Understanding the nature of US-China research collaborations on COVID-19

Research by Professor Jenny Lee and Higher Education doctoral candidate John Haupt found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the US and China collaborated more frequently on pandemic-related research than on other research in the previous five years. To better understand how these collaborations occurred, Lee and Haupt recently received a National Science Foundation Rapid Grant. In addition to examining how US-China research collaboration on COVID-19 occurred, they will examine how scientific nationalism and global competitiveness shaped these collaborations. The second part of their research will examine the extent to which securitization may have supported or hindered the COVID-19 research collaboration, as well as its impact on future collaboration.

The findings from their research will generate crucial insights on how to effectively balance the need to rapidly produce knowledge, overcome disruptions to research processes, and ensure research abides by established regulatory protocols. Furthermore, it will contribute to current understandings of the relationship between the nation-state and international science cooperation, particularly the impact that global crises and geopolitics may have on scientists’ abilities to engage in the global knowledge network to produce knowledge on urgent cross-border issues.