Dr. Steven B. Case of University of Kansas Center for Research will lead a team that includes one senior colleague and two graduate students to China in late autumn 2005 for a planning visit to establish a research and education collaboration between the University of Kansas, Tianjin University, Xhengzhou University and Sichuan University. The collaboration will explore local atmospheric conditions (air pollutants), bioindicators and local biodiversity as measures of environmental health. The group will employ as their research methodology a Distributed Human Network (DHN) of scientists, science teachers, and students, and citizen-scientists from the universities and local K-12 schools in both countries to form a collaborative research community. During the planning visit, the PI and U.S. researchers will meet counterparts in the target universities as well as representatives of local secondary schools interested in becoming involved with the DHN project. One objective of the planning visit will be to assess the capacity of the counterparts to participate in a meaningful way in the planned research collaboration.
