2019 New Year Greetings
New Year's address from President for 2019.
January 1, 2019
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology Hiroyuki Ohno, Director
Happy New Year. We look forward to your continued support for Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology this year.
A new era will begin this spring, and I believe you are all feeling renewed and working towards even greater goals. Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology will also undergo a change starting this April. The Faculty of Faculty of Engineering will reorganize and restructure its eight departments into six departments, and will begin providing advanced education to respond to changes in society. The Graduate Graduate School of Agriculture (Master's program) will also be reorganized from nine majors to one major and six courses, promoting education and research that transcends the previous majors. In addition, our university will cooperate with Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and the University of Electro-Communications to establish Joint Doctoral Program for Sustainability Research at each university, and will begin education and research in April. This is the first attempt in Japan to foster human resources who can obtain doctoral degrees and work in the arts and sciences as international staff, and is attracting attention.
Last year, we applied to several programs to further enhance our activities at the university, and the "Global Science Campus" program was selected, which has begun our efforts to train high school students to become outstanding researchers. In addition, our application to the JST Industry-Academia Collaborative Research Promotion Program (OPERA) was accepted, which will advance our research in optical sciences to the next level. Furthermore, our program that we applied to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's 2018 WISE Program in Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology was accepted. In this program, we are revamping our doctoral education, and one of the major goals is to produce female doctorates who can become candidates for executive positions in companies and other organizations. We hope that these efforts will further accelerate the sophistication of graduate school education.
This year marks the fourth year of the third Medium-term Objective plan, and we will make further efforts to achieve our four strategic goals. That is, we will promote ① strengthening cutting-edge research capabilities, ② globalization of education and research, ③ industry-academia collaboration with an eye toward internationalization, and ④ development of highly innovative human resources. The cut in operating expenses subsidies faced by national university corporations is a major problem, but we will make further efforts to acquire external funds, etc., so that this does not lead to a decline in the quality of education and research, make the doctoral program more attractive, increase opportunities for international co-authored papers and overseas dispatch of graduate students, and increase the number of international students accepted, and strive to achieve our goals. We are determined to significantly improve the quality of education while maintaining the quality and quantity of research to date. The mission of the university is to provide students with quality education. It is not easy to improve education while maintaining research capabilities, but in order to achieve our goals, we will review the way faculty and staff work and proceed with system reform. We will pool our wisdom, come up with ideas, and do our utmost to improve the system so that students can be satisfied with their campus life at our university and we, the faculty and staff, can work with a sense of fulfillment.
All faculty and staff will work together to do our utmost to make our university even better than before, so we appreciate your continued cooperation and support.
