By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

The UCLA Global Advisors Council recently awarded 26 inaugural grants — 16 Global Education Awards and 10 Global Research Awards — to individuals across campus.

UCLA International Institute, November 25, 2025 — In 2023, UCLA identified expanding its global reach as one of five strategic goals.

The UCLA Global Advisors Council recently awarded nearly $500,000 in grants to do just that. Winners of the council’s inaugural Global Education Award and Global Research Award include 26 individuals across the university.

A total of 16 faculty, academic and non-ladder faculty professionals received Global Education Awards for Internationalizing Curriculum to revise a current course; design a new course; or design a new program, concentration or track that incorporates global perspectives. Award amounts ranged from $5,000 to $20,000.

Another 10 received Global Research Awards, which vary between one-year seed grants (up to $10,000) and two-year research grants (up to $20,000) focused on expanding an existing domestic research project, enhancing one or more international partnerships or engaging students and other partners in a research initiative that addresses global issues.

Award recipients represent the breadth of UCLA’s education and research enterprise, including the UCLA divisions of social sciences, humanities and life sciences, as well as the UCLA Library, Congo Basin Institute, Cotsen Archaeology Institute, Fielding School of Public Health, Geffen School of Medicine, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Luskin School of Public Affairs and School of Theater, Film and Television.

The five projects summarized below illustrate the multidisciplinary span of the 26 funded projects.

Black Radicalism and Intellectual Thought Across the Diaspora
Kyle Mays, Global Education Award

Kyle Mays is an assistant professor of African American studies, American Indian studies and history at UCLA. He will develop a new course that examines the radical thought of Black activists, artists and intellectuals throughout the African diaspora. In addition to examining how this transnational diaspora responded to the social, political and economic issues of colonialism, exploitation and racism, it will explore the importance of music, rhetoric and writing in challenging capitalism, racism and other forms of discrimination.

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Developing Universitywide Guidance for Globally Integrated Classrooms
Virginia Zaunbrecher, Global Education Award

Associate director of the Center for Tropical Research at the Institute of the Environment and
Sustainability, Virginia Zaunbrecher also manages partnerships for the Congo Basin Institute. Her project seeks to overcome barriers to participation in formal study abroad programs for students in many (scientific) disciplines by bringing together experts from UCLA’s Center for Education and Innovation Learning in the Sciences, Center for Tropical Research and Congo Basin Institute to develop universitywide guidance and tools for globally integrated classrooms that incorporate international instructors and students into course curricula and coursework.

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Inclusion of Global Voices in Introductory Chemistry Classrooms
Dory DeWeese, Global Education Award

An assistant teaching professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry, Dory DeWeese will revise the introductory general chemistry course, “General Chemistry for Life Sciences” (CHEM 14AE) to include highlights of the work of scientists from outside the Global Northwest. The course revision will help students develop a more complete, scientific perspective by acknowledging the work of scientists, past and present, from low and middle-income countries. Ultimately, the new course aims to change students’ conceptualization of who science is done by and who science is done for, as well as to enhance their sense of belonging in the field of chemistry.

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Spanish Language Acquisition in Children: A Transnational Research Collaboration
Victoria Mateu, Global Research Award

Associate professor of Hispanic linguistics in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, Victoria Mateu will build a transnational research collaboration to investigate Spanish language acquisition by partnering with Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM), Latin America’s largest university. Despite being the second-most spoken language, both worldwide and in the U.S., we know little about how children learn Spanish. The collaborative research project will expand knowledge of this process beyond monolingual English-learning children, addressing critical gaps in how both monolingual and bilingual children learn Spanish.

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Resonate 2026
Matthew Vest, Global Research Award

Matthew Vest is music inquiry and research librarian at the Walter H. Rubsamen Music Library, located in the Schoenberg Music Building. His project seeks to globalize the impact of Resonate, a global, open access musical score project created by Vest based on scores submitted by composers for inclusion in the Contemporary Music Score Collection. It aims to make scores from living composers more accessible for global research and performance and to remove barriers like submission fees that often limit the diversity of voices represented in calls for new musical works. Resonate 2026 will facilitate international performance collaboration, open access collection metadata enhancement and a formal phenomenological study.

Published: Tuesday, November 25, 2025