About Institute

The President of Yokohama National University (YNU) concurrently holds the post of Director of the Institute of Advanced Sciences (IAS), and effective top-down management governance system is in place. In addition, the “Steering Committee,” which consists of the YNU Executive Director (Research and Finance) and the deans of in-campus research institutions including the Graduate School of Education, is in place for research-organization management with their cross-cutting knowledge. Furthermore, the “Management Advisory Board,” which mainly comprises off-campus experts, provides support for effective and efficient realization of our various activities rooted in the principles of the establishment of the IAS, such as research strategy formulation, dissemination of research results to society, and collaboration with external institutions.

Each research unit in the IAS emphasizes and strengthens its efforts on both global collaboration with prominent universities research bases overseas as well as industry–academic–government–public–finance collaboration with domestic and foreign companies, public research institutions, local governments, financial institutions, etc.

Each research unit mainly comprises Principal Investigators (PIs), and “In-campus PIs,” “Overseas PIs” and “Industrial PIs” are to work together in each unit. In-campus PIs are YNU researchers with unique and outstanding research seeds. Overseas PIs are overseas researchers with international presence in their respective fields. Industrial PIs are industry practitioners with know-how to connect research seeds and social implementation. In this way, we strive not only to enhance the international academic value of our research results, but also to develop a research system structure that can continuously generate practical and socially impactful research seeds in “risk symbiosis” study fields, and realize rapid implementation in society.

Also, in accordance with industry needs, we form research consortia with off-campus collaborative research institutions and companies, with the aim of realizing solutions to social issues through research information sharing and joint and collaborative research with stakeholders.

IAS has arranged a research management system with strategic research planning managers and faculty members in charge of research clusters and they support various activities of research sections (research centers and research clusters/research units).

Closely cooperating with the Research Initiatives and Promotion Organization (including the University Research Administrator (URA), the Industry-University-Government Collaboration Coordinator, and the Intellectual Property Manager, etc.), which is a cross-university organization, we widely support research activities such as acquisition of competitive funding, post-award administrative management, outreach activities for off-campus events, and connecting with off-campus intellectuals/experts (researchers in other fields and organizations for utilizing research results)