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Stephen Schroeder figures making life easier for people with disabilities should be a goal that transcends cultures.

With that in mind, the retired director of Kansas University's Institute for Life Span Studies next week will leave Lawrence to lead a center for disability research in Saudi Arabia.

"It's an area of peaceful collaboration and goodwill," he said of disability research.

Schroeder will be director of the Prince Salman Center for Disability Research in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The center, funded by the Saudi government and private donors, conducts its own research and provides grants for research at other agencies.

The center first approached Schroeder about its director position two years ago, but he declined the offer. Schroeder instead suggested a friend, Terrence Dolan, who was his counterpart at the University of Wisconsin. Dolan took a year leave of absence to head the Salman Center.

Schroeder, 65, said the timing of Dolan's departure, which came about the same time as Schroeder's retirement in October after 10 years as director of the KU institute, led him to accept the job in Saudi Arabia.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks also helped persuade Schroeder to want to learn more about another culture.

"I thought that we know so little about the Middle East, and our views are totally colored by the Western media and our politicians," he said. "We need to go over there and find out for ourselves, to find out what things look like from their point of view."

Schroeder said Saudi Arabian leaders often looked to American researchers for guidance on how to create a strong research infrastructure. The Salman Center has about 30 staff members and is about 15 years old.

One of the center's main focuses has been birth defects, which occur about five times more often in Saudi Arabia than in the United States.

That's a result of intermarriage within the approximately 10 families that make up the country.

Schroeder said researchers were finding birth defects that are different from those in other parts of the world. For instance, scientists found a mutation that causes cystic fibrosis on a gene different from the gene that usually causes the disease in the United States.

Another area of emphasis has been language development. Most speech pathologists in Saudi Arabia use language tests that were designed for English.

"They've got more sounds (in Arabic) than we do," he said. "They've got more letters than we do."

Schroeder said one of his goals would be to determine other areas for research. One may be environmental health. With so much oil production in Saudi Arabia, its residents may be exposed to toxic chemicals, he said.

To prepare for his new job, which he expects to keep two years, Schroeder has been studying Arabic and the Koran.

"It's a very different culture," he said. "I'm going to learn a lot."