Accessibility statement

Building international collaborations and partnerships

Finding a collaborator can be challenging, particularly if you are planning to expand your research into a new area, in a new country with very different civil, legal, financial and cultural conditions. Establishing successful communication channels and a trusting relationship are essential to a successful collaboration.

The Global Engagement team has region-specific expertise and can provide advice about international partnerships, including how to develop and sustain links at the individual, departmental and institutional level:

  • The University has many established connections with countries across the world with governmental institutions, higher education, civil society and industry.
  • The team can assist in drawing up relevant agreements such as MoUs, working alongside the Academic Support Office, the Centre for Global Programmes, and Legal Services.
  • The University is also a founding member of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) a partnership of 21 research-led universities with members in Europe, North America, China, Australasia and Africa.
  • The Global Engagement team manages a programme of institutional visits to countries which have been prioritised for the development of international links. These visits play an important part in building departmental and institutional links. Contact us if your department would like to be involved in any of our upcoming visits. 
  • We welcome visits from other institutions who wish to build links with York. The Global Engagement team can help to plan your collaborators’ visit to the University of York.
  • We understand that personal relationships often form the basis of wider links, so we would like to hear from staff with existing links which might form the basis for a new collaboration.

Contact information, including Global Partnership Managers’ areas of regional expertise:

Assistance can also be provided by the Research and Innovation Development Team and if your research has a commercial angle, the Commercialisation Team. 

Advice from funders

Funders themselves offer some great advice in building collaborations and some of the things that need to be considered when you work in collaboration on research.

The ESRC has produced some extremely helpful tips around collaboration.