In what university officials say represents a new approach to the internationalization of higher education, Columbia University is building a network of six to eight research institutes in capitals around the world. The Columbia Global Centers, as they are called, are designed for faculty members and students from various disciplines to collaborate on international projects with universities, government agencies, and other organizations abroad. Like a growing number of American universities, Columbia already has a strong international presence, including collaborations with a number of foreign institutions and several regionally focused institutes on its New York campus. But with the centers, which will serve as regional hubs for project-based scholarship, Columbia is headed in a new direction. As the world becomes more interconnected, many of the most pressing issues of the day are best approached not within a bilateral framework, but by groups of scholars and researchers from diverse backgrounds bringing their expertise to bear in novel ways. At the Beijing center, for example, a program on global risk, preparedness, and response to major disasters will involve, among others, experts in geography, engineering, humanitarian relief, and public health from China and the United States. The centers will also offer Columbia students opportunities to study and work abroad outside of traditional semester-length programs. In addition to the major-disaster project, Columbia will also use its Beijing center to expand an environmental and urbanization project called China 2049. Led by Columbia's Earth Institute, together with the Brookings Institution and China's National Development and Reform Commission, the project will forecast what China's economy could look like in 2049 and develop plans for water management and other needs accordingly. The university's architecture school is creating a Beijing design studio as well. Two other of Columbia's global centers will be in Paris and either Mumbai or Delhi, with the goal of having a center on nearly every continent. The other sites have yet to be determined. Although the centers will be hubs for project-based scholarship and are not, at least for now, intended to provide platforms for new degree-granting programs, each one will play host to programs, conferences, seminars, and exhibitions.