About Us

In the Summer of 2018, an innovative new course by The International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) debuted, titled “COP4: Borderlands”. Over the duration of about 4 weeks, the collaborative effort between research universities exposed participants to themes of progressive field research and scholar activism, centered around the idea of “Borderlands.” Two of the participants from UC Berkeley, Sebastian Ong-Osmond and Kung Chen, returned to UC Berkeley for the fall semester, where along with the guidance of Khatharya Um, met with Kira Stoll, Berkeley’s Director of Sustainability, and a fellow student and OS Fellow, Mikayla Tran.

Over the course of the Fall 2018 semester, the three students synthesized ideas and projects surrounding how ideas of sustainability, scholar activism, and community outreach can carry out the work of the Global Transformation Initiative here at the UC Berkeley campus. Following this effort, Mikayla Tran, Kung Chen, and Varsha Madapoosi created SURG (SDG Undergraduate Research Group) as an IARU-inspired student group, focused on empowering undergraduates to take lead on local and global environmental issues through undergraduate-led research centered around the UN SDGs.

The International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) and SURG

SURG was established as a result of UC Berkeley’s involvement in the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU). IARU is a network of 11 research-intensive universities from nine countries that work together on a shared vision and commitment to educating future world leaders. In 2009, IARU created the Sustainable Campus Initiative to catalyze campus sustainability work of member universities by sharing best practices and by working collaboratively. Each member institution has a robust set of campus sustainability initiatives, and the collaborative effort to foster dialogue, innovate, measure successes, and develop solutions has both enhanced the Alliance and the commitments of each member. This spirit of collective action in the context of different national circumstances helped to shape the narrative on the role that higher education institutions can play in achieving the SDGs. SURG is one of the initiatives that UC Berkeley embarked on to help drive SDG driven research.

The current IARU member universities are: Australian National University, ETH Zurich, National University of Singapore, Peking University, UC Berkeley, University of Cambridge, University of Cape Town, University of Copenhagen, University of Oxford, Tokyo University, and Yale University.