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Mission
The Payson Center for International Development and Technology Transfer of Tulane University was established in 1997 to examine the impact of technology on every aspect of society and devise innovative applications to keep pace with and utilize these powerful new tools. First in introducing expanded knowledge and developing expertise through the educational process, with an eye to practical business uses, the Center focuses ultimately toward transforming and improving global society, constantly researching the vast, continually flowing deluge of new information and utilizing it to create innovative approaches and solutions.

Part of the Center's research revolves around the far-reaching ramifications of the Information Revolution on human behavior. Through the process of analyzing the unprecedented accelerated rates of progress affecting lifestyles in every corner of the earth, techniques are being developed to meet the growing need to acquire new adjustment and adaptation skills. Governments, corporations, educators, and individuals can be helped through the inevitable transition to embrace and welcome change as opportunity for growth, personal as well as professional, freeing the mind and imagination to penetrate unknown and uncharted arenas.

As Information Technology is rapidly changing our lifestyles, organizations worldwide are in the process of gauging their strengths and weaknesses in order to prepare to meet future challenges and capture myriad opportunities streaming into the new millennium. Institutions of higher education must also examine ways to use new technology to fulfill strategic goals.

Tulane University has already proved itself a leader in applying the latest technologies to training methods, forecasting, managing future events by being able to make informed decisions based on rapidly obtained, accurate, up-to-date information. By providing real-world problem solving opportunities in the field, the Payson Center offers an exciting, innovative educational environment for Tulane students through lens with a technology-inspired international focus. It has also successfully applied innovative technologies using creative approaches to programs for developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, accelerating progress by inventing tools to educate people in their native lands to become self-sufficient, making permanent contributions to their unique and individual cultures. On all five continents the Center travels and expands the path of illumination, examination, and construction of new techniques for delivery of education, research and service on a global scale.

Background
As the twenty-first century beckons, dramatic changes in global economics, politics and education are gathering momentum at unprecedented speed. As the primary catalyst driving this dynamic rate of change, the information technology revolution is forcing the reshaping of priorities, programs and policy for institutions, government, markets, and society worldwide. The Payson Center for International Development and Technology Transfer was established to meet the challenges brought on by this rapid explosion of new information.

Under the innovative direction of Dr. William E. Bertrand aided by the visionary support of Doris and Martin Payson, the Center is embarking upon a path to define novel modes for the global delivery of education, training, research and service in the constantly growing information-based environment and to develop and implement programs using the latest technologies. Tulane is proactively defining its place as a vital and viable institution within the global milieu, exploring how continual new technology developments affect and intertwine with institutional and societal change.

The first challenge being met head-on by the Center is to digest, organize and create methods to channel the available bulk of information being transmitted and captured by the vast international technology networks. In examining the impact of technology, instigating and disseminating up-to-date techniques, the Center is filling the gap for a qualified scientific educational entity to step in and create mechanisms to utilize and vehicles to direct the overwhelming onslaught of available information. The second challenge is to attract and garner the expertise of highly skilled professionals in technological, educational, governmental, scientific, medical, sociological and related sectors to create systems to utilize technology creatively and constructively. For two years, the Payson Center has been dynamically filling the vacuum for an established, recognized institution of higher learning to respond to the urgent need for experienced educators and scientists to invent methods for every spectrum of society to identify, digest and utilize the enormous opportunities made possible by technological breakthroughs in the foreseeable, and unforeseeable, future. The third challenge is to disseminate the far-reaching impact of the Center's own technological advances with ongoing updates so that the benefits and opportunities made possible by Payson Center's innovative programs and structures are available and accessible to peoples and institutions worldwide.

Through its graduate faculty, masters and doctoral candidates, impressive array of international consultants, experts and adjunct faculty experienced in technology and educational programming, plus the resource of career development professionals working with partner foundations and non-profit organizations, the Center continues to design and update CD ROMs, manuals, audiovisual aids and other training materials for educational programs touching myriad arenas where technology is no longer merely useful, but has become essential in order to keep pace with the rapid exchange of information now possible.

Historical Antecedents

• Development of technology-aided educational programs in 5 African countries in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID
• Implementation of the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) using technology to predict famine in 11 African countries
• Creation of an Applied Development training course for USAID
• Collaboration with Johns Hopkins University to create technologically enhanced courseware for education and training projects in developing countries
• Ongoing Masters, Doctoral and advanced courses for technology-assisted Applied Development education in Washington (IDB), Latin America (Colombia, Mexico) and West Africa (AID), China, Taiwan and Thailand.

The Birth of the Payson Center

Tulane University takes pride in its long track record in international development. Much of the University's current success hinges upon its strong leadership in immediately and effectively applying cutting-edge microcomputer technology to address and solve pressing problems in the field in countries around the world. No other US university has maximized its capacity to take charge and take action with such enormous success in the earth's most troubled places.

In 1984, severe droughts necessitating emergency airlift of food into Ethiopia and the Sahel Desert made international news. In response, Tulane designed a computerized tracking system to aid in disaster management called the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) enabling African countries to utilize reliable agricultural and social data forecasts to instantly identify and access the pertinent international resources available to take swift action in a host of emergency situations such as impending mass starvation and population displacement.

Using sophisticated new formats drawing from a large database, this rapid-assessment program continues to provide decision makers onsite and offsite with instant vital information on at-risk populations via technological channels and satellite data tracking. Tulane's more than two-decade-old involvement in Africa provides the knowledge base and practical experience to undertake a large portion of training in the African education program President Clinton announced in summer 1998 during his visit to African countries.

A recent outbreak of Ebola virus in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo--DROC) demonstrated the fearsome potential of unchecked disease transmission. Most of the Zairian physicians and professional health workers who managed and contained this outbreak were trained at Tulane Medical School and/or Tulane's Kinshasa School of Public Health in the DROC, which maintains one of Central Africa's first microcomputer laboratories, developed and still supported and operated by Tulane staff. Despite primitive working conditions and lack of sophisticated equipment, the outbreak was contained around the town of Kikwit because most of the local health professionals had been trained by or exposed to Tulane's innovative Public Health curriculum, having ingrained effective means of response and practical methods to apply them, due in large measure to the experiential learning approach marked by exposure to real-world situations in field-based training. The potential for global transmission of disease is still high, especially in developing countries but elsewhere as well. Recently, considerable attention was focused on transmission of tuberculosis from Russia to Scandinavian countries. Tulane's leadership in the formation and deployment of early warning systems coupled with its strength in Public Health positions the University to make a major contribution toward containing the further spread of tuberculosis to other parts of the planet. This imminent possibility is critical to US national security.

Information technology was as integral to the development of the Famine Early Warning System as it was instrumental in containing the Ebola outbreak. The ability to sustain technical field interventions depends upon how well the local populace is trained and developed to operate and maintain, through means of technology, close ties with sources of information and training from industrialized nations. Today, thanks to the development and training of local human capital and support from the resources of international universities, technology links are helping provide the assistance needed to sustain progress in many corners of the earth.

Tulane's major international operations have focused historically on medicine and health, particularly on training undergraduate and graduate professionals from many countries throughout the world. Among US universities, Tulane has performed a special guidance role in executing and implementing programs abroad. Tulane also specializes in educating mid-career professionals, many from newly industrializing countries, to undertake practical applied research in the field and to utilize new technological advances to meet growing health needs back in their home regions.

Universities seeking subsidies to send scholars into the field for intensive research now find they must equip these specialists with adequate hardware and software technology enabling them to access and send information directly to specific areas of the world in order to deal with significant social problems onsite. Many highly skilled field technicians trained at institutions like Tulane also need support and assistance in applying their expertise to individual needs in their own developing countries and communities after graduating out of the formal training process. The role as direct providers of training and development assistance for Tulane and other American universities is expanding to envelop that of information broker once their practitioners are trained and released and disperse to often fairly remote areas of the globe.

Tulane's Payson Center is forwarding, widening and deepening the path embarked upon by the University for more than two decades, advancing its solid, long-standing expertise in technology information transfer which has established Tulane as information and intellectual property broker between Western information producers and emerging industrializing countries. The University's programs in Africa, Latin America, and more recently Asia are providing unprecedented opportunities to link information and field workers around the world, thereby pooling their energy and resources to devise solutions to shared societal problems in the global village. The ultimate goal to provide information and develop the capacity for field workers to solve their own problems on their own turf's is an exciting proposition, a task the Payson Center is tackling step-by-step, and a vision rapidly being transformed into reality.