US Vietnam educational exchanges including The Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF)

The Center for International Training in Research (CITAR) is a program for Vietnamese graduate students studying public health at the University of Texas School of Public Health (UTSPH). CITAR was formed in 2004 to assist students from Vietnam with scholarships from the Vietnamese Education Foundation (VEF), a new small agency which supports graduate education in the sciences in the United States for two years. Support is supplemented by an AIDS International Research Program (AITRP) training grant from the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health for trainees interested in Vietnam's growing HIV/AIDs epidemic. The purpose of both programs is to prepare Vietnamese health professionals for research careers in public health and both sources require trainees to return to Vietnam after completion of training. Students may pursue any master or doctoral level public health degree program in any of the school's divisions but most have chosen epidemiology, health promotion or health policy. CITAR program activities include: 1) A weekly two hour research seminar; 2) A yearly one-week CITAR public health workshop in Vietnam in which UT faculty and CITAR fellows participate as workshop faculty; 3) Joint student faculty research in Vietnam.