Faculty members of Iowa State’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences soon will be traveling around the world to help begin a dietetics program at Punjab University, a women’s college in Lahore, Pakistan.

Carol Meeks, dean of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, said the Punjab University administration approached the college’s faculty about three years ago seeking assistance in starting a dietetics program at the university.

Meeks said the program would begin by focusing mainly on dietetics programs in hospitals, since most Pakistani hospitals do not have a cafeteria, and patients are fed by family members with food from their homes.

She said this makes it difficult for the staff of Pakistani hospitals to monitor what their patients are eating and make sure it will not be a detriment to their health during recovery.

Mary Jane Oakland, associate professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, will be traveling to Pakistan to begin the dietetics program with 10 students from Punjab University. Oakland said she will be staying in Pakistan for six weeks to work with the faculty, students and physicians involved in the program.

“It will be interesting to see the differences in health care; it will allow adjustments to be made in the program,” she said.

Meeks said the cooperative decided to start with a small group of participants to figure out how the program can be run most efficiently.

Future plans for the cooperative may involve exchanges between students in the ISU College of Family and Consumer Sciences and students from Pakistan.

Meeks said some of the students whom she talked to from Punjab University were very interested in coming to study at ISU, and she hopes the exchange will become an option for students at both universities.

“I really want student exchanges to develop because I think that it really broadens the students’ experience,” Meeks said.

Meeks also said as the dietetics program develops, she hopes to see the program expand to other ISU departments, such as child development, education and textiles and clothing.

She said some possible problems with establishing the program may be a lack of cooperation on the part of the Pakistani hospitals, but she sees many more opportunities for some positive effects.

“I think that a program like this promotes creativity and flexibility among the faculty and helps to develop some new ideas and different ways of looking at things,” Meeks said.

If the program becomes successful, Meeks said it could develop into joint faculty research projects and more similar programs could possibly be developed for universities in countries with needs similar to India’s.

Overall, Meeks said she is looking forward to developing a relationship with the faculty at Punjab University.

“They have a lot of shared interests with Iowa State; there’s a lot of opportunity for intellectual development,” she said.