is best for your women faculty, ask them. What do you need? An extra year in your tenure clock? Additional material support? Childcare and mental health support resources? New, nondiscriminatory criteria that make it possible to appreciate the contributions of all faculty members? Commitment to hiring dual career partners? Similarly, not all academic institutions are uniform, with different universities boasting different institutional cultures and access to financial and personal resources. While some institutions maintain an equal footing in research, teaching and service, others are more focused on one cause. We must remain committed to gender, racial and social equity while recognizing the nuanced constraints of each individual institution. We have presented a snippet of the full picture of women academics’ experiences, which differ vastly across racial, ethnic, cultural and other contexts. As exemplified during the APRU senior international leaders’ meeting, which brought together leaders from 18 different countries, it is increasingly important to leverage international networks like APRU in order to adopt global solutions to issues of inequity. And to bear in mind that equity is different from equality.

APRU held the first seminar of the Asia-Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) Mentoring Program’s 2nd Cohort on December 8, exploring women’s representation and advancement in higher education leadership in the Pacific Rim. Speakers from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Australia shared their personal experiences and views, shedding light on both the commonalities and differences in barriers to women’s advancement in leadership. The APWiL Mentoring Program is a year-long commitment matching a mentor and mentee from one of the participating APRU member universities. It provides international and intercultural opportunities for the empowerment, professional growth, and development of aspiring women leaders within APRU. The program is co-chaired by Dr Sabrina Lin, Senior Advisor to the HKUST President and Professor Joanna Regulska, Vice Provost and Dean – Global Affairs, and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, UC Davis. The APWiL Mentoring Program 2nd Cohort will run until September 30, 2022, involving 94 participants from 26 institutions. APRU held the APWiL Mentoring Program Seminar in partnership with the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Center for International Higher Education (CIHE) at Boston College. The seminar was moderated by Professor Joanna Regulska, Vice Provost and Dean – Global Affairs, and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, UC Davis and APWiL Co-Chair. “Women’s higher education leadership has been an integral component of ACE’s work for decades, including our robust AEC women’s network and our initiatives aiming for gender parity in higher education leadership,” said Carly O’Connell, American Council on Education (ACE) Representative, in her opening address. “APRU’s commitment to mentorship and women lifting up other women is very much in the same spirit as ACE’s efforts,” she added. Norzaini Azman, Professor of Higher Education at the Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan, Malaysia, shared her personal experience of earning her PhD in Manchester and afterwards getting into an academic management leadership position in Malaysia. Azman had difficulty juggling that work with the needs of her own child and felt that she did not have enough time to dive deeply into her own area of higher education. “I took two sabbaticals, which was a very important decision that allowed me to develop my academic leadership, and I think that Malaysian women are really moving away from the assumption that they are best suited for domestic work,” Azman said. “We work hard, have academic overseas experience and networks, so there are the opportunities and skillsets needed to become academic leaders,” she added. Amalia Di lorio AM, Professor of Finance and Associate Provost (International and Academic Partnerships), La Trobe University, Australia, recalled that she was trained in medical radiology but after graduation did not want to work in that field. Coming from an Italian family which had restaurants in Australia, she chose to study accounting, which eventually led her to become a professor of finance. “My first years of academic life were really intense, because I had two little children, and I could not have done it without support from my family,” Di lorio said. “In Australia, we have come a long way in gender equality discussions, but it does not mean we are seeing many women in academic leadership positions,” she added. Linda Chelan Li, Professor of Political Science at the Department of Public Policy and director of Research Centre for Sustainable Hong Kong (CSHK), City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, pointed out that collaboration with other academics is a very important form of leadership. “Women need to stand taller in this time when we are still living in a transitional culture,” Li said. Click here to view more information about the event.

The second cohort sees number of mentor-mentee pairs more than triple HONG KONG–(BUSINESS WIRE)–APRU celebrated the completion of the first cohort of its APWiL Mentoring Program. The APWiL Mentoring Program Inaugural Graduation Ceremony was part of the APRU Senior International Leaders’ (SIL) Week 2021, hosted virtually on October 19-21 by the University of Sydney. The APWiL Mentoring Program was launched almost exactly one year earlier under the leadership of Prof. Joanna Regulska (Vice Provost and Dean – Global Affairs at the University of California, Davis) and Dr. Sabrina Lin (Senior Advisor to the President at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology). The first cohort matched 15 pairs of mentors and mentees to provide international and intercultural opportunities for the development of aspiring women leaders within APRU. It was created against the backdrop of the World Economic Forum’s 2019 Gender Gap Report ringing alarm bells on the lack of improvement in the previous years. The current cohort, running from October 2021 – September 2022, comprises 47 mentor-mentee pairs, reflecting strongly growing receptiveness of the APWiL Mentoring Program. Participants used the ceremony to report on the program’s impact and introduced the second cohort to Senior International Leaders (SILs). The SILs convene annually to discuss important themes in higher education, advancing the impact of APRU initiatives and programs. “Throughout this year, the mentor and mentee relationships have been sustained by a shared commitment to the future, to higher education and to ensuring women leaders are prepared to be part of higher education’s future,” said Professor Dawn Freshwater, Vice-Chancellor, University of Auckland, in her keynote. “We know there are many complex social and economic barriers to women’s advancement in leadership within our institutions, and we know that it is only with diverse and inclusive leadership that our institutions will be able to navigate the global and societal issues that are confronting us,” she added. Among the mentor-mentee pairs sharing their experiences were mentor Professor Cindy Fan, Vice Provost, International Studies and Global Engagement, UCLA, and mentee Professor Surabhi Chopra, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Chopra recalled that she entered the APWiL Mentoring Program when nearing her mid-career mark, not being perfectly sure where to direct her attention to in the coming years. The six meetings Professor Chopra had over the course of the year with Professor Fan then facilitated an important process of reflection. “Professor Fan was a coach who drew me out and pushed me to think more concretely,” Professor Chopra said. “That process of having someone engaged, intelligent and experienced was incredibly valuable for me in deciding how I want to engage in academic leadership.” Professor Fan, for her part, underlined that the status quo is far from perfect for aspiring women leaders. She cited findings showing that overall access to higher education for women students has been improving only in a handful of regions of the world, with the picture becoming even patchier in terms of women academics’ access to the highest levels of institutional administration. “The proportion of women in the highest echelons range from 0% in some Asia Pacific countries to about 20% in Australia,” Professor Fan said. “Without many mentors in my professional life, I would not have aspired to senior leadership in academia and become the first female and first Asian American senior international officer in my university.” About APRU As a network of 60 leading universities linking the Americas, Asia and Australasia, APRU (the Association of Pacific Rim Universities) brings together thought leaders, researchers, and policy-makers to exchange ideas and collaborate on effective solutions to the challenges of the 21st century. We leverage collective education and research capabilities of our members into the international public policy process. In the post-pandemic era, our strategic priorities focus on providing a neutral platform for high-level policy dialogue, taking actions on climate change, and supporting diversity, inclusion, and minorities. APRU’s primary activities support these strategic priorities with a focus on key areas such as disaster risk reduction, women in leadership, indigenous knowledge, virtual student exchange, esports, population aging, global health, sustainable cities, artificial intelligence, waste management and more. Contacts Jack Ng Director, Communications, APRU [email protected]

On November 5, APRU launched the 2nd Cohort at the virtual orientation for the 2nd cohort of the APWiL Mentoring program, representing the first opportunity for the cohort’s participants to come together as a group. The APWiL Mentoring Program 2nd Cohort will run until October 2022, involving 92 participants from 26 institutions, which represents a major upscaling from the pilot program 2020-2021, which recorded 30 participants from 10 institutions. The introduction to the 2nd Cohort Orientation was delivered by Sabrina Lin, APWiL Co-Chair and Senior Advisor the President at HKUST; she was very pleased to note that over 90 attendees were recorded. “This reflects the popularity of the APWiL Mentoring program and will surely lead to good interactions in the opening remarks as well as in the breakout rooms,” Lin said. “APRU is viewed by many university presidents around the world as being one of the most serious and also most impactful networks, and so I think that you are really in for a thrill to be part of not only APRU but also APWiL Mentoring Program,” said Santa Ono, President of The University of British Columbia and APWiL Mentoring Program’s Presidential Champion, in his welcoming remarks. “There are too many men that are always nominating each other for awards, and it is about time that we nominate women, not only for the awards, but also for positions within professorships or as department chairs or university provosts,” he added. Program Manager Chelsey Hawes, Program Coordinator Kimberly Bellows (both University of California, Davis), and Anya Wong (APRU Secretariat) provided a program overview including the program design and expected outcomes. Additionally, the program just launched APWiLMentoring.org which offers a members-only site for mentors and mentees to further engage in conversation and exchange between all participants and alumni. The APWiL Mentoring Program provides international and intercultural opportunities for the empowerment, professional growth, and development of aspiring women leaders within APRU. It was created against the backdrop of the APRU 2019 Gender Gap Report ringing alarm bells on the lack of improvement in the previous years. Other studies have since shown that the current challenges relating to COVID-19 have been exasperating the divide even further. The 2nd Cohort Orientation concluded with an announcement on the next APWiL Mentoring Program event; on Dec 7- 8, the cohort’s 1st workshop under the theme Women’s Representation in Higher Education in the Pacific Rim Seminar will feature panelists from Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Mexico. The 2nd and 3rd workshops will focus on the topics Leadership and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion respectively. “We never thought this program would be growing so fast and bring together so many wonderful participants both on the mentor and mentee side,” said APWiL Co-Chair Joanna Regulska, Vice Provost and Dean – Global Affairs at the University of California, Davis. “We saw in the pilot program that when mentors and mentees spend some time together to talk and think, amazing things are coming out, including ideas for new research projects,” she added. Click here to view more information about APWiL Mentoring Program 2nd Cohort.

Written by Tessa DeLaquil Original post on University World News The latest International Brief for Higher Education Leaders from the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Center for International Higher Education (CIHE), titled Women’s Representation in Higher Education Leadership Around the World, reveals the “unfinished” business that is achieving gender equality at institutional, national and international levels. The brief includes country cases with new data from Hong Kong (Linda Chelan Li and Iris Chui Ping Kam); Indonesia (Dorothy Ferary); Kazakhstan (Aliya Kuzhabekova); Malaysia (Norzaini Azman); Ghana (Christine Adu-Yeboah, Georgina Yaa Oduro and Dorothy Takyiakwaa); South Africa (Adéle Moodly); Mexico (Alma Maldonado-Maldonado and Roberto Rodríguez Gómez); Australia (Amalia Di Iorio); and Finland (Terhi Nokkala). It also includes international analyses of women’s leadership in higher education by Fanny M Cheung and Joanna Regulska, as well as a section on the diverse dimensions of gender equality, including contributions on the subjects of leadership at women’s colleges (Kristen A Renn) and black women and intersectionality in US higher education (Ashley Gray), as well as a personal reflection on women’s leadership by Lily S Hsu. The brief argues that, while overall access of women to higher education as students has risen in some but not all regions (sometimes achieving more than parity), this development is not uniform and is by and large not paralleled in positions of either leadership and decision-making or at the highest levels of institutional administration. The proportion of women in senior leadership positions in the country cases of the brief range from practically non-existent participation at universities in Ghana or public universities in Hong Kong to 28% of vice-chancellor positions in Australian higher education. Although the barriers and support related to the achievement of women leaders in higher education vary by social and historical context, there are nonetheless certain identifiable commonalities across the country cases examined that make clear the unfinished nature of the project of achieving gender equality in women’s leadership in higher education. Context matters The unfinished nature of the achievement of the human right of gender equality, in terms of representation of women in leadership in general and in higher education in particular, may be understood as partial at three levels in relation to: (i) national or regional context; (ii) historical effects and socio-cultural foundations; and (iii) individuals and the complexity of individual identity, including marginalisation factors. For instance, the general paucity of women in leadership in higher education is visible even in some countries where representation of women in the pipeline (on undergraduate and graduate degree programmes) is reaching parity. This phenomenon varies by regional and national context, by institutional type (for instance, by university ranking and classification) and by societal culture, tradition and the related expectations of women. Intersectionality also determines outcomes, as other markers of marginalisation further restrict representation and participation for women in positions of higher education leadership. Barriers to equality in leadership Barriers to achieving gender equality in higher education leadership occur at each of three levels – national or institutional, cultural and individual. As such, effective support and structural change must be responsive to and present at each of these three levels. According to the cases in the brief, we see that when support is lacking at one of these levels, the overall project for achieving gender equality in higher education seems to stagnate or fails to materialise. Barriers that occur in society also occur within the system of higher education, since higher education institutions may be understood as what Adéle Moodly calls “microcosms of the broader society”, and so are pervaded by historical and cultural aspects embedded within our communities. While we are unable to address every cause of gender imbalance in leadership, the academic community is not powerless. The so-called glass ceiling is maintained at least in part through structural and cultural complacency within our institutions and our academic communities. Through our support for change within our institutions, we work slowly but surely towards social change for the common good in our societies and larger communities. The contributions in the brief raise certain barriers that re-occur at both institutional and societal levels. At national and societal levels, these include culturally and societally defined gender roles, historically and religiously entrenched cultural standards, an unfair division of domestic labour and a lack of recognition of the effects of intersectionality. Both institutionally and societally, barriers include the evident gender pay gap, gendered stereotypes with regard to leadership competency, sexual harassment within the realms of both higher education and society, the leaky pipeline through the fraught pathway of the professoriate, tokenism, hiring biases and the inevitable consequences on the potential for gender equality in the future due to the present under-representation in leadership and decision-making positions. A general lack of sex-disaggregated data further limits effective policy decision-making. The precarity of the gains made in gender equality is palpable in the exacerbation of these trends and barriers during the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, the persistence of gender inequality in relation to domestic labour and family care is discernible in the decline in academic manuscripts submitted by women during the pandemic period. The idea of the ‘glass cliff’ – a concept describing how women are overrepresented in leadership during periods of institutional crisis – suggests that taking on precarious leadership positions may ultimately discourage other women from pursuing advancement to academic leadership in the future. Towards gender equality Effective support must therefore also address barriers at the three levels of nation or institution, culture and individual. Broad national-level policies explicitly supporting gender equality may encourage cultural and structural change. Institutional policies are necessary in order to ensure procedural justice, for instance, around parental leave, workload expectations, recruitment and hiring and promotion practices. Sex-disaggregated data collection must be set up both within higher education institutions and national systems of higher education in order to support policy decision-making at each level of support. At an individual level, targeted programming for leadership development and other forms of mentorship programming have been put into place in several countries. Also, higher education networks, set up both within and external to institutional or national support structures, that include programmes and processes for finding, mentoring and training women in higher education seem to be a highly effective mechanism for supporting women’s leadership in higher education. However, it is not sufficient to merely support individual women in the navigation of the structures within which they find themselves. Structural injustice must be met by procedural justice through national- and institutional-level policy. Cultural changes can also begin within institutions, for example, through institutional policy changes championed by vocal leadership. Universities have the potential to exist as countercultural spaces – as Renn’s contribution on women’s colleges and universities demonstrates – in which justice can be achieved via a cultural change in our approach to women in leadership in higher education. Support and encouragement for individual women to achieve their career goals can be productive but are generally most useful when accompanied by institutional and national leadership and programming. Indeed, as Regulska asserts in this brief, ensuring that the human right of gender equality is met will require both individual and collective action. In the end, all of the contributions to the brief imply that the most significant barrier to women’s equality in higher education is a tenacious complacency within our academic communities. We have the tools in hand that are required to effect initial change. What is needed now is the will to work towards achieving true gender equality within our academic communities and our institutions, with the hope that these steps will also build towards the achievement of this human right beyond our universities, in our nations and across the globe. To learn more about APRU Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Program, please visit here.

APRU’s APWiL Mentoring Program facilitated a fruitful exchange between APRU member universities’ women leaders and other program participants. Held virtually on June 2, the Fireside Chat highlighted speakers’ personal stories, from accomplishments to opportunities and challenges throughout their professional career. During the Q&A session of the program, they addressed participants’ questions ranging from work-life balance to women empowering other women. “There are many, many more women in leadership positions now than there used to be, and I think that is going to continue as we move forward,” said Professor Carol Christ, the Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, at the Fireside Chat. “Being a member of a faculty in which the leadership was predominantly women was enormously liberating for me, really helping me grow in confidence as a leader,” she added, referring to her time as President of Smith College. The other Fireside Chat speakers were Professor Dr. Kamila Ghazali, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and International) at Universiti Malaya, and Professor Nancy Y. Ip, Vice-President for Research and Development, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Professor Cindy Fan, UCLA’s Vice Provost for International Studies and Global Engagement, served as the moderator. “I’m only here today because of the support of the people around me,” said Ghazali. “This made a huge difference in my entire career, and especially in the difficult situation when the pandemic first started,” she added. Professor Ip, for her part, shared her experiences of working in the private sector, which prepared her to be the first and only woman in a senior management position. “This experience was very helpful to navigate the situation, when I returned to Hong Kong where I often found myself being the only woman in a senior position,” Ip said. This workshop is one of the activities of APWiL Mentoring Program. The APWiL Mentoring Program is designed to connect senior leaders at APRU institutions with emerging women leaders to create an effective network to overcome complex social and economic barriers to women’s advancement in leadership. The program’s overarching aim is the advancement of ethnic, cultural, and gender diversity of participants’ institutions. Revisit the event recording at YouTube. More information on the event page.

We are delighted to announce that Santa J. Ono, President & Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia, has become the new APWiL Presidential Champion. President Ono is now acting as a direct link between the Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Program and the APRU Steering Committee and will work with these key leaders to advance programmatic goals. President Ono is the 15th President & Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia and serves as Chair of the U15 Group of Universities, on the Board of Directors of Universities Canada, and as Past Chair of Research Universities of British Columbia. He is molecular immunologist educated at the University of Chicago and McGill and has taught at Johns Hopkins, Harvard University and University College London. President Ono has advised national and regional governments on higher education and mental health. He has also advised companies such as GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Novartis on R&D. “It is great news that President Ono agreed to work closely with the APWiL Core Group members and Co-Chairs to develop and advance the APWiL vision,” said Sabrina Lin, APRU APWiL Co-Chair and Senior Advisor to the HKUST President. “President Ono’s track record as an advocate for equity and diversity in academia means he is perfect for this position of actively promoting APWiL’s current and future activities,” added Professor Joanna Regulska, APRU APWiL Co-Chair and Vice Provost and Dean – Global Affairs, UC Davis. “I am honoured to be the Presidential Champion for the Asia Pacific Women in Leadership group,” said Professor Ono. “Gender inequality persists in far too many professions, including higher education. It diminishes institutions, entire regions, nations and the world. We must fight for gender equality, so that no woman is excluded or discouraged from a field she excels in, so that no breakthroughs are lost through the barriers of sexism, and no one who deserves a chance is passed up for their gender.” APWiL aims to drive change in gender equity while considering the various contexts in which this pursuit for gender equity takes place across APRU member universities. Case studies presented by APRU member universities under APWiL have shown that gender equity has a positive impact on economic growth, social well-being, as well as in addressing demographic challenges. The latest APWiL initiative is the APWiL Mentoring Program launched in 2020. The initiative matches a mentor and mentee from one of the participating APRU member universities in order to provide aspiring women academics international and intercultural opportunities for the empowerment and development. More information about Asia Pacific Women in Leadership

Written by Joyce Lau Original by Times Higher Education Covid has only widened gender inequalities among researchers, data show Universities in places like Japan and Hong Kong are trying to combat vast gender gaps with carrots such as departmental hiring incentives and sticks such as quotas and budget “punishments”, institutional leaders told the Times Higher Education Asia Universities Summit. According to a 2020 THE analysis, none of the top 10 Asian universities had female vice-chancellors or presidents, while women make up only 15 per cent of senior management. Sabrina Lin, senior advisor to the president of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said that her institution enacted HR practices to encourage the hiring of female staff. “All departments have an open invitation: if they find female faculty they wish to hire, they can go ahead,” and it would not count against their normal limits, she told the event, held virtually in partnership with Japanese medical institution Fujita Health University. But she said that the promotion of STEM careers had to start years earlier, to combat deeply ingrained cultural views. citing studies showing that girls and boys performed similarly in math and science. “However, parents and teachers discourage girls from pursuing certain fields, like engineering,” she said. Professor Lin also co-chairs the APRU Asia Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) programme, which offers mentoring for young women, including on skills such as managing interpersonal relationships with male colleagues. Seiichi Matsuo, president of Nagoya University in Japan, stressed the need for men like himself to become “male allies.” Under his leadership, Nagoya is one of only 10 UN HeForShe IMPACT Universities in the world, and the only one in Asia apart from the University of Hong Kong. It has poured resources into facilities such as on-campus nurseries and workshops to give women “self-confidence,” so they can “get out of their comfort zone and not feel isolated”, he added. “Some women suffer from ‘imposter syndrome’, in which they feel doubt and fear,” Professor Matsuo said. “They might think that to be a ‘leader’, they need to be someone other than themselves. And that’s not true.” He has set a goal of women making up 20 per cent of university leadership. “We would like to aim later for 30 per cent, although I admit that is still low,” he said. Nagoya also launched a “penalty system” in which allowances would be based on whether departments met gender goals. The enormous problem of gender inequality has been exacerbated in the past two years, as women took on disproportionate childcare and household burdens during Covid lockdowns and school closures. Ann Gabriel, senior vice-president of global strategic networks at Elsevier, presented data showing that “Covid has thrown the research gender gap into even greater relief”. “This is a critical and global issue that we must tackle,” she said. Elsevier’s numbers show that women submitted proportionately fewer academic papers in 2020, although the total amount of research created during this period increased. Women were less represented among grant recipients and patent-holders. The move to gender equality was also slower in the physical sciences, such as engineering and computer science. According to Elsevier data comparing 16 nations, Japan was the farthest from parity in terms of research publishing, with only 18 active female authors for each 100 men. “It’s today’s graduate students and researchers who will be tomorrow’s HE leaders. So we first need to invest in increasing the female representation at the research level,” Ms Gabriel said. More information about Asia Pacific Women in Leadership

Issued by the Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy Announced during the APEC Women and the Economy Forum on September 24, 2021, the winner and two runners-up for the 2021 APEC Healthy Women Healthy Economies Research Prize are listed here. The winning team is co-authored by Mr. Chen-Wei Hsiang, PhD student at University College London; Dr. Ming-Jen Lin, Distinguished Professor of Economics at National Taiwan University; Dr. Kuan-Ming Chen, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the United States’ National Bureau of Economic Research. Runner-up: Dr. Ying Yang, Associate Professor at China’s National Institute for Family Planning Runner-up: Ms. Nurliyana Binte Daros, Lecturer at Nanyang Technological University Find out the news release here and more information about the prize below. Applications are now open for the 2021 APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize. The prize rewards researchers who spur the creation of sex-disaggregated data and gender-based research in APEC. Launched in 2018 by President Sebastián Piñera of Chile with the support of Merck, the research prize seek for outstanding research work that will provide policymakers and business leaders with the tools they need to implement measures that improve women’s health and well-being so women can join, rise and thrive in the workforce. “Robust data and evidence are the foundation of sound policymaking,” said Renee Graham, New Zealand’s Secretary for Women and Chair of APEC’s Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy. “The gendered impacts of COVID-19 make the call for data and evidence all the more important, as we look to ensure women are fully incorporated into, and benefit from, the economic recovery from the pandemic.” Last year, the inaugural research prize was awarded to Dr Fanghui Zhao, a director at the National Cancer Center and Cancer Hospital with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, whose winning research looks at ways to make cervical cancer prevention more accessible and affordable for people in lower-middle income economies. Dr Lih Rong Wang of Chinese Taipei and Dr Dorothy Chan of Hong Kong, China were the two runners-up for the 2020 prize. Applicants to the 2021 APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize can be individuals or teams with one leader listed as official participant from an APEC member economy. Applications for the 2021 research prize are due on 31 May 2020. Applicants do not need to come from academia, as long as the research is evidence-based and addresses at least one of the pillars outlined in the Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Policy Toolkit, such as: workplace health and safety health awareness and access sexual and reproductive health gender-based violence work/life balance The prize winner will receive USD 20,000 and have the opportunity to present the research to APEC gender experts in the public and private sectors on the margins of the 2021 Women and the Economy Forum, hosted by New Zealand. Two runners-up will receive USD 5,000 each. “COVID-19 has exacerbated gender inequalities across a range of women’s health issues, making sex-disaggregated data and gender-based research essential for today’s policymakers,” said Liz Henderson,Regional Vice President, Merck Biopharma Asia Pacific. “To truly unlock the economic potential of women, we must first empower women by promoting policies that improve their health outcomes.” “It is important to make available sex-segregated data, especially in the services sector where women’s participation is high and which have been affected by the pandemic,” explained Dr Rebecca Sta Maria, Executive Director of the APEC Secretariat. “Good sex-segregated data will contribute to the development of policies that are effective, equitable and beneficial.” Since established in 2015 the Healthy Women, Healthy Economies initiative aims to identify and implement policies that advance women’s health and well-being to support their economic participation. To submit your application form, click here. The deadline to submit applications is 31 May 2020. For more information, please visit the APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies website or contact [email protected] with any questions. For further details, please contact: Masyitha Baziad +65 9751 2146 at [email protected] Michael Chapnick +65 9647 4847 at [email protected]

The Asia-Pacific region lags behind other global regions with respect to women’s health and economic participation. Sustainable economic growth cannot be achieved if women, who consist half of the workforce, are unable to fully participate in the economy due to health implications. Since 2014, APEC’s Healthy Women, Healthy Economies (HWHE) initiative convenes government (health, labor, gender officials), private sector, academia and other interested stakeholders to raise awareness and promote good practices to enhance women’s economic participation by improving women’s health. A virtual APEC HWHE Policy Dialogue will be held on March 2, 7:30 – 9:30 p.m. (EST) / March 3, 8:30 – 10:30 a.m. (SGT). A number of high-level speakers from across government, academia, and the private sector will be participating as speakers in the event. The objective of this policy dialogue is to share how public and private stakeholders across the APEC region can ensure women are not left behind, especially given the impact of COVID-19, as well as to identify and discuss the long-term societal risks if we do not build back better. We hope this policy dialogue will help stakeholders – especially those who might not ordinarily consider gender in their line of work – understand why it is vital to construct a COVID-19 recovery effort that takes into consideration the unique ways women have been impacted by the pandemic.

APRU and the University of Sydney on Dec 2 Hong Kong time hosted the webinar Impact of Covid-19 on Women in Higher Education to share the network’s latest research on how the COVID-19 lockdowns across the world have been affecting gender equality in the academic realm. Held under the APRU Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Program (APWiL), the virtual event featured leading researchers discussing the challenges that women face during the lockdown and strategies to overcome barriers to publishing, forging new research partnerships, and establishing funding. The discussion raised important questions about how research outputs are calculated in consideration for tenure and other career milestones. Moderator Professor Katherine Belov, The University of Sydney Professor of Comparative Genomics and Pro Vice-Chancellor Global Engagement, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, raised the curtain with noting that the OECD recently pointed out that women fuel the fight against COVID-19, making up almost 70% of the health care workforce and making them more vulnerable to infection. “At the same time, women are also shouldering much of the burden at home, given school and child care facility closures and longstanding gender inequalities in unpaid work,” Belov said. “And our own colleagues, women in academia, have suffered a similar fate, with research outputs plummeting during lockdown while men’s have increased,” she added. Dr. Bahar Mehmani, Reviewer Experience Lead in the Global STM journals at Elsevier, presented her latest survey illustrating that a wave of academic publications during the pandemic came mainly to the benefit of male researchers’ careers. In Feb-May, the number of publications submitted to Elsevier increased by a whopping 90% compared to the same period of 2019, compelling Mehmani’s team to look at the submitters’ names in order to guess their gender. The data exposed that while submission increased in all months during the lockdown period, the growth of submissions by female researchers accelerated significantly slower than those by male researchers. Growth was even slower in the late stage of female academics’ careers, leading Mehmani to conclude that especially female researchers in middle age bracket are penalized by closures of their children’s schools. According to Mehmani, this is bound to strengthen long-lasting gender inequalities in the academic world; those who have already benefitted from COVID-19 research inflation may have higher chances in future to receive prestigious grants and obtain tenures and promotions in prestigious institutions. “Flagging, carefully pondering or even disregarding COVID-19 related publications and citations from applicants’ assessments must be considered,” Mehmani said. “Institutional interventions, such as promoting a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable working environment and embracing a family friendly leadership policy in the reopening plans of laboratories and institutes, could help moderate the distortions caused by the pandemic,” she added. Mehmani’s presentation was followed by that of Professor Mai-har Sham, Pro-Vice-Chancellor / Vice-President, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Biomedical Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Sham shared her research on the situation in Hong Kong and introduced CUHK’s support measures for female academics who are adversely affected by the pandemic. Professor Kalindi Vora, Director of Feminist Research Institute and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Director of the Feminist Research Institute of UC Davis shared perspectives considering how women and women of color are impacted by Covid-19, with already drastic underrepresentation of women and black women in tenure positions, there are additional strains due to caretaking that widen the gender gap even further. Professor Vora shared important initaitves that the Feminist Research Center is taking to provide support such as Addressing Privilege and Anti-Blackness in Research Culture project and ADQ Scholar and Research Training Series. The Asking Different Questions project is funded by the National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education grant (Co-PIs Sara Giordano, Sarah McCullough, and Kalindi Vora). This project explores the following hypothesis: That changing research questions and research agendas will change who is in STEM and the knowledge we produce. The award will provide graduate students with training to locate their research questions within a larger societal context. This will include how to recognize and address issues of historical bias and cultural complexity. By learning to place their research in a broader context, junior researchers are able to better frame complex research questions, particularly those presented by communities traditionally under-served by science. The curriculum also provides support for interdisciplinary collaborations and the inclusion of diverse voices and approaches in STEM research. Professor Joanna Regulska, Vice provost and Dean of Global Affairs and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, UC Davis reminded participants that there is great potential as part of the APRU network to use our collective knowledge and resources to expand impact in the region. One such opportunitiy is the APRU APWiL Mentoring Program which has just begun its pilot in 2020. More information on the event page For more information about the Asia Pacific Women in Leadership program contact [email protected]

The Asia-Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) Mentoring Program was launched on October 30 with a virtual kick-off meeting hosted by the APRU secretariat in Hong Kong. Participants charted out expectations for the year-long pilot program, which aims to match a mentor and mentee from one of the participating APRU member universities in order to provide aspiring women academics international and intercultural opportunities for the empowerment and development within APRU.  The APWiL Mentoring Program Pilot was initiated following the release of the 2019 APRU Gender Gap Report flagging that females remain under-represented in university leadership positions, with the 2013-19 period producing little tangible improvement. The APRU APWiL is led by co-chairs Sabrina Lin, Senior Advisor to the HKUST President, and Joanna Regulska, Vice Provost and Dean of Global Affairs at UC Davis. The virtual kick-off meeting was held in breakout group discussions on topics related to strong supportive networks of women leaders, strategic planning, goal setting, career development, effective leadership skills, opportunities for collaboration and interdisciplinary research, as well as work-life balance. “We are discussing the lack of female leaders in our own academic context and the associated lack of models to look up to,” said Derlie Mateo-Babiano, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, in the kick-off meeting. “Although involvement in programs such as APRU has been helping many of us in joining supportive networks of female leaders, we have found that the theories behind these efforts too often still do not fully work in the Asian context,” she added. Similarly, Mariam Lam, Vice Chancellor and Chief Diversity Officer at University of California, Riverside, emphasized the urgency of promoting the ideas of mentorship, encouragement, sponsorship, and patronage. “Make sure we are using this format of sisterhood and shouting out to other women to get a woman into that next space that opened up,” Lam said. “We have to nudge women sometimes, given that there often are existing access points to those spaces,” she added. Kira Matus, Associate Head in the Division of Public Policy at HKUST, for her part, criticized that women are often placed in leadership and committee positions simply because people feel that there should be a woman visible as opposed to reflecting a holistic approach. According to Matus, a holistic approach involves both having women champions at the higher level and many small wins at the bottom. “We have to tackle tasks such as family friendliness in schools and campuses and parental leave to make inclusivity more holistic,” Matus said. APWiL provides for mentors and mentees developing a mentoring agreement, identifying goals for the program and meeting virtually throughout the year. Mentors may be men or women leaders at a participating institution who are interested in supporting the growth of aspiring women leaders at APRU institutions. Participating APRU members are Keio University; Osaka University; The Chinese University of Hong Kong; HKUST; The University of British Colombia; The University of Sydney; University of California, Davis; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Malaya; and UNSW Sydney. The mentor-mentee pairs are: Maureen Kinyua, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering, UC Davis (Mentee) Natalie Munro, Associate Professor, School of Health Sciences, University of Sydney (Mentor) Jessica Bissett Perea, Assistant Professor, Department of Native American Studies, College of Letters and Science, UC Davis (Mentee) Yvonne Ai-Lian Lim, Director, Department of Parasitology, University of Malaya (Mentor) Kira Jen Mendelsohn Matus, Associate Professor, Division of Public Policy, Division of Social Science, and Division of Environment and Sustainability, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Mentee) Louise Ferguson, Professor and Extension Specialist, Department of Plant Sciences, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, UC Davis (Mentor) Joy Becker, Associate Professor, Aquatic Animal Health and Production, University of Sydney (Mentee) Christopher Glick, Assistant Dean, Development and External Relations, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, UC Davis (Mentor) Azusa N. Hattori, Associate Professor, Division of Public Policy, Division of Social Science, and Division of Environment and Sustainability, Osaka University (Mentee) Stephan Tillman, Professor, Geometric Topology, University of Sydney (Mentor) Charmaine C.M. Yung, Assistant Professor, Department of Ocean Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Mentee) Masae Kuboniwa, Associate Professor, Department of Preventive Dentistry, Osaka University (Mentor) Derjung Mimi Tarn, Associate Professor, David Geffen School of Medicine, and University of California systemwide University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, UCLA (Mentee) Keiko Okawa, Professor, Graduate School of Media Design; Research Institute for Digital Media and Content; School on Internet Research Institute Co., Ltd., Keio University (Mentor) Hang Fang Carole Hoyan, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature; the Yale-China Chinese Language Centre, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Mentee) Christine Dunkel Schetter, Professor, Psychology and Psychiatry; Faculty Development, UCLA (Mentor) Hisayo Ogushi, Professor, Dean, Keio University International Center, Keio University (Mentee) Fanny Cheung, Senior Advisor, Faculty of Social Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Mentor) Mihoko Maruyama, Associate Professor, Institute for Advanced Co-Creation Studies, Osaka University (Mentee) Haibin Su, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Mentor) Nazia Abdul Majid, Lecturer, Genetics and Molecular Biology, University of Malaya (Mentee) Mariko Okada, Professor, Institute for Protein Research, Osaka University (Mentor) Roxanna Pebdani, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of Rehabilitation Counselling, University of Sydney (Mentee) Sara-Jane Finlay, Associate Vice-Provost, Equity & Inclusion Office, University of British Columbia (Mentor) Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard, Lecturer, Landscape Architecture, UNSW Sydney (Mentee) Noor Ismawati Jaafar, Associate Professor, Faculty of Business and Accountancy, University of Malaya (Mentor) Suat Yan Lai, Senior Lecturer, Gender Studies Program, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya (Mentee) Helene Hoi-Lam Fung, Professor, Department of Psychology; Centre for Positive Social Science; Institute of Ageing, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Mentor) Surabhi Chopra, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law at Chinese, University of Hong Kong (Mentee) Cindy Fan, Vice Provost, International Studies and Global Engagement, UCLA (Mentor) More information about APWiL Mentoring Program Pilot

By Jeff Hou See the original post here. This series of articles represents the outcomes of a two-part webinar, titled Bottom-Up Resilience and hosted by APRU Plus in July 2020. Through a partnership between Pacific Rim Community Design Network and the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub, the discussion brought together a group of activists, organizers, and researchers across the region to critically reflect on their ongoing work in supporting the local communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning from Civil Society and Civic Resilience What exactly can we learn from these different types of civil society responses during the pandemic? What do these cases tell us about social and community resilience from the bottom up? What do they reveal about the longstanding disparities in society? What can we look forward to in terms of sustaining these networks and momentum? Contrasting responses Besides the disproportionate impacts on the mainstream society and the marginalized communities, the contrasting responses from the state and the civil society groups present another parallel across the different geographical contexts. In Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon found the state’s bureaucratic response to daily emergencies like food supply, mass testing for the virus, and the provision of public transport to be, as usual, delayed and inadequate. As a result, communities turned to self-help and mutual aid as a way to address urgent needs, a pattern also found elsewhere. The experience in China offers a different scenario. In Wuhan, the local government did react relatively quickly but failed to account for the less privileged. Yang Bao and Shuyun Cao argued that “as the pandemic spread, the government’s one-size-fits-all directives could not respond to the detailed needs of all sectors of society.” It was in this context that the self-organized civil networks have emerged in response to the urgent needs of those who have not been helped. In Tokyo, the support from the government in terms of temporary accommodation for the homeless was critical but short-lived. After seven days during the crisis, “people were back on the streets,” said Mago Yoshihira. She went to note, “we were worried about them and that was why we started free ‘food delivery’ to homeless people […] so we can visit them directly and conduct short interviews each time.” “Face-to-face conversation is best to feel empathy,” said Yoshihira. YUI Associates also began to accept people who had newly become homeless due to COVID-19 and assisted them in finding jobs, according to Yoshihira. In other cases, the government response has been a source of longstanding challenges. In Hong Kong, Michelle Wong described the dilemmas faced by the homeless and social service organizations, “even before COVID-19, they stay in tunnels; they stay on the streets, or they stay in McDonald’s.” “They move around quite often, and the reason why they need to move is that the government would remove their stuff in the tunnel or park frequently,” said Wong. This has made the work of volunteers and social service organizations difficult because they cannot locate the homeless, build relationships, and provide support for them. Trust and empathy As a discussant on the first day of the webinar, Kian Goh of the University of California, Los Angeles highlighted the presence of place-based and historically informed local experiences as illustrated by the speakers. Goh noted that many community self-help and mutual aid practices “really have to be built on trust and empathy […] developed among close-knit circles.” Indeed, local practices that built trust and empathy appeared to have played an important role in engendering community responses during the COVID-19 crisis. In Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon pointed out the notion of Namamangketa as “a way of life” and “a manner of thriving” among the community members she worked with. Asked about how empathy was developed, Guazon noted that empathy among the women partners was built from shared experiences, particularly the struggles with local law enforcement and government. Working with the women partners through the SEANNET project, she learned that a way to live together was “to be with another, to feel the pain of another, to empathize with others.” In the case of LuMo Road Rescue in Wuhan, Yang Bao found trust was already established and deeply rooted in the group, “making the rescue, their donation [drive], and mobilization of resources [go] quite smoothly.” Iderlina Mateo-Babiano also found community resilience to be underpinned by trust in the case of Life Cycles PH. She noted that many of the transactional activities, including the borrowing of bicycles, were based on trust and community spirit or Bayanihan. “There was no money involved; transactions were just purely made on trust and generosity within the community Facebook group,” said Mateo-Babiano. Asked about how trust was developed for Life Cycles PH, Mateo-Babiano suggested that the transactions became a form of relationship building. Following the online transactions, “the group would go and meet up with people to exchange bicycles,” said Mateo-Babiano. The social media platform also allows the group to build trust by being transparent about their actions. Reciprocity and Scalability As place-based and locally-specific actions, Kian Goh wondered about the potential of looking across scales to include different community groups and different levels of government, and if these efforts are bound to one place and one community. In other words, are these civil society responses scalable? In Singapore, Tan Beng Kiang found an untapped resource of people who are interested in helping: “I think there are a lot of people during the lockdown who were at home and they all want to do something [to help] but they can’t get out,” said Tan. Tapping into the potential of these individuals presents opportunities for scaling up. In Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon found evidence of “a cycle of generative reciprocity” in the example of a chef who converted her restaurant kitchen into a community kitchen and came up with a set of guidelines for establishing community kitchens and for making them safe. A colleague from the university then translated the guidelines into Tagalog or Filipino so they can be widely circulated. “It keeps these efforts going. Some of us may fall out because of fatigue but I think others will be interested to help,” said Guazon. In the case of Life Cycles PH, beyond facilitating the lending and borrowing of bikes, Mateo-Babiano found the group to have expanded their advocacy to create a culture of cycling, “a culture of just and sustainable mobility for everyone.” This includes pushing the government to build more bike lanes and cycling infrastructure to make cycling safe. She found that the conversation has moved from short-term emergency response to long-term needs for expanded infrastructure for more equitable and safer mobility. In the migrant worker community in Hong Kong, Cecilia Chu and Marta Catalán Eraso came across additional actors that served to bridge multiple scales. For instance, they highlighted the role of banks in lending technical support to the workers as they might become future clients. “This suggests that self-help is not really entirely independent […] there is a kind of intricate relationship between institutional engagement and community self-help,” said Chu and Catalán Eraso. Solidarity and collaboration The answer to scalability perhaps already exists in the way that many of these groups and initiatives operate, through collaboration and acts of solidarity. In answering my own question about how organizations adapted to crises and how such adaptation can sustain in the long run, Iderlina Mateo-Babiano sees the sharing paradigm as key, particularly when “fueled by the ongoing advocacy and solidarity of like-minded individuals,” and “a common concern for social justice and human connection.” Michelle Wong had a similar response, “as an organizer I always go back to solidarity as a solution.” For instance, the COVID-19 crisis has led ImpactHK to consider forming a network of homeless advocacy organizations in Hong Kong to address the problem effectively and to lobby the government. “At the end of the day, the government is the resourceful, powerful kind of machine that can do much more than a small organization like us,” said Wong. Collaboration already played a critical role in the ongoing work of ImpactHK. During the crisis, the organization hosted around 200 homeless individuals by partnering with guest houses for travelers. In another instance, to learn about the issues facing the street cleaners and to better support them, Fixing Hong Kong organized a learning session for volunteers with the Hong Kong Cleaning Workers Union so they can “understand more about the difficulty that these street cleaners face,” said Bernard Lee. In Singapore, during the crisis, some of the existing NGO groups have formed a coalition because their work is similar. Instead of everyone trying to replicate others’ activities, “they are combining,” said Tan Beng Kiang. According to Tan, the groups are also partnering with the government because during the crisis, “there are things you can’t do unless you get permission, such as entering the quarantined migrant worker dormitory.” As a result, “there’s now a partnership going on between the government and the NGO groups,” said Tan. Spontaneous solidarity can also take place across borders. In Tokyo, where masks were in short supply during the COVID-19 outbreak between March and June of 2020, YUI Associates received donations of masks from regular customers of their tourist hotel in Sanya. According to Mago Yoshihira, more than 1,200 masks were sent from Shanghai and Hong Kong where the number of infections had declined at the time. YUI members brought these donated masks to rough sleepers and the homeless populations in Sanya as well as a terminal care facility for homeless individuals and a hospital. In answering the question about how civil society responses can be sustained, Tessa Maria Guazon suggests that this can be supported through multi-nodal efforts: “When people work at various scales, if one group suffers fatigue, then another catches them.” Similarly, Masato Dohi, co-founder of ARCH, reflected on the voluntary effort of Tokyo Street Count: “[with] just a small group of two or three people, we can only count a small part of the city and small part of the homeless population, but with hundreds of people we can count the homeless people in Tokyo.” (Nao Kasai further notes that the robustness of the count is not the focus of the argument, but rather that societal inclusivity starts from “I recognize you” at the grassroots level. “Our Tokyo Street Count is an effort to scale up this ‘I’ to ‘we,’ so we can say ‘we recognize you all’ as a society,” said Kasai.) Collaboration and solidarity are indeed keys to how responses of civil society, albeit often modest in scale and capacity, can have a greater collective impact during a crisis and in the long run. They enable groups to maintain autonomy and self-manage while working toward a common goal. By pooling together resources of different kinds, it creates efficiency and allows groups to adapt to changing needs and circumstances and scale-up. Barriers to Civil Society Responses With lockdowns and other extraordinary constraints during the COVID-19 pandemic, civil society responses have their share of challenges and difficulties as well. In Tokyo, Nao Kasai noted that because of limited capacity, the work of ARCH on street homelessness had to shrink. “Many street support activities rely on volunteers, and service providers had to redesign or stop their activities without volunteers during the pandemic,” said Kasai. As a social enterprise, YUI Associates faced a financial challenge during the crisis. With almost no guests by April, they had to close one of the hotels to reduce costs even though the demand from the homeless population has increased, including people who require special care. Other aspects of the widespread lockdown during COVID-19 posed additional difficulties. In Manila, residents from San Roque, an informal settlement in Manila’s northeast protested against the local government during the lockdown. They were dispersed and later arrested as they were deemed by the police to be defying the law against public gatherings. In Hong Kong, where there was already a ban on public gatherings issued by the government to rein in the civil unrest, volunteers handing food to the homeless in the park received warnings from the police because of the restrictions against public gatherings. “I know that some of our homeless friends. They get tickets. They get warnings and tickets from the police,” said Michelle Wong. She suspected that the police were using the ban to “scare them off from the park.” “I think they make use of COVID to get what they want right now because of the protests and also for the homeless; they don’t want them,” said Wong. Faced with this challenge, volunteers of ImpactHK resorted to a flash mob tactic to continue serving food in the park next to their office. Physical and mental fatigue came up as another important issue in the conversation. Tessa Maria Guazon described her experience in Manila, “after what we did for our women partners, I was totally just exhausted.” In her concluding thought on the first day of the webinar series, Shuyun Cao suggested, “we should not over-emphasize contribution or devotion to a great goal […] I think in that way individuals will be swallowed by those great goals.” Instead, she suggests attention to self-care and individual mental health, “then the empathy fatigue will not be that serious,” said Cao. Besides fatigue, it is also important to critically reflect on other challenges facing mutual aid and self-help. Cecilia Chu argued, “all these self-help practices [by migrant workers] when we presented them seemed very positive and enlightening, but in Hong Kong, it’s been really not seen as part of the civic engagement in the eyes of most of the local residents.” Furthermore, she suggested that the community self-help was in fact a reflection of their marginalized position “that so far has not been really breached.” Lastly, Shu-Mei Huang suggested that even with all the focus on the marginalized groups through civil society responses, some groups might still be left out. For instance, while we have better understood the struggles of the domestic workers, we still know rather little about factory workers and fishers, “migrant fishermen […] really can’t make it to public space over the weekend because they don’t have a weekend.” Implications and Lessons for Planning and Design Practices A key question on both days of the discussion concerns the implications and lessons of civic resilience for planning and design professionals, the main audience of the webinars. Iderlina Mateo-Babiano responded with a reflection on her training as a planner, “when I hear the stories […] I think that’s one of the learnings that as a planner we should take on.” “Sometimes we think that we know what are the lived experiences of those for whom we provide public spaces, but actually what we have thought of as the right solution, the right public space, may not really be the right one for the users,” said Mateo-Babiano. For Tan Beng Kiang, a key lesson from the civil society responses was simply to act. She thinks that as designers or as educators, “we can encourage our students to act, even if they are locked down at home or with limited access to visit [a site], etc., what is it that they can do to help? What is it they can do within their community?” Indeed, the cases presented by the webinar speakers would not have been possible without the actions and initial responses. Whether there have been pre-existing networks or not, the most critical aspect of community self-help has been the will and ability to act. While the focus of the urgent and immediate relief was critical, in the grand scheme of things, it’s also important to identify how civic resilience can be supported and cultivated on an everyday basis before and beyond the moment of crisis. As suggested by the role of pre-existing networks and organizations, it is important to engage these networks and organizations in the planning and design of neighborhoods, districts, cities, and regions, and ensure such engagement can help build capacity and strengthen relationships among the groups. Opportunities also need to be provided for those without formal affiliations. As evident in the outcomes of the pandemic, social disparities have been an acute form of vulnerability that threatens not only the underserved and underprivileged but also the society at large. As these social and economic disparities are often reinforced by the built environment, planning and design professions, by and large, have been accomplices to a structure that produces and reproduces these inequalities. Addressing these disparities and closing the gaps requires the built environment professions to play a more self-critical role and reflect on longstanding assumptions and practices. As we rebuild cities and communities to avoid future outbreaks of infectious diseases, we must ensure that the voices of the less privileged are not left out. As evident from the cases highlighted in the webinars, a seemingly insignificant change in the everyday environment and everyday life can have a significant impact on the vulnerable populations. Additionally, a well-intended policy or measure can have unintended consequences especially if the concerns of those who are not at the table are not accounted for. We must avoid the pitfalls that have plagued the rescue, relief, recovery, and rebuilding efforts in the past that have deprived rather strengthened the communities in need. Finally, as Kian Goh noted during the webinar, “mutual aid community self-help is not a cure-all.” There are structural issues that will require much more substantial effort and perseverance. But as the experiences highlighted through the webinar have indicated, seemingly robust structures can fail and when they do, civic resilience can play an important role in saving lives and supporting communities in need. Furthermore, changing and rebuilding the structures will also require the efforts of civil society in holding the state and institutions accountable. A deeper and more critical understanding of civic resilience is the first step toward the long-term safeguarding of cities and communities beyond the pandemic.

By Jeff Hou See the original post here. This series of articles represents the outcomes of a two-part webinar, titled Bottom-Up Resilience and hosted by APRU Plus in July 2020. Through a partnership between Pacific Rim Community Design Network and the APRU Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Hub, the discussion brought together a group of activists, organizers, and researchers across the region to critically reflect on their ongoing work in supporting the local communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, civil society responses including self-help and mutual aid have become critical to the survival of many individuals and communities, lending a lifeline to some of the most vulnerable populations in our society. In the Seattle area, the ground zero of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, citizen groups and community organizations mobilized to provide food delivery and relief for elderly residents. Makerspaces, architecture firms, and university labs shifted gear to produce Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. Artists volunteered and collaborated with neighborhood organizations to paint murals on boarded-up storefronts to support local businesses and deter vandalism. While many of these efforts may appear to be ad-hoc and spontaneous, others also emerge from longstanding networks and relationships. Together, they represent the emergence of civic resilience — the ability of citizens and communities to cope with and adapt to social, economic, and environmental disturbances. Compared with the common association of resilience with infrastructure projects and scientific analyses, civic resilience suggests the agency and power of individuals and civil society groups in responding to urgent and longstanding challenges. Seattle is far from the only city where such instances exist. Cases of community organizing for self-help and mutual support have also emerged elsewhere during the pandemic, including cities and communities in Asia. Through a two-part webinar titled Bottom-Up Resilience and hosted by APRU Plus in July 2020, a group of activists, organizers, and researchers across the region joined in a dialogue to share lessons and experiences from their ongoing work during the COVID-19 crisis. The webinars set out to examine the following questions: How do communities and social groups self-organize to address challenges during the pandemic, in particular challenges facing the most vulnerable populations in our society? What do these cases have in common? What can we learn from these civil society responses for future planning? What are the roles of researchers, planning and design professionals, and institutions in strengthening community resilience? This essay summarizes the findings and presents the key lesson learned in the hope of advancing the understanding and practices of mutual aid, community self-help, and civic resilience. Pandemic Inequalities With lockdowns, travel restrictions, social distancing requirements, and economic slowdowns, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused enormously disruptive changes to societies around the world. As schools, streets, and other forms of public and private spaces shut down in one city after another, the patterns of daily lives that were once taken for granted had suddenly unraveled. While a large segment of society can afford or manage to work from home, however, others are not as fortunate. As the death toll under COVID-19 has shown, cities and communities have been impacted differently, with the less privileged ones suffering a greater blow. Inequalities and the experiences of the marginalized and unprivileged were the main themes during the webinar with presenters sharing their first-hand accounts working with or learning from the homeless, migrant workers, and street vendors on the front line during the pandemic. In one case after another, we learned that a simple change in how urban spaces were managed could have a substantial impact on the populations that depended on them for their livelihood. In Manila, for instance, Tessa Maria Guazon of the University of the Philippines Diliman reported on the experience of street vendors during the lockdown, sharing that “many of those who sold their goods on the streets had no earnings having lost touch with their loyal customers.” The street that once provided a “semblance of security” was no longer accessible. The restriction imposed on transportation during the lockdown also “put the marginalized at a greater disadvantage,” said Guazon. Changes in mobility during the lockdowns had a disproportionate impact on different segments of the population. According to Iderlina Mateo-Babiano of the University of Melbourne, 80% of the Philippines population is largely dependent on public transport. Banning mass transit to prevent the spread of COVID-19 had a significant impact on those who rely on public transport. “The impact was felt hardest by the essential workers and frontline workers who still had to go to work but had limited mobility choices,” said Mateo-Babiano. In Hong Kong, homeless individuals, or McRefugees, were locked out of their usual refuge as McDonald’s was closed for a month during the lockdown, according to Michelle Wong, former program manager of Impact HK, a charity organization serving the homeless in Hong Kong. For those who had to report to work, such as the street cleaners, long working hours meant that many did not have time to cue up for buying masks even if they could afford to buy them, said Bernard Lee of Fixing Hong Kong, a volunteer organization that organized donations and distribution of PPEs to street cleaners and those in need during the pandemic. For migrant workers in Hong Kong, Cecilia Chu and Marta Catalán Eraso of the University of Hong Kong reported that “fears of contagion meant that employers were largely unwilling to give domestic workers their weekly time-off.” Specifically, they found 29% of the domestic workers have their days off refused. Foreign domestic workers were also not included in the almost HKD 300 billion government fund to assist industries and the public in Hong Kong. Many also do not have access to PPEs, according to Chu and Catalán Eraso. The situation in Singapore is perhaps most telling in terms of the demographic disparities. According to Tan Beng Kiang of the National University of Singapore, 95% of local cases are migrant workers living in the dormitories. The number of COVID cases is significantly high “because of the high-density living in the sharing of common spaces,” said Tan. Other seemingly simple or trivial changes could also have a significant impact on the less privileged. In Tokyo, according to Mago Yoshihira of YUI Associates, a social enterprise organization serving the homeless population in Sanya, during the pandemic people often eat at home and do not go out to drink (at bars or restaurants), resulting in a lot of household cans to collect. The price of cans went down as a result, with the price for one kilogram falling by almost 50% from 80–85 yen to 45 yen. This falling price presented a challenge for people who make a living by collecting cans. Vulnerable populations during the pandemic include not only the homeless and migrants but also those with chronic illnesses. In Wuhan, the first epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, medical resources were squeezed in the city, and many patients with chronic illnesses had difficulties accessing medical care during the lockdown, according to members of the Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society Yang Bao and Shuyun Cao who have been observing volunteer efforts in Chinese cities during the COVID-19 outbreak. Many of the challenges facing marginalized populations have long existed before the pandemic. In Tokyo, chronically homeless people keep living on the street and refuse to receive social benefits, according to Mago Yoshihira. “One of the major reasons for them to refuse services is that they do not like to stay at the institutional facilities […] Usually the bunk beds are provided, or one room has to be shared with another person. There are also lots of restrictions […] it’s not a good environment,” said Yoshihira. In Taiwan, where the local authority has successfully contained the outbreak of COVID-19, the social isolation and spatial segregation experienced by migrant workers during the pandemic was not new, according to Shu-Mei Huang, an Assistant Professor at the National Taiwan University. From an interview with a community worker, she learned that the migrant workers ”are actually better than anyone to live in isolation, and to maintain online, fragmented social interactions.” Organized Civil Society Responses It was in the context of disparities and inequalities faced by the vulnerable and marginalized populations that many of the self-help and mutual aid efforts emerged. At the webinars, it was interesting to hear about not only the range of efforts but also the organizations that undertook the initiatives. Specifically, it is important to note that many of the organizations existed long before the pandemic. Their efforts showed how they have responded and adapted to changing needs in the community, and how existing networks and relationships played critical roles during the crisis. Starting with Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon shared the effort of her research team as part of the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network, a project that started in 2017. During the pandemic, the team shifted from research to supporting community partners who were mainly homeless women and itinerant vendors. Using social media, the team solicited donations and organized “survival packs” for distribution to community members. Each survival pack provides one family with a week’s supply of rice, cans of sardines and corned beef, powdered coffee and milk, sugar, bread, and fresh vegetables. Multiple organizations from Hong Kong were featured in the webinars. Fixing Hong Kong is a volunteer group based in Tokwawan, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Hong Kong. Founded in 2015 after the Umbrella Movement, the group provides home repair services as a way to perform outreach to communities to promote democracy and community self-help. With the outbreak of COVID-19, the group shifted gear to organize donations and distribution of masks and hand sanitizers to those in need, particularly street cleaners. As of July, the group has received and distributed over 50,000 masks and several hundred liters of hand sanitizers, according to Bernard Lee. ImpactHK is a charity organization focusing on serving the homeless in Hong Kong. With limited staff, the organization focuses on linking the homeless, volunteers, donors, and their own staff. ImpactHK already had a food distribution program that served about 30 people a day before the pandemic. During the COVID-19 crisis, the program expanded to serve 150 people a day. The group also distributed masks and hand sanitizers, although they found the homeless were more concerned with having a place to stay and addressing other more immediate survival needs, according to Wong. For migrant workers in Hong Kong, many grassroots organizations and unions from the community of domestic workers have been active in providing extra support to those in need. According to Marta Catalán Eraso, these groups reached out to the community and gave away masks and other supplies donated by companies. They also provided moral, legal, and health support. The Indonesian migrant workers union even had an online meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo to discuss these issues. The first-ever global online rally of migrant domestic workers took place with more than 500 participants representing organizations from 39 countries, a testament to the power of the pre-existing networks among the migrant workers. In Singapore, several existing organizations have stepped up during the crisis. According to Tan Beng Kiang, NGOs such as Alliance of Guest Workers Outreach delivered meals to migrant workers who are quarantined or under a stay home order. A Singapore choir group “Voices of Singapore” organized a virtual sing-along for migrant workers and kids to raise funds for migrant workers. During the lockdown, religious spaces opened their premises for the homeless, including Malaysians who commute to work in Singapore each day but were stranded overnight because of the sudden lockdown and border closure. In Wuhan, the NGO Wuhan LGBT Center provided health counseling and medicine delivery for HIV patients. They also set up a mutual support WeChat group for people to borrow HIV medication in emergencies. According to a report by Jean Chong of OurRight Action International, “between January 26 until the end of lockdown on April 8, the Center delivered medicine to an average of 200 persons daily,” and “an estimated 14,000 persons received 130,000 bottles of medicine over the entire 74 days of lockdown.” In the Wanhua District of Taipei, a historic district with a high concentration of poor and elderly populations, the dense network of existing social service organizations provided much-needed support for the area’s residents and businesses. With large public gatherings banned during the early part of the pandemic in Taiwan, the network of organizations successfully moved a market event online. The event typically held three times a year since 2016 has been important for supporting local businesses and social enterprises. The success of the online event encouraged the event partners to continue working together, according to Shu-Mei Huang. In Tokyo, YUI Associates is a social enterprise that runs hostel-like hotels and a cafe in Sanya, a neighborhood historically known for a concentration of day laborers and homeless people. The organization operates two hotels for travelers and a third one to serve the homeless and provide them with a more comfortable and dignified environment. During the COVID-19 crisis, the group used one of its travelers’ hotels to accommodate chronically homeless individuals during the emergency declaration. It continues to provide food deliveries in the area for the homeless. Besides formal organizations, informal social networks also played an important role during the crisis. In Manila, Tessa Maria Guazon found that the drives for food provision during the first few weeks of the city-wide lockdown have relied on social media networks. “There was a resurgence of community kitchens, and efforts were pooled between individuals and the many citizen groups that social media helped gather,” said Guazon. In Hong Kong, Bernard Lee argued that many of these civil society responses during COVID-19 in Hong Kong have their roots in the protest movement in 2019. “Because of the protests, we are much better at organizing ourselves,” said Lee. Among the migrant workers in Hong Kong, there was also informal sharing of masks and sanitizers, as well as emotional support for those returning to their home countries under the lockdown, according to Marta Catalán Eraso. Emerging Mutual Aid and Community Self-Help Besides the existing networks and organizations, the recent crisis also saw the emergence of several new groups and self-organized initiatives. The formation of these efforts suggests new possibilities of community self-help and new forms of civic organizing. They also suggest the potential of civil society particularly in places where such a phenomenon was not expected or was not prominent historically. In Singapore, a society arguably without a strong tradition of civic actions, there has been an outpouring of support for mutual aid and community self-help during the pandemic. A group of students from the National University of Singapore volunteered as translators for the migrant workers with a hospital, “They translated common questions the doctors would ask workers into voice recording and text. (in five languages — Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Myanmar, and Chinese). These were used by the doctors when they communicated with the workers,” said Tan Beng Kiang. On the campus of the National University of Singapore, with a dormitory converted into a community recovery facility where migrant workers discharged from the hospital came to recover, students collected t-shirts and delivered them to the workers (as they could not go back to pick up their belongings) and offered financial literacy classes for the workers. At the Nanyang University of Technology, with the school in lockdown and the canteen closed, an undergraduate student who had just opened a noodle shop in the canteen decided to cook for hundreds of elderly citizens with donations from a crowdfunding campaign. With students having to engage with home-based learning during the lockdown, a group of volunteers formed a group called Community Against COVID that repaired laptops for students in need so that they could continue learning at home. Other groups included “Masks Sewn with Love” that “sewed masks from their home for the homeless, migrant workers, and other vulnerable groups,” said Tan. In Manila, Life Cycles PH was formed by a team of transport advocates, cyclists, and social media campaigners to provide bicycles to frontline workers in need of transport during the community quarantine. According to Iderlina Mateo-Babiano, through the donation of bikes and funds to purchase bicycles in bulk from suppliers, the group has delivered over 1,000 bikes to hospitals and institutions. Also, they have been able to match more than 400 bike lenders to borrowers in the community. Mobility and transportation during the pandemic was a challenge not just in Manila. In Wuhan, known as China’s punk rock capital, music fans from two renowned live houses together with other participants formed a group called LuMo Road Rescue. The group coordinated and gave rides to medical workers during the city’s extraordinary lockdown. Starting with mobility support, the group has since branched out to coordinate donations and distribution of personal protection supplies to those in need, including local hospitals. Wuhan was the site of many other self-help and mutual aid efforts, including those that serve the socially marginalized populations. According to Yang Bao and Shuyun Cao, volunteers formed a support group for pregnant women especially single mothers and same-sex partners. There were also pet owners who organized a support network to care for abandoned pets and those whose owners were missing or could not return to their apartments during the lockdown. The emergence of these novel, self-organized initiatives illustrates the possibilities for community self-help and mutual aid even in societies with a tradition or system of top-down governance. It suggests that when called for by extraordinary circumstances, community groups and informal networks may leap into action. Yet it is also quite possible that these self-help efforts have long existed but were overshadowed by the state institutions and cultural biases that fail to recognize these survival mechanisms.

APRU Global Health Working Groups provide a platform for experts and scholars to develop joint-research and share lessons-learnt. During a webinar held in May 2020, experts brought together by the Global Health Bioethics Working Group examined ethical challenges in both research and clinical care associated with COVID-19. The inter-disciplinary and international nature of the event offered participating scholars the unique opportunity to analyze these challenges from diverse perspectives and publish the findings in the Journal of Global Health Science. View the paper here. Find out details about the authors and the webinar here.

By Yojana Sharma Original post in University World News While many university leaders around the world fear post-COVID budget cuts due to squeezed economies and – for many host countries – a drop in fee income from foreign students staying at home, top universities in Hong Kong and Singapore say their research funding is relatively secure, which enables them to take a longer view. The disruption caused by pandemic lockdowns affected day-to-day university work and research, but COVID-19’s impact on all sectors of society has opened the window to changes in research towards tackling societal challenges that require a longer perspective and an interdisciplinary approach. “We should think out of the box and [take] the long-term perspective,” Wei Shyy, president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), told University World News. “We are not just trying to fight this particular pandemic. There are many large humanity-level challenges.” Research needs to be “purpose-driven” and interdisciplinary, Shyy said, adding that while this is often talked about, until now it has not been accorded sufficient energy or motivation. Shyy said there had been a move towards a more short-term approach to research in recent years. But as a result of COVID-19, “we have seen how connected many issues are, not just science and technology, but also policy, psychology, economics, culture and many other areas.” The university is encouraging academics and researchers to be aware of societal challenges in selecting research topics, even in fundamental research. “It’s not just pandemic research, but the pandemic has been an example. We are not de-emphasising any particular research area, just encouraging more mission-oriented thinking at the earliest stage,” Shyy said. “The research focus will definitely change to look at the more pressing issues of the aftermath of COVID-19, as well as some of the important challenges uncovered by COVID-19,” Tan Eng Chye, president of the National University of Singapore (NUS), told University World News. “Singapore has always been very forward-looking in not cutting the research budget,” Tan noted. In late May, ahead of a general election, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat unveiled an early budget for 2021, against the backdrop of the International Monetary Fund’s prediction that Asia, which saw the fastest growth globally in the past decade, would see zero growth in 2020 – the worst growth performance in 60 years. Heng announced SG$20 billion (US$14 billion) in basic and applied research funding for 2021-25, to also include research into “solutions for some of the world’s major challenges”. The current five-year research budget to 2021 is around SG$19 billion. “COVID-19 has given us an opportunity. We have resources now and this is perhaps a good time to make big changes to put us in a better position for the future. We do not want change to be forced on us, but to lead the change,” said Tan. With research funding secured, “we need to relook at our systems and how to make them more robust, to be able to adapt to shocks and shockproof our institutions and our community. But it also begs the question of the relevance of the university. The way we teach, we learn, the way we do research,” Tan said, referring to the need for a cross-disciplinary approach that will affect all areas. “Collaborations will be very important because we do not have a wide spectrum of skill sets and knowledge for a complex problem like a pandemic. COVID-19 throws at us problems and challenges that no single discipline is able to address. Because we don’t have all the strengths in one university, collaboration between universities will be important,” says Tan. “Universities have to depend on globalisation and the free flow of information because this is how we do research. We have to leverage off one another,” Tan added. “We hope that universities can stop the trend of de-globalisation and perhaps regionalisation, which we feel is not a good trend.” Even during the pandemic, NUS set up a major new collaboration with Peking University in Beijing on public health crisis management to exchange case studies on COVID-19 control in China and Singapore. “Peking University will have access to a lot of data and information, vital for COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccine development,” Tan added, while Singapore points to a very high survival rate as something other countries can emulate in improving public health systems. Climate change and other global challenges Shyy and Tan both mention climate change and climate change mitigation and resilience as future challenges to focus on, as well as artificial intelligence, automation and Industry 4.0. “During the pandemic crisis we noticed information security and cyber-security were threatened, so that is very important,” Tan said, pointing to the need to invest in backup IT systems. He added that COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of Industry 4.0. “A lot of this is already on our radar, but COVID-19 has accentuated the importance of this area and that we have to work on this much faster.” He pointed to longer term food security as a new research area, referring to the disruption in food supplies from neighbouring countries during the pandemic. Singapore depends on imports for 95% of its food, with only 5% produced nationally. “Over the next 10 years we need to increase that to 30%,” Tan said. “It is possible with urban farming, agritech and aquatech, and we need to research these.” University research collaborations slowed during the pandemic due to travel restrictions, but the university leaders said they will become stronger again. COVID-19 research Universities like HKUST and NUS, which serve densely populated urban areas, were quick to align research to the needs of the health system and society. The campuses at HKUST and NUS were mainly closed during their respective lockdowns. But in Singapore some 200 researchers continued with COVID-19 related research through lockdown in a shift system to minimise contact, developing among other things a ‘symptom checker’, now widely used in Singapore, which helped in stepping up COVID-19 testing. The Duke-NUS Medical School identified the neutralising antibodies for serological testing for highly accurate testing for antibodies that work against the COVID-19 virus. Some HKUST researchers were already involved in research stemming from the 2003 SARS outbreak which could be re-geared for COVID-19, for example, an anti-microbial liquid which can be sprayed on surfaces and is effective for three months. Another project brought into practice was an autonomous vehicle to deliver food and medical supplies without needing a driver. “Usually universities are considered to be a kind of ivory tower, but we have never been so closely linked to aspects of daily life,” Shyy said. Push towards interdisciplinarity Beyond the immediate crisis, the consensus among university leaders of the need for more interdisciplinary research is strong. Agile institutions like HKUST and NUS are determined to use changes in attitudes in academia to push through important reforms at the institutional level. Tan pointed to his own plans for NUS for “tearing down structures that inhibit interdisciplinarity”. “We are going to have a big overhaul of our academic system, by freeing up the structure and injecting more flexibility for departments and faculties to collaborate across disciplines. I’m also changing the financing and budgeting of our NUS system to facilitate this,” he said, adding that the changes will affect every university faculty and department. He acknowledged it will not be easy and there will be resistance within the university community. But the goal and timetable are clear. After changing the institutional structure, “the next step is to build a critical mass of faculty passionate about interdisciplinarity,” he said, noting that he believes he can achieve these changes within two years. “This would also have to factor in how we recognise and reward faculty members,” he said. But convincing students could take longer. “We need to ensure interdisciplinary research can feed on education and vice versa. It’s important for learners to accept this. We will have to work hard to make sure our students buy in. “Students would be easier to convince when we expose them to real life problems, to internships and experiences outside of the university in the real world,” Tan said. “We are trying to get the employers on board and, I guess, once senior students have gone through this and have seen the benefit, they will impress on junior students to ask for more.” New campus In Hong Kong, Shyy is keenly aware that interdisciplinary structures are extremely difficult to bring into an existing university, even one as young as HKUST, which was founded in 1991. “You have a disciplinary establishment – the departments, the schools – already in place. They are here to stay and they should stay, but on top of the disciplines you want to build bridges which is very hard because that is not human nature,” he said. “We need a reset, but the reset cannot replace what you’re already doing in your current place. That’s why we decided to have a new campus devoted to cross-disciplinary pursuits, starting with the academic structure. It won’t have traditional disciplinary units, everything there will be flexible and adaptive.” Shyy is referring to the new campus being developed by HKUST across the border in China’s southern province of Guangdong, with funding from the Guangzhou city government. It is scheduled to open in 2022 and will eventually double the faculty numbers and size of the existing university in Hong Kong. It will offer cross-disciplinary graduate programmes, for example, in autonomous systems, big data, public policy, population and socio-economic development. Other areas are sustainable energy, environment, equity or inequality of wealth, urban policies and city planning and development. Some 250 graduate students have already been enrolled, starting their programmes on the Hong Kong campus. It will have new, additional resources. “So we can have healthy research without upsetting the existing work that we are good at.” Shyy described the role of the twin campuses, with the current Hong Kong campus continuing with discipline-based and interdisciplinary research. “But from the ground up the new campus will be cross-disciplinary with disciplinary depth and support drawn from our current campus, which in turn will tap into the China campus’s cross-disciplinary energy and resources,” he said. “There will be two systems which don’t have to force each other to compromise. They will run in parallel, and we will leverage the talents and the approach from each other.” While the project has been in planning for two years, “the pandemic provides even stronger motivation,” Shyy noted. “Coincidently, it is a very timely opportunity.”

By Yojana Sharma originally published in University World News Several countries and cities in Asia were able to swiftly control local outbreaks of COVID-19 in part due to the use of contact-tracing apps which locate and isolate those who have been in contact with a patient, to better contain contagion. However, such mobile phone apps have raised data privacy and bioethical issues around their use in public health. “Public health relies on good quality surveillance,” noted Angus Dawson, professor of bioethics and director of Sydney Health Ethics at the University of Sydney, Australia. However, “contact tracing can generate all kinds of ethical problems,” he said, speaking at a June webinar organised by the bioethics group of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities’ (APRU) Global Health Program, noting that it raises issues of privacy, informed consent and confidentially. “One of the concerns is what actually is the data being collected,” said Dawson. “How much of it is identifiable data in relation to particular individuals?” “It is not just a technical issue but a medical one too,” he said, adding that “every intervention in the COVID area has to involve ethical considerations – whether we are talking about distribution of protective equipment, ICU beds, or hopefully in the future when we might have some vaccines.” Apps in use in the region include the Alipay Health Code app in China, which codes people as green or red depending on their health status and requires identity card details as well as full face scans. Hong Kong has the StayHomeSafe app combined with a wristband linked with the app. Developed by Gary Chan, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the app maps a unique footprint of a person’s locality. Stepping out beyond certain perimeters triggers an alert. Taiwan’s Intelligent Electronic Fences System app uses different measures, but with similar functionality. New Zealand’s NZ COVID Tracer app is based on a ‘digital diary’ of places visited by individuals by scanning the official QR codes, which can alert and be shared with contact tracers. Singapore’s TraceTogether app, developed by the Government Technology Agency together with the Ministry of Health, exchanges short-distance Bluetooth signals between mobile phones to detect other TraceTogether users in close proximity. The data is shared once the individual is contacted by contact tracers. The Singaporean app has also been adopted in Japan and Australia. Some of the apps have supplementary functions where individuals can input symptoms to create an alert. What happens to the data? Calvin Ho, associate professor in the faculty of law at the University of Hong Kong researching health and biomedical technologies, said international health regulations drawn up by the World Health Organization (WHO) “put a lot of emphasis on technological surveillance as well as rapid technological advances, but it did not quite anticipate the developments that have arisen from this particular [coronavirus] outbreak”. In many of the countries and cities where mobile phone use is high, such apps “have been very effective in controlling the rate of infections – many of the cities did not have to introduce a complete lockdown”, Ho said during the webinar. “However, privacy is a huge question. We do not yet know what is going to happen to the data,” Ho said. “There needs to be public discussion on what principles of data protection have to be observed.” For the public to be willing to take part, trust and transparency is crucial, he added. “In the midst of an outbreak, as we have seen in South Korea, for example, people are very conscious about social responsibility. There’s a very strong societal and peer emphasis so people tend not to invoke their right [to privacy] straight away. That seems to be the phenomena right across East Asia,” he said. But also in Australia and New Zealand, people were extremely cooperative. In Western Europe and the United States, people have been more vocal on privacy issues. “Privacy has not been highlighted as a huge issue across Asia, particularly in the initial stages,” Ho said. “But it does not mean these concerns are not there. Individuals remain concerned about what’s going to be used out of all the data that’s been collected about them. It’s very vivid in their minds.” Involvement of tech giants Ho described the use of such mobile technologies as a form of “mass surveillance”. Some ethical principles are not always followed with surveillance, he noted. The WHO Guidelines on Ethical Issues in Public Health Surveillance, published in 2017, state: “Those responsible for surveillance should identify, evaluate, minimise and disclose risks for harm before surveillance is conducted. Monitoring for harm should be continuous, and, when any is identified, appropriate action should be taken to mitigate it.” Ho, who helped draft the WHO guidelines, noted that they were drawn up with governments and public health systems in mind, rather than corporations or NGOs. Ho pointed to the involvement of technology giants such as Google and Apple in developing some of the apps in use during the pandemic, which raises questions of “whether we are further empowering very powerful industry players with control over public health measures”, and added that it is unclear what such companies will do with the data. “Technically, the data will be owned by these commercial developers. With other contact-tracing apps there should be an agreement with the public at the authority and then the data belongs to the public health authority,” Ho told University World News. Ho added that if such companies are not carefully monitored, “then ultimately it does mean that these huge commercial entities could potentially exploit public health systems and potentially vulnerable individuals, essentially for political gains or some kind of influence over government”. Balance of public health and privacy Dawson, who is also one of the drafters of the WHO guidelines, said COVID needs to be thought about as a “global ethical issue, and not just a concern to an individual”. Issues of data ethics and the balance of personal privacy often “come down to the advantages we might have through having that data”, Dawson said. Public health systems “can have very good reasons to try to understand what the levels of infection are in different regions and cities across the world and then use that to plan how they are going to respond”. He noted that with some of the recent contact-tracing apps, “some of that data is identifiable and some is not”. “We should not just think public good versus privacy. There are ways to try to think about how they are both important and we can put protections in place, for example putting coding attached to individual level data to make sure individuals can’t be identified,” Dawson said. Research ethics Bioethical principles used in conducting medical research can be useful in guiding use and data issues surrounding such apps. This kind of surveillance “is very similar to research in many ways”, said Ho. “It can involve similar methodologies and activities. These can include systematic investigation, medical record review and data mining.” Both involve human subjects and both can raise similar ethical issues, including exposure of subjects to risk, standards of care and questions about informed consent. However, Ho pointed out: “Informed consent is a basic tenet of research ethics, but it is often not sought in the context of surveillance.” Biomedical research has strong regulations in place and systems overseen by ethical committees in universities, hospitals and research institutions. “There is less institutional oversight for surveillance, which means app-based surveillance, data and research derived from it may not undergo ethics committee reviews,” Ho said. With academics and researchers well trained and experienced with research ethics, they can contribute to improving bioethical aspects of surveillance, Ho said, adding that university input into issues of data governance, accountability and transparency measures were likely in the wake of the pandemic. Mellissa Withers, associate professor at the department of preventative medicine at the University of Southern California in the US and director of the APRU Global Health Program, said the bioethics group within the APRU programme would continue to look at such issues to inform policy-makers. “A lot of the experts are involved in research ethics committees, and they are very active in reviewing the ethics of human subject research in their own universities, but more needs to be done across universities and, in particular, there is a real need for sharing and doing training in low- and middle-income countries,” she noted. “There was a lot of interest from [those in] the Philippines and Indonesia attending the webinar which shows they really want some guidelines and recommendations on bioethics. They are interested in building capacity around these areas and learning what’s going on in the field. “Structured regulation needs to be in place or at least these ethical issues need to be considered because there is the opportunity for [data] misuse by governments,” Withers told University World News. “We need more standardised policies that can be implemented across countries because it won’t go away even after COVID-19. The amount of data collected for public health purposes is growing exponentially every year.”

originally published in Tohoku University Tohoku University’s International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) Multi Hazards Program hosted a seminar online on June 17 to discuss strategies and early recovery lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. Moderated by Professor Rajib Shaw of Keio University, the international panel of speakers represented perspectives from the United Nations, government, the private sector and academia. Shaw described the COVID-19 pandemic as “one of the longest live disasters” of our time, and warned of seasonal dangers, such as typhoons and heatwaves, that still await. “It will be a long journey so we need some strategies to learn to live with risk.”   Kicking off the lectures was Yong-kyun Kim, Director General of South Korea’s National Disaster and Safety Control Center. He attributed his country’s success in “flattening the curve,” to decisive and transparent government policies and the extensive use of innovative technology. He cited regular government updates through text messaging and other forms of communication that helped authorities win the public’s trust and cooperation. ICT-based systems and mobile phone apps also gave the government some control in monitoring persons from high risk areas or those who are supposed to be in quarantine. But perhaps the most effective Korean response to the pandemic was the widespread testing, contact tracing and rigorous treatment, which Kim described as “the 3T strategy.” An innovative drive-through testing method allowed people to be tested from their cars, or to walk through a booth. Because the RT-PCR tests could return diagnostic results within six hours, positive cases were dealt with quickly, said Kim. Loretta Hieber Girardet, who heads the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction for Asia and the Pacific, explained how the UN has been working to prevent COVID-19 from derailing the work that had been going on around the world on achieving Sustainable Development Goals. “The world has been looking at COVID-19 as a health crisis, but it goes far beyond that,” she said, adding that the UN has been developing a framework to support countries on issues like urbanization, gender equality, human rights and green recovery. Antonia Yulo Loyzaga, President of the Philippines National Resilience Council, spoke on how the private sector can build resilience, and had three recommendations: understand local risks and vulnerabilities, invest in early detection and warning systems, and have a pre-disaster recovery plan.     She said companies should build their crisis management capabilities by learning from best practices across all sectors, adding that conventional corporate social responsibility is no longer enough. Disaster risk reduction, especially health security, should be embedded in the core values of all corporations going forward. Anchoring the panel was Associate Professor Takako Izumi from IRIDeS. She highlighted the impact of COVID-19 on universities and their level of preparedness to meet the challenges. Izumi, who is also the director of the APRU Multi-hazards Program, shared the results of an April survey of 65 universities in 29 countries, which revealed that nearly half of them did not have sufficient organisational preparedness when the pandemic struck.On the academic front, some institutions also struggled with the shift from traditional classroom learning to online-based learning. Izumi concluded that the following adjustments need to be made to ensure better preparedness in the future: – have adequate business continuity plans (BCP) and emergency management units – use a blended learning approach to education – raise awareness of not just natural disasters, but also biohazard and health risks – build a network with other stakeholders and be part of a wider DRR agenda – have designated funding to scale up preparedness “We see from this pandemic that an all-hazards approach to risk assessment is vital for academic institutions. This includes their emergency response mechanism, as well as information sharing and risk communication systems, such as early warning and evacuation plans,” said Izumi. “It’s also important to have drills and stress tests before the disaster, to make sure the plans work.” The 90-minute event wrapped up with the panelists reiterating the need to understand the interconnected nature of risks. “Certainly COVID-19 for us is a wake-up call around systemic risks,” said Girardet. “You cannot look at risks in isolation.” APRU-IRIDeS MH Program: http://aprumh.irides.tohoku.ac.jp/

On this page you will find: Resources Seminars, Workshops, and Discussions APRU members resources for Covid-19   We express our concern and support to our members at this very difficult and unpredictable time. The APRU Chair and Secretary General have expressed their concern in this letter to APRU members in China and Hong Kong SAR. To assist APRU members as you confront this health challenge and associated policy responses from around the region we have posted this web page. During the SARS emergency, APRU universities found it very helpful to know what others were doing to respond.  Therefore, we have put up this web page which includes links to members’ websites stating their policies and the actions they are taking.   APRU Plus: Addressing the Crisis   The ongoing COVID-19 situation has provided us with a reminder that even in uncertain times, APRU is a diverse community of people who lead, create, inspire and learn—together. APRU members are already sharing their policies and actions responding to the crisis on our webpage Coronavirus emergency and APRU universities.   As a service to our members, we have prepared APRU Plus an online hub of information for all of us working virtually. This hub gives members access to webinars, knowledge exchange, and communications updates about the ongoing health crisis and the universities across the Asia Pacific.   Resources   Universities’ Preparedness and Response Towards Multi-Hazards: COVID-19, Natural, and Human-Induced Hazards The APRU Multi-Hazards program hosted by Tohoku University collected case studies to learn about the efforts made by universities in the response and preparedness toward the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other hazards such as earthquakes, fires, and anthropogenic hazards. It also aims to investigate how to prepare for future pandemics and disasters more effectively.   This compilation which includes 26 case studies from 13 countries and region is a record of what had happened as well as the success and failures. It is crucial to learn from these experiences and to be prepared for future hazardous events. This publication will also be useful for universities to strengthen their current strategy and plan to establish a resilient campus against various types of hazards to protect the lives of the university community as well as the assets on campus.   Download the report   Vaccine research deepens university-industry collaboration   The intensified search for a vaccine against COVID-19 has pushed vaccine research to the top of collaborative medical and R&D research projects between Japanese universities, drug companies and the government in Japan.   For example, it is funding a university-led task force for joint COVID-19 research projects established by prominent Japanese universities, including the University of Tokyo, Keio University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Kitasato University and Osaka University, with experts from diverse fields, including infectious diseases, virology, molecular genetics, genomic medicine and computational science.   Read full article >>   UQ vaccine scientists report positive results from pre-clinical testing   Pre-clinical testing of The University of Queensland’s COVID-19 vaccine has produced positive indications about its potential effectiveness and manufacturability.   Read full article >>   HKUST’s All-Round Efforts to Help Fight COVID-19 Pandemic   The unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19 since December 2019 has been sweeping across continents, with confirmed cases surpassing 220,000 and death toll exceeding 8,000 worldwide to date. This highly contagious virus has quickly flared up elsewhere and become an unforeseen global challenge. The entire HKUST community as a global citizen has a role to play in the concerted response to this significant public health threat.   Read how HKUST is fighting COVID-19 now >>       Practical recommendations for the management of diabetes in patients with COVID-19   Nanyang Technological University, Singapore   Stefan R Bornstein, Francesco Rubino, Kamlesh Khunti, Geltrude Mingrone, David Hopkins, Andreas L Birkenfeld, Bernhard Boehm, Stephanie Amiel , Richard IG Holt, Jay S Skyler, J Hans DeVries, Eric Renard, Robert H Eckel, Paul Zimmet, Kurt George Alberti, Josep Vidal, Bruno Geloneze, Juliana C Chan, Linong Ji, Barbara Ludwig   National Response to COVID-19 in the Republic of Korea and Lessons Learned for Other Countries   Juhwan Oh, Jong-Koo Lee, Dan Schwarz, Hannah L. Ratcliffe, Jeffrey F. Markuns  & Lisa R. Hirschhorn Article: e-1753464 | Received 30 Mar 2020, Accepted 06 Apr 2020, Published online: 29 Apr 2020 https://doi.org/10.1080/23288604.2020.1753464   The second affiliated hospital released the Guidebook of Hospital Response Strategy to COVID-19   Zhejiang University   Drawing upon the firstline experience of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine in the fight against the pandemic, a guidebook – COVID-19 outbreak: Hospital Response Strategy was released on April 11, which offers applicable references to a wider audience.   Fast Funding for COVID-19 Science   Science funding mechanisms are too slow in normal times and may be much too slow during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fast Grants are an effort to correct this.   If you are a scientist at an academic institution currently working on a COVID-19 related project and in need of funding, we invite you to apply for a Fast Grant. Fast Grants are $10k to $500k and decisions are made in under 48 hours. If we approve the grant, you’ll receive payment as quickly as your university can receive it.   Corona Virus (COVID-19) “Infodemic” and Emerging Issues through a Data Lens: The Case of China   Jinling Hua and Rajib Shaw * Keio University, Fujisawa 252-0082, Japan; [email protected] *Correspondence: [email protected]   Building resilience against biological hazards and pandemics: COVID-19 and its implications for the Sendai Framework   Riyanti Djalante (a,b), Rajib Shawb (b, c,), Andrew DeWit (d),     a. Academic Programme Officer, United Nations University-Institute for the Advances Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), Japan b. Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR), Japan c. Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Japan d. School of Economic Policy Studies, Rikkyo University, Japan   female lab technician doing research with a microscope in the lab. coronavirus How Elsevier is supporting your response to COVID-19 Elsevier has made a variety of resources available to support our partners in the research, higher education and health communities March 24, 2020 – Updated March 26, 2020   Covid-19’s highly infectious nature means there is a pressing need to find solutions. Universities can help Image: REUTERS   From virus-slaying air purifiers to delivery robots, how university inventions are fighting COVID-19 World Economic Forum Agenda 16 Mar 2020 Wei Shyy, President, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 中文/日本語/Français/English COVID‐19 Effe cts on US Higher Education Campuses View report  The Institute of International Education (IIE) is studying the effects of COVID‐19 (coronavirus) on global student mobility on U.S. higher education campuses. The series is to provide more information about the effects that COVID‐19 has had on international student mobility, and the measures U.S. higher education institutions are taking regar ding international students currently on campus and those abroad, international students interested in studying in the United States, and U.S. students planning to study abroad. The first survey was launched on Feb. 13, 2020, and specifically focuses on the effects of COVID‐19 with regard to academic student mobility to and from China. As the COVID‐19 outbreak evolves, IIE will administer follow‐on surveys to the U.S. higher education community to monitor the unfolding situation and to keep the international education community informed. For more information, please visit www.iie.org or email [email protected].   Harvard University Coronavirus (COVID-19)   Seminars HKUST x University of Southern California Webinar: Sustainability as the New Normal – A Vision for the Future 17 November 2020 10:00am – 11:15am How will 2020 pandemic change the future sustainability policies in U.S., Hong Kong, China, and the world? USC Professor Marlon Boarnet and HKUST Professor Hong Lo, renowned scholars on transportation, environment, and urban planning; with Professor Christine Loh and Noah Miller, subject experts and strategists on environment and climate change, will talk about the new definition of sustainability after the pandemic and how the disruption forces us to change in every aspect. Head of Sustainability at HKUST, Davis Bookhart, will moderate the discussion. More information is available on the HKUST website >> Register by November 15th HKT >>   Japan MEXT Top Global University Project Online Symposium: International Collaboration in Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic Time: September 30th 17:00 (JST) Register here. With the spread of COVID-19, international exchange at universities is entering a new phase. Although online lectures have become prevalent in Japan, universities around the world are now considering various means of international collaboration in education and research including online exchanges and hybrid styles that combine both virtual and physical interaction. In this symposium, new ideas and case studies will be shared and discussed regarding the future of international exchange in education and research. By clarifying the common hallenges faced by global universities and awareness of these with regard to international exchange in the post-COVID era, the symposium aims to help sketch a new blueprint for higher education along with what international exchange should look like in the future. For more information about the symposium, please visit the website.   Japan and the World in the Era of COVID-19: Considering whether the new paradigm is a crisis or an opportunity Register here for the final webinar with a wrap-up discussion in English on July 29. COVID-19 brings significant impacts on peoples, countries, and the world. It is thought that this will bring earth-shattering changes in the future. By examining Japan’s response to the first wave of COVID-19, the analyses implied that vulnerabilities on informational infrastructure and delay of innovations and social implementation were showed in several cases. To gain a deep understanding of the new paradigm, Keio University has organized four webinars bi-weekly from June 17 to July 29. The series include a broad range of topics from health, technology, economy to law. Experts from Japan and around the world provide international perspectives based on their active involvement in fighting against COVID-19. For more information about the webinar series, please visit https://www.kgri.keio.ac.jp/en/news-event/070204.html View the recording here in English.   WEBINAR: Korea University Medicine The Next-Normal Conference 2020 This conference will provide a forum for discussion on predicting the “Next-normal” of human society, including health care, economic growth, development and leadership after COVID-19. Young-Hoon Kim, President of Korea University Medicine says, “it’s time to look for serious concerns and directions for a sustainable human society after COVID-19. We hope that this conference will provide meaningful implications and directions for us in the future, not only in the area of health care but also for social and economic areas of various fields at home and abroad.” The conference will be held in the form of a “hybrid conference” that combines online and offline participation. Date: July 23, 2020 (Thursday) Time: 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (Korean Time UTC+9) Enquiries: ​[email protected] Live Broadcast on YouTube. Simultaneous interpretation Korea-English will be provided.   Managing the COVID-19 Pandemic UC Berkeley Self-paced Free Course The course will provide you with a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the pandemic. We have gathered faculty with a wide range of expertise to deliver over 20 lectures addressing essential topics relevant to the prevention and control of this deadly infectious disease that has affected the entire globe. The course starts with an introduction to the history of global pandemics and lessons learned, and then moves on to the biology, epidemiology, diagnostics, and basic concepts in modeling the spread of the virus. The course then shifts to cover prevention and control strategies, including the populations most at risk during this pandemic and the systemic causes of these disparate impacts. Finally, we cover how organizations and individuals are coping, and look at the range of potential health and economic impacts of this pandemic that depend on our global and local responses. The course is followed by a short exam where we allow you to test your knowledge and deepen your learning. Thank you again for your interest in the course. We hope that this course helps you better understand the pandemic and what you can do to respond to it.   WORKSHOP: Using Coronavirus to Teach Science In this new global landscape, how can educators incorporate coronavirus examples to enhance student learning? In this four-week workshop, educators will practice applying principles of active learning, inclusivity, and assessment to develop student learning activities focused on coronavirus in their discipline. Disciplines might include global health, mathematical modeling, biology, epidemiology, sustainability, city planning, and others. Application Deadline: June 20, 2020 Cost: $500 U.S. dollars (If you are interested in attending, but the fee is a barrier, please contact us) Details: July 6 – July 29, 2020 Time: Workshops will be offered at two different times to accommodate a global audience. Mondays and Wednesdays 7-9 a.m. Pacific Time (Central European/Middle East/Africa Time) Mondays and Wednesdays 5-7 p.m. Pacific Time (Asia Pacific Time) We look forward to learning together with a group of educators from around the globe. Please be in touch with Elly Vandegrift, Program Director for Global STEM Education Initiatives with any questions.   [LIVE] “Biases, Norms and Culture: A Framework for Understanding Our Responses to a Pandemic“ Date: June 23, 2020 Time: 16:30 – 17:45 HKT (GMT+8) Register Now The COVID-19 pandemic has put all of us in uncharted territory. No nation is unaffected by the outbreak and there is no uniform formula tackling the crisis. We see varied approaches and responses from cities and individuals.  Join us for the upcoming webinar, as part of the global webinars under the theme “Navigating a World of Disruption”,  in partnership with KTH Royal Institute of Technology to learn how people respond to the pandemic from different perspectives—social & cultural, public health, public transportation, urban planning & design. Through the academic exchanges, we wish to better understand how the new normal will be in the post-pandemic era. Registration closes on June 23 at 12:00 HKT (GMT+8).   Medical Education in Pandemic: Screen to Screen or Face to Face May 22, 2020 16:00-18:00 (HKT) Hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong During the COVID-19 pandemic, many medical educators have continued to teach their students by adopting new methods in teaching and assessment. As educators, we believe in learning from experience. In this webinar, we will be sharing experiences from medical teachers and students around the world. The audience will hear that bedside teaching may be possible, online education can be conducted interactively, and social distancing may still be compatible with face to face examinations. Most importantly, the audience can gain some insight into the readiness of our students to be doctors during the pandemic. We will have speakers from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. Details can be accessed via the CUHK website. Registration is free on a first come, first-serve basis. Everyone is welcome.   Entering the New Realm of International Higher Education Higher Education Leadership Academy (AKEPT) Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia in collaboration with International Relations Centre (UKM Global) The National University of Malaysia (UKM) Email: [email protected] This program aims to discuss the impact that the current Covid-19 has had on international higher education and how universities are reacting to the situation. It follows through the plan of actions done by universities from different parts of the world in dealing with this global battle. The pandemic has changed what traditional teaching and learning environment used to be like and universities have to now accelerate their speed of transformation in adapting to these new challenges. The panel of experts consist from scholars to practitioners from four different regions sharing their experiences in dealing with this unplanned necessary change. The discussion includes their strategy in embracing this new normal of education and the preparations involved in realizing this strategy.   Tsinghua University – Didi Joint Research Center for Future Mobility March 20, 2020 from 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. (Beijing Time) Combating the Coronavirus with Big Traffic Data – China and the World Stay Hand in Hand, Heart to Heart Meeting Agenda Tsinghua University – Didi Joint Research Center for Future Mobility is holding an online seminar on March 20, 2020 from 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. (Beijing Time) with the topic “Combating the Coronavirus with Big Traffic Data – China and the World Stay Hand in Hand, Heart to Heart”. The seminar will focus on the applications of big traffic data analytics in coronavirus combat and the experiences that could be shared under international background. In-depth discussions and extensive exchanges will be carried out among leading experts from governments, schools, international organizations and enterprises.   Migrating a Whole University to “Online Real-Time Interactive” Teaching: An Experience-Sharing Forum March 18, 2020 The discussion covered issues such as: Strategic and Technological Decisions​, Faculty and TA Training and Support, Migrating Common Teaching Practices​ (From whiteboards to visualizers), Student Support and Feedback​, Assessments and Exams , and Faculty Experiences​. This webinar is for senior administrators in charge of teaching and learning. A recording of the webinar and resources can be found at the HKUST website.   APRU Members   Australia The Australian National University Contact: Jane O’Dwyer Vice-President (Engagement and Global Relations) Email: [email protected] The University of Queensland https://about.uq.edu.au/coronavirus-advice-uq-community Contact: Mr Rongyu Li Deputy Vice-Chancellor & Vice President (External Engagement) Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (External Engagement) Email: [email protected] The University of Sydney Coronavirus (COVID-19) research and expertise: Information to keep our global community safe Discover the latest research, analysis and podcasts from our University of Sydney experts addressing the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Coronavirus (Covid-19) infection: University of Sydney advice   China and Hong Kong SAR The Chinese University of Hong Kong Act Together Against Covid-19: https://againstcovid19.cuhk.edu.hk/ CU Medicine on Covid-19: https://www.med.cuhk.edu.hk/covid-19 Contact: Ms. Shally Fan, Director of Academic Links, Office of Academic Links, [email protected] Ms. Amy Chan, Senior Programmer Manager, Office of Academic Links, [email protected] The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Covid-19 Info@HKUST https://covid19info.ust.hk Contact: Eliza Tam Manager (Global Engagement & Greater China Affairs) Office of the Vice-President for Institutional Advancement Email: [email protected] Zhejiang University Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment officially launched   Chinese Taipei National Taiwan University https://www.ntu.edu.tw/english/spotlight/2020/1797_20200130.html Contact information: Campus Health Center: +886 3366-2156, (Office hours，8AM – 5PM） [email protected] Campus Safety Center: +886 3366-9119, (24hr）[email protected] Chile University of Chile Espacio en la web de la U. de Chile que agrupa los contenidos relacionados al COVID-19: https://www.uchile.cl/covid19 Encuesta de Monitoreo COVID-19 realizada junto al Colegio Médico de Chile Web para consultas para integrantes de la comunidad universitaria U- de Chile Iniciativas de integrantes de la comunidad universitaria en tiempos de pandemia: https://www.uchile.cl/ChileCuentaconlaU Propuesta para una Estrategia Nacional de Salud Mental en contexto de pandemia: https://www.uchile.cl/portal/especiales/covid19/163020/estrategia-nacional-para-salud-mental-propuesta-a-mesa-social-covid-19 Japan Keio University Important Notices on COVID-19 (University Measures) Osaka University Latest information about the novel coronavirus from Osaka University Tohoku University COVID-19 Information and Preventive Measures   Korea Seoul National University Link : SNU Academic Policies and Procedures against COVID-19 Infection Contact : 1) SNU Health Service Center : +82-2-880-5339 (From 9am to 6pm) 2) Gwanak-gu Community Health Center : +82-2-879-7131 (24 Hours) 3) Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(KCDC) : 1339 (24 Hours)   Malaysia Universiti Malaya Creating the future of public health México Tecnológico de Monterrey Coronavirus Covid-19 Coronavirus Announcement – Tecnológico de Monterrey Cuida tu Mente     New Zealand University of Auckland Coronavirus outbreak     Philippines University of the Philippines Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Advice for the UP Community    Singapore National University of Singapore NUS advisories:https://emergency.nus.edu.sg/circulars/ Dean of Students’ updates http://nus.edu.sg/osa/resources/dos-update   Nanyang Technological University, Singapore NTU experts fighting the COVID-19 pandemic on all levels Guide for COVID-19 remote consultation by primary carers designed by NTU Singapore scientist and peers   Thailand Chulalongkorn University Download the complete Summary of Chula’s responses to COVID-19. Chula COVID19 website: https://www.chula.ac.th/en/covid-19/ The Great Digital Leap Forward: https://qswownews.com/the-great-digital-leap-forward/ School of Integrated Innovation, Chulalongkorn University Moves to Hybrid Teaching Model Amidst Corona Outbreak CU Introduces Online Learning Innovation Center   USA University of California Berkeley For travel advisory: https://globalengagement.berkeley.edu/faculty-staff/international-travel-resources For health advisory: https://uhs.berkeley.edu/news/health-advisory-coronavirus-2019-ncov University of California Davis UC Davis Global Affairs: Travel Announcement: Novel Coronavirus UC Davis Dateline: Coronavirus: Travel Warning, Other Cautions UC Davis Student Affairs: Coronavirus Update; Precautions During Cold and Flu Season UC Davis Health: What you need to know about the novel coronavirus   University of California Los Angeles https://www.bso.ucla.edu   University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa https://manoa.hawaii.edu/emergency/coronavirus-update/ Contact: Anderson Sutton Dean, School of Pacific and Asian Studies & Assistant Vice Chancellor for International and Exchange Programs email:  [email protected]   University of Southern California https://emergency.usc.edu   University of Washington Novel coronavirus & COVID-19: facts and resources ALERT: COVID-19 travel restrictions  

The APEC “Healthy Women, Healthy Economies” (HWHE) has found that sex-disaggregated data and gender based research and analysis is lacking. Policy makers, business leaders and others do not have adequate data and evidence to draw from to identify gender-specific interventions appropriate for their economies and organizations. To spotlight and spur much-needed data and evidence, Chile, along with Merck’s support, has created an annual prize recognizing research that enables policy makers, business leaders, and others to identify and implement measures to improve women’s health in APEC economies so women can join and rise in the workforce. Dr. Mellissa Withers, Director of the APRU Global Health Program, was chosen to be one of the judges of this contest in 2019. Prize The winner of the prize will win USD $20,000, while the 2 runners-up will win USD $5,000 each. If the winner or runner up is from government then the prize money will be given instead to HealthyWomen (a women’s health not-for-profit). Alternatively, the winner or runners-up may designate a not-for-profit entity to receive the prize money. Please attribute the research to all involved in its making, but only one individual may be nominated and eligible to receive the prize money and present the research. Eligibility In order to be considered for this prize, individuals must submit an original piece of research that is no older than two years of age as of January 1, 2020. All are welcome to apply; you do not require a background in academia in order to be considered. However, the research must be evidence based. Furthermore, the research must be submitted in English. If the research was not originally written in English please have it professionally translated. Application Materials  Application (**Please use this for applying. Send completed version to [email protected]**) APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Application Form APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Prize Flyer For more information, please visit the APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies website. Contact [email protected] for any questions.

The inaugural APEC Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Research Prize is now accepting applications for outstanding research that strives to improve women’s health, economic well being, and inclusive growth. The winning entry will receive USD $20,000 and two runners-up will receive USD $5,000 each. Theme The prize aims to highlight and spur the creation of sex-disaggregated data and gender-based research that will help decision-makers make more evidence-based policies to improve the lives of women and strengthen the regional economy. Based on The Healthy Women, Healthy Economies Policy Toolkit, the five research topics are: workplace health and safety health awareness and access sexual and reproductive health gender-based violence work/ life balance Requirement Individuals must submit an original piece of research that is no older than two years as of January 1, 2019. Applicants may be individuals or teams (with one leader listed) who are from an APEC economy. No academic background required. The research must be evidence-based and addresses at least one of the topics outlined in the toolkit. The research must be submitted in English. Find out the full list of requirements. Must be an APEC member economy. Submission & Deadline To submit your application form, click here. The deadline to submit applications is July 5, 2019. Prize The winner of the prize will win USD $20,000, while the 2 runners-up will win USD $5,000 each. If the winner or runner up is from government then the prize money will be given instead to NGOs. See details here. The top three finalists will have the opportunity to present their research to members of the APEC Women and the Economy Forum in La Serena, Chile. The prize winner will be announced at the annual Women Leaders’ APEC Roundtable during the 2019 APEC CEO Summit in Santiago, Chile in November 2019. APEC CEO Summit is Asia-Pacific’s most influential meeting of business and government leaders. Contact Contact [email protected] with any questions.