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| On
the establishment of the 21st Century COE Program, "Center
of Excellence for Advanced Structural and Functional Materials
Design" |
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 The
industrial revolution to begin with, development and improvement
of new materials and functions have brought social changes and
contributed to human society. However, recent material research,
in particular metals, is specialized only in individual elemental
characteristics and narrow specialty fields, and there is a
feeling that the original mission of material research has been
forgotten. In the present project, we return to "the origin
of material science" to form an integrated research center
that contemplates the issues at the application stage and their
solutions, in a broad area of research that is strongly aware
of "crafting", which results so to speak from the
fusion of "hi-tech and lo-tech", spanning from the
basic physical characteristics of materials to their applications.
Every now and then, to promote autonomy, I tell students, "Japanese
graduate students are really students, those in Europe and the
United States are working people". The lives of Japanese
students rely on the money supplied by their parents or scholarships
only by name, which are loaned money from the Japanese government.
Autonomy is impossible, psychologically and in research, without
financial autonomy. To adopt post-graduate course students as
COE researchers and make them autonomous both financially and
psychologically. Also, to train "super elites" who
will lead the future of material science, through dispatching
to overseas research institutes, participation to projects by
collaborative Graduate School with the National Institute for
Materials Science, individual guidance from invited outstanding
overseas researchers, and so on. Please understand and support
the formation of this active international research center.
Center's Leader: Yukichi Umakoshi, Professor of Materials Science
and Engineering,
Vice President of Osaka University
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