Greetings from the Director

Director Hideaki Takayanagi

Nowadays, advanced frontier research inevitably necessitates international collaboration and collaborative activities as a major driving force. While each institute/center of the National Institute of Natural Sciences (NINS) has been actively developing international joint researches in its respective research fields, NINS is destined strongly to promote interdisciplinary collaborative researches which are not confined within territories of specific research fields. To realize this idea, the International Research Collaboration Center (IRCC) was established in August 2018 as a center for the international development of comprehensive natural sciences.

International research collaborations are usually based on personal relationship between individual researchers, but IRCC aims to establish constant alliances between research organizations, so that we can maintain more stable relationships and wider scopes for research targets. IRCC operates in tight cooperation with the NINS international branch offices, which NINS set up at Princeton University, USA and in Bonn, Germany.

IRCC has two divisions now and will have additional divisions for research units of interdisciplinary fields. Currently, we have started the "Research Unit for Astro-fusion Plasma Physics (IRCC-AFP)" which conducts research in the integrated fields of astro plasma physics and fusion plasma physics, and the "Research Unit for Quantitative and Imaging Biology (IRCC-QIB)" which attacks the mystery of life by combined use of quantitative biological analysis and new imaging techniques. IRCC-AFP and IRCC-QIB are operated under the organizational collaboration of Princeton University, Max Planck Institutes and NINS, and Princeton University and NINS, respectively. In these research units, young full-time researchers are actively developing international researches.

April 2022