Outline: The Functions of Institute of Sustainabiity Science
Sustainability science is a synthetic science for the next generation which harmonizes and synthesizes different disciplines with natural science as its core to develop the new Humanosphere. It aims to build a sustainable society by coping with human crisis, and protecting and creating the society’s sustainability. To create this new field of research, there are many COE programs in progress at the related institutes. With the objective of promoting the potential represented by these programs to an essential science for sustainable human existence, the institute functions in the following ways.
- Incubation of integration and synthesized research: Through public advertisement, the institute extracts novel points of view in the integrated and synthesized research to incubate them positively.
- Education: As the education program for the present, the institute is concerned with the master course of the graduate school at the coordinated field with Kyoto University Graduate School of Global Environment Studies as a part of the coordinated program with Integrated Research System for Sustainability Studies of Tokyo University.
- Promotion of integration and synthesis of different fields:
- Presentation of the results of researches: By presenting research at the institutes concerned, the institute encourages collaboration among different fields.
- Open seminar: the institute provides the seminar room for having an open seminar of each laboratory.
- The effective use of research facilities: the institute investigates facilities available for the joint use (including large-scale devices, special devices and conference rooms) at the institutes concerned, examines the ways to use them, coordinates for the joint use, and so on.
- Providing information: the institutes published newsletters (publicity activities), and operates the website of the institute providing information to wider audience as a representative of the institutes concerned.
- The proposal of the large-scale project; In case of proposing of the large-scale projects, the institute functions as an umbrella organization (including the function of planning projects)
- The institute aims to expand the overseas offices by organizing the existing overseas network (of departments, laboratories, and individual), and making more use of the existing offices (e.g. Bangkok and Jakarta offices of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies).
- Promoting young researchers: the institute encourages among various institutes with high-grade potentialities the fusion of broadly different fields, and promotes young researchers who will be concerned with creating Frontier Science which forms the core of Sustainability Science.