This study presents data from 44 major research university schools of engineering predominantly in the USA but also in Canada, Australia and the UK – about how faculty are collaborating or not with Chinese and Russian scientists. The study gives detailed information about how the cooling of relations between the USA and other major English-speaking western countries on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other – have impacted scientific and scholarly collaboration in engineering and science related fields.
The study pinpoints the percentage of engineering faculty who have co-authored articles with either Russian or Chinese scientists or who have conducted collaborative research with Russian or Chinese scientists. The report also looks into trends in the use of Chinese and Russian postdocs, graduate students and visiting scholars, and at how the newly confrontational stance in international relations has impacted such flows and exchanges of scientific personnel. Survey participants give their opinion of the likely course of scientific collaboration with Russian and Chinese scientists at their institutions, and their opinions of the more restrictive attitudes that have emerged in recent years. The study also looks at the extent to which scholars handle classified or controlled materials and their self-assessment on how clear they are on the restrictions such materials require.
The report helps its readers to answer questions such as: which fields have been most impacted by the chill in USA-China relations? What will be the practical consequences for the use of postdocs from China? Or joint scientific ventures in China? How has it and will it impact the recruitment of students from Russia and China? How knowledgeable are American engineering and scientific faculty about US export controls and how they may relate to joint research with scholars who are Russian or Chinese nationals? Are scholars from Russia and China treated similarly or differently? Do faculty feel that recent measures to restrict the access of some Chinese students to certain fields are racist? Or reasonable security measures?
Data in the report is broken out by a broad range of criteria including enrollment size, public/private status, tuition level and world university ranking of the participant’s parent institution, and by the age, gender, academic field, and political beliefs of the survey participant.
Just a few of this 168-page report’s many findings are that:
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45% of those surveyed had shared publication credit with Chinese nationals working outside of the USA.
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36% of respondents in biomedical or environmental engineering said that prior to the pandemic, cooperation with Chinese scholars had been increasing.
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More engineers from public than private colleges felt that cooperation with Chinese scholars would decline over the next two years.
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55% of universities in the top tier of global rankings felt at the would have fewer or far fewer graduate students from China over the next two years.
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Respondents from civil engineering were less clear than others about what kind of information can be shared with postdocs from Russia or China.
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12% of those surveyed had share publication credit with Russian national working outside of the USA.