Each biennium, the University of Hawaiʻi produces an update report to document our progress in meeting our goals in service to the State of Hawaiʻi.

Efforts to internationalize the campus experience demonstrate the University’s progress in positioning itself as one of the world’s foremost multicultural centers for global and indigenous studies.

Visiting Scholars and International Faculty
In academic year 2010, 568 international faculty/staff and visiting scholars taught, conducted research, worked in academic institutional support positions, or participated in international exchange activities under UH sponsorship.

International Student Enrollment
In fall 2010, 1,816 international degree-seeking students were enrolled at a UH campus, with the majority coming from Asia.

Language Study
UH students can earn a certificate with an international component in about 40 fields. Students have the opportunity to participate in international exchange, study abroad, and specially designed campus-based overseas programs.

Fifteen undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have been hard at work behind the scenes to help Hawaiʻi a major international event—the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders Meeting in Honolulu.

Led by Mānoa Department of Economics Chair Denise Konan, special advisor on APEC to University of Hawaiʻi President and APEC Hawaiʻi Host Committee member M.R.C. Greenwood, the student interns have helped in various ways.

Read in UH News: Students work behind the scenes to prepare for APEC

Named after one of the first Belauan physicians, who attended his mother in the delivery room, Victor Yano became a physician himself and helped transform medical care in the Pacific Island republic.

After completing post-graduate residency, Yano returned to Koror to practice medicine at his country’s lone hospital

An early patient was a critically injured visitor, who recovered thanks to a neurosurgical procedure Yano helped perform after consulting with a physician at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu. The grateful family sent a donation to Koror, which funded neurosurgical equipment for the hospital and sparked Yano’s commitment to improve health care on Belau.

On Thanksgiving Day 1981, the Belau Medical Clinic opened its doors, operating on private funds, including $200,000 raised by the Belau community. Patients soon come from neighboring island countries to be treated by Yano.

In 1995 Yano pushed to establish the Pacific Basin Medical Association, which provides professional development and support to medical practitioners throughout the region. Ten years later, he was appointed to head the Belau Ministry of Health and in 2010, won easy confirmation as minister of state.

For three decades, Yano mentored every local physician now practicing in Belau, so it should be no surprise that one of them, Stevenson J. Kuartei, succeeded Yano as Belau’s minister of health.

Yano was a 2006 recipient of the University of Hawaiʻi Distinguished Alumni Award.

—from East-West Center: Fifty Years, Fifty Stories

Dubbed the “father of maize,” Soon-Kown Kim directed the Maize Green Revolution, a national program that tripled corn yield in his native Korea during the late 1970s.

The program provided seeds that spurred an eight-fold increase in agricultural production during 17 years with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria. His work with high-yield, disease-resistant corn hybrids resulted in five Nobel Peace Prize nominations since 1992 and a 1998 University of Hawaiʻi Distinguished Alumni Award.

The son of a poor rural farmer, Kim knew firsthand the pangs of hunger. He studied agriculture in Korean and Hawaiʻi, where he worked with College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources horticulturalist Jim Brewbaker to developed corn seed resistant to the insects, parasites and diseases in South Korea.

“With this corn, I can change the world,” he thought, offering to go to jail if he failed in order to persuade Korean farmers and officials to try his seeds.

Kim spent 17 years in Africa, applying his hybrid techniques to produce high yielding crops farmers could grow without relying on chemicals to combat the pervasive maize streak virus.

Kim returned to Korea in 1995 as professor and director of the International Agricultural Institute at Kyungpook National University and instituted the Corn for Peace program to help restore relations between North and South Korea through technical assistance and seed/food aid.

“Corn doesn’t know Korea is divided,” he maintains.

John Nealon

An instructor and his student from the Center for Interpretation and Translation Studies 2011 Summer Intensive Interpreter Training program are serving as escort interpreters for a Spanish-speaking president and first lady during APEC leaders week. Simultaneous and consecutive interpreting instructor John Nealon recommended his student Katherine Porras for the assignment.

Ten members of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa men’s basketball team spent 16 days in August playing exhibition ball, expanding their horizons and cultivating new fans in China and Japan.

Japan National Museum of Ethnology anthropologist Ritsuko Kikusawa earned her doctorate in linguistics while she was a Crown Prince Akihito Scholar at the University of Hawaiʻi.

One of 132 scholar who have received support through the scholarship established by a Hawaiʻi man to honor Japenese emporer’s wedding, she was honored at the scholarship foundation’s 50th anniversary banquet.

Kikusawa has done pioneering work in the comparative grammar of Oceanic languages (including Hawaiian), reconstruction of the language of the first inhabitants of Fiji and Polynesia and discovery of how giant water taro was introduced into the Pacific area.

Primarily thought of as an internment site for Hawaiʻi residents of Japanese ancestry, the Honouliuli Camp in central Oʻahu also held Japanese, Okinawan, Korean and European prisoners of war and U.S. citizens of Italian, Irish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Finnish ancestry during World War II. A UH West Oʻahu team is unlocking the site’s long held secrets.