Rosina Chia

1939 - 2020

Rosina Chia
Rosina Chia. Image Source: Obituary for Rosina C. Chia

Rosina Chia began her career at ECU in 1968 as a lecturer in psychology. At the time, she was one of five Chinese faculty on campus. Four decades later, Chia retired as assistant vice chancellor for global academic initiatives having presided over a virtual revolution in international education strategies by using the internet to enable global exchanges and understanding even during times of war, strained political relations, and even pandemics.

In the summer of 2003, two years after 9/11 and at a time when international relations remained tense due to the onset of American military action in Iraq, Chia embarked upon her monumental contribution to global education at ECU and the larger academic world. Along with Dr. Elmer Poe, associate vice chancellor of academic outreach, Chia developed an international curriculum initially called the Global Understanding Program. The innovative program used internet communication technologies to bring international students together in dialogues about global issues. The first course involved ECU students and their counterparts at Soochow University in China. Since then, the program has partnered with universities in Pakistan, Iraq, Russia, Switzerland, Gambia, Poland, China, Taiwan, Ecuador, Nigeria, Turkey, Venezuela, Japan, Kashmir, and dozens of other countries, enabling tens of thousands of students worldwide to engage in person-to-person global learning without having to bear the often-prohibitive expense of travel abroad.

Chia was born in Hong Kong in 1939, just two years before the Japanese occupation of that city during WWII. She subsequently spent her early years in the occupied mainland before returning to Hong Kong and then, following WWII, with the rise of the People’s Republic of China on the mainland, relocating, along with KMT Nationalist supporters, to the island of Taiwan. There, Chia attended the Taiwan Second Girls High School and then National Taiwan University where she majored in psychology. In 1962, Chia moved to the U. S. for graduate study at the University of Michigan. After receiving a doctorate in psychology, she joined the faculty at ECU.

In the fall of 1980, Chia made history, becoming the school’s first female chair of Psychology. Two decades later, Chia, having earlier served as interim dean of the School of Industry and Technology, partnered with Dr. Elmer Poe to pioneer internet-based approaches to international education, thereby broadening the global perspectives of many unable to travel abroad and, in the process, revolutionizing, with WWW-communication technologies, international education. By the time Chia retired, the Global Partners in Education Program included 47 institutions from 29 countries and was annually impacting thousands of students worldwide who might not otherwise have the chance to experience a more global community.

Chia’s work achieved a highpoint in May 2008 when ECU hosted a four-day Global Education Conference attended by 18 international educators. The purpose of the conference, according to Chia, was “to formally establish the Global Partners in Education.” Subsequent conferences were held in Beijing (2009) and Lima (2010), and most recently in Nijmeden, Netherlands (2018) and Bogota, Colombia (2019). In 2020, due to the pandemic, the 13th Annual Global Partners in Education Conference was based at ECU but held online.

At the 2008 Conference, then president of the University of North Carolina System, Erskine Bowles, welcomed the participants. In his opening remarks, Bowles stated “[This type of collaborative program] … is absolutely critical to the future, not just of this university but our entire state.” Bowles added that the ECU program will “produce young people ready to work in the global economy.” Bowles’ assessment was not hyperbole: since the first Global Partners in Education conference, the program Chia and Poe pioneered has continued to grow and now spans every major continent except Antarctica, enabling international communication and understanding for university students worldwide even in the most challenging of times.

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Citation Information

Title: Rosina Chia

Author: John A. Tucker, PhD

Date of Publication: 3/11/2021

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