But for Chelsea "Chip" White, head of Tech's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the trip makes perfect sense.

The Stewart school focuses on simplifying industrial processes to improve productivity in complex fields like logistics, health care, computing and many others. As economies become more globally connected, the school has become a "multinational academic unit" active in transforming the way countries do business, Dr. White said.

In an interview with GlobalAtlanta from Abu Dhabi, he pointed to the school's top-ranked Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, which has operations in Singapore; Shanghai, China and San Jose, Costa Rica.

"In logistics, we know about globalization, and that means there are things that we want to buy that are made in places like China or pumped out of the ground in the Middle East, and we need to get them to the United States," Dr. White said. "The efficient movement of goods from origin to destination is far from trivial. We play a major role in globalization and world trade."

Georgia Tech is helping Abu Dhabi, the richest and largest of the seven city-states in the United Arab Emirates, build the educational base it needs to reduce its economy's dependence on oil.

Abu Dhabi sits on about 9 percent of the world's proven petroleum reserves, and nearly 60 percent of the emirate's gross domestic product comes from oil. The city is investing in education to ensure competitiveness across a broader spectrum of industries.

Dr. White is helping launch an industrial and systems engineering department at Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, also called KUSTAR, which was launched more than two years ago with ambitions to quickly become a "world-class" institution, Dr. White said.

"They would like to move their economy to more of a knowledge-based economy, and they need an academic structure in order to enable that," Dr. White said.

In the new industrial and systems engineering department, Dr. White will focus on fostering excellence in teaching, linking research with curriculum and tailoring the department's emphases to Abu Dhabi's economic development needs.

He's not the only Georgia Tech professor at KUSTAR. Steve DeWeerth, a professor in Tech's biomedical engineering department, is also spending the 2010-11 school year helping the university build curriculum and recruit faculty. An aerospace engineering professor from Tech will likely to join them soon, Dr. White said.

International outreach is essential for public institutions charged with developing the future leaders of Georgia's economy.

"It's important to the state. If you look at the state's economy, much of (it) is based on international trade," Dr. White said, citing the freight moved through Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and the Port of Savannah as huge economic engines.

Dr. White will be back in the U.S. at least six times over the course of the year. He'll also be speaking at conferences in the Netherlands and the Philippines.

He said the stereotypical image of Abu Dhabi as a place of opulence is accurate. He noted that it's home to the Emirates Palace Hotel, one of only three seven-star resorts in the world. He joked that the apartment where he was staying was "only five-star."

But the emirate's grandeur doesn't detract from its enterprising spirit. The city is filled with "hard-working, very actively engaged" people devoted to changing their economy for the better, Dr. White said.

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