Vassar’s mission is to improve Rice’s international profile

Vassar’s mission is to improve Rice’s international profile

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

Rice faculty who are involved in research collaborations with institutions outside the U.S. are of particular interest to David Vassar.

Vassar is assistant to the president for international collaborations – a new position created by President David Leebron to help achieve the Vision for the Second Century (V2C) goal of having Rice become an international university with a more significant orientation toward Asia and Latin America.

“Just sending students abroad to study does not make our campus international,” Vassar said. “My priority is to help President Leebron improve Rice’s profile internationally.”

VASSAR

Vassar’s primary field of expertise is in Latin America, but he also has experience working in other international corporate environments, including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain. He has studied or worked in Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina, so he is keenly aware of how business is conducted and how relationships in other cultures.

Vassar’s mission is to foster and develop relationships with universities and private and public institutions in other countries.

“Most of these relations are driven by faculty interests, so research collaborations will play a big role,” he said. He hopes to broaden those relationships to maximize their potential. For example, if a faculty member is working with a researcher at a university in Mexico, perhaps an exchange agreement could be worked out to bring graduate research assistants from that university to study at Rice, which would also benefit the campus’s diversity.

Vassar is currently working with Carol Quillen, vice provost for academic affairs, to develop Rice’s Latin America Initiative — the V2C effort to strengthen the university’s Latin American research and curricular programs.

Leebron noted that Vassar’s firsthand knowledge of Latin American countries is particularly well-suited for the institutional relationships that Rice is building. “It’s important that our international initiatives not be a copy of what everyone else is doing,” Leebron said. “David Vassar’s background can help Rice establish a distinctive presence in the increasingly competitive world of educational and research collaboratives.”

Vassar came to Rice from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he taught undergraduate courses in Latin American culture and conversation, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish while earning a Master of Arts in Spanish and Spanish-American literature. He is now working on a Ph.D. in Spanish-American literature from the University of Virginia.

Previously he had been an internal business consultant for Vopak Logistics North America and a senior consultant for DA Consulting Group. In these positions he provided training for clients in Mexico, Venezuela, Canada the U.S.

Vassar has an M.B.A. from Texas A&M University and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish language and literature from Texas Christian University. He is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, and he has spoken at a number of foreign language conferences in the U.S. and the 40th Southwest Conference on Latin American Studies in Merida, Mexico.