LEADERS: Paté-Cornell and Blacker are spearheading the initiative, which focuses on security, governance and health. Linda A. Cicero

Talk with a physician about disease, and you hear about controlling the spread of infection. Include specialists in law and business in the conversation, and suddenly you’re learning about the delivery of drugs across national borders at prices people can afford.

That’s the goal of conversations that risk management specialist Elisabeth Paté-Cornell and political scientist Coit Blacker are initiating. At the School of Medicine, “we sat down with colleagues and collectively expanded on something that could have been just a Medical School project,” Paté-Cornell says. “We opened the windows to a larger problem.”

Blacker, director of the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS), and Paté-Cornell, MS ’72, PhD ’78, professor of engineering and a senior fellow at SIIS, are co-directors of the University’s new international initiative. Modeled on previous interdisciplinary initiatives in biosciences and the environment, it will study three broad themes: pursuing peace and security, reforming governance and advancing human health. Blacker says Provost John Etchemendy, PhD ’82, was “very clear” about goals from the earliest stages. “He said, ‘Tell us what’s going on in the world, what the big challenges are, and then tell us what Stanford should be doing in reference to those problems.’ ”

More than $94 million has been raised for the initiative, with a $50 million lead gift from business partners Bradford Freeman, ’64, and Ron Spogli, ’70. In September, SIIS will be renamed the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, in recognition of their gift.

The initiative aims to double the number of international students—from four to eight percent of the undergraduate student body—and hire up to 10 new professors. Another $44 million has been pledged to provide need-blind scholarship support for international undergraduate students, to support the Center for Global Business and the Economy, to strengthen the international policy studies master’s program and to endow SIIS’s Asia Pacific Research Center, which will be renamed for its lead donor, Walter Shorenstein.

Blacker and Paté-Cornell hope to launch some faculty searches next year, and call for interdisciplinary proposals from current faculty soon. “Stanford’s not going to solve the problem of bad governance,” Blacker says. “And Stanford’s not going to solve the problem of risk. But what the trustees, president and provost are saying is, ‘We need to get Stanford in harness so that some of its energy and focus goes to these big issues.’ ”