In March 1991, university officials traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, to initiate an exchange agreement between UW–Parkside and the Georgian Technical University. Later in the year, Chancellor Kaplan and Vice Chancellor John Stockwell traveled to Ile-Ife, Nigeria to agree final details of an exchange agreement with Obafemi Awolowo University. In April 1991, a human-protein experiment coordinated by Associate Chemistry Professor Z. Richard Korszun launched into orbit aboard space shuttle Atlantis. Korszun invented a specialized device to "grow" crystallized human protein samples in the weightlessness of space, in the hope that the crystals will provide new information about the structure of proteins.