Dr Mike Collyer was among the delegation visiting Georgetown University to explore the development of existing research links in migration.

The University of Sussex has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Georgetown University in Washington DC to facilitate ongoing dialogue in research as well as staff, post-doctoral and doctoral student exchanges.

The new partnership builds on a long-standing link that goes back to the first student exchanges in the 1970s and officially to 1986, when the two universities signed an agreement to exchange American Studies undergraduates. The exchange continues to this day and a Sussex student will visit Georgetown this year.

Last week, a team of academics from the School of Global Studies at Sussex visited Georgetown to explore the development of existing research links in migration and links with researchers on climate change and refugee re-settlement policy.

They also explored policy making in the management of complex emergencies and in the area of global health policy, including the legal, regulatory and political issues associated with access to international vaccines.

Among the delegation was Dr Mike Collyer, Senior Lecturer in Geography at Sussex, who spent the 2012-13 academic year in the USA on a Fulbright scholarship and visited Georgetown as part of his research around the relationship between people on the move and states, forced migration, internal displacement and refugee movement.

Dr Collyer is a contributor to a recent publication on refugee movement that was edited by Georgetown’s Professor Susan Martin, a leading expert on migration.

Last week Dr Collyer and Professor Martin took part in an academic workshop chaired by Sussex’s Pro-Vice Chancellor (International), Professor Chris Marlin, and Georgetown’s Senior Vice President for Research & Chief Technology Officer, Dr Spiros Dimolitsas (himself a Sussex graduate).

The workshop was followed by a well-attended event for Sussex alumni who are based on the US East Coast.

Georgetown, which was ranked 160^th in the current Times Higher World University rankings, is very strong in liberal arts and social sciences. It has undergraduate programmes in nursing and health studies, medicine, business and liberal arts. Its strengths at graduate level are in arts and sciences, Arab studies, public policy, medicine, law and business.

The importance of the new agreement with Georgetown was signalled by the presence in Washington DC of the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Michael Farthing. He said: “Sussex is an international institution and strengthening links with other leading universities overseas is one of our key strategic goals.”

Georgetown is one of several US partners with which the University is exploring how to build on existing links. Conversations on research collaborations are also being held with institutions including Cornell, University of California Santa Cruz and New York University (NYU).