The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is actively engaged in 76 countries around the world, as evidenced in a recent faculty survey.

The survey, administered by the Office of International Programs, was completed by 109 faculty members who provided detailed information about their current and recently completed international activities.

“The last survey of this sort was conducted 10 years ago, so it is extremely valuable to have updated data to validate ACES' continued international impacts and to be able to quickly find who is doing what, where,” says Alex Winter-Nelson, associate dean for international programs.

Activities reported ranged from consulting and fieldwork to hosting scholars and participating in faculty exchanges. Themes reported ranged from commercial and digital agriculture to food and nutritional security, human health, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation.

The survey asked about activities within the past 10 years, and 115 of the reported engagements are ongoing through 2021.

“Also extremely valuable is that we asked faculty to list their international collaborators, so now have a list of 171 existing partners, mostly international, with whom we are already working in some capacity,” says Winter-Nelson.

The responses are collected in a database that will be an invaluable resource for ACES faculty to find collaborators and contacts in certain areas of the world. The Office of International Programs expects to have this database accessible and searchable by ACES faculty later this fall.

The countries listed by ACES faculty included: