Message from Head of the GIR

TUAT is promoting the globalization of our cutting-edge educational research in the respective interdisciplinary fields of Agriculture and Engineering. In 2016, to strengthen our role to “achieve competitive research capabilities on a global level”, TUAT reorganized the Global Innovation Research Organization into the Institute of Global Innovation Research (GIR), including two organizations: the “Women’s Future Development Organization” and the “Organization for Promotion of Tenure-track System”. We facilitate international collaborative research in the three priority areas of “Food”, “Energy” and “Life Science” and endeavor to enhance the further globalization of younger researchers. We invite the world’s leading researchers from abroad for each area as core members and build a system so that TUAT researchers and graduate students can conduct collaborative research which will boost the number of internationally co-authored papers and enhance to foster global-innovative human resources.

In April 2018, we introduced a flexible personnel system for promoting and fostering young researchers. We encourage selected ones to participate in GIR international collaborative research and give them the opportunity to study abroad, so that we can promote development of the future globalization of younger researchers.

In April 2020, we established a new international collaborative research center, the Global Research Hub (GRH), to further enhance and strengthen our research capabilities and strive for world-leading research. At the GRH, we promote international collaborative research in which TUAT has a competitive advantage, aiming to create an innovative research center for the continuous global brain circulation of talented researchers.

In April 2025, we launched the ARC Teams initiative (Strategic Research Teams for Advanced Research Careers), aimed at advancing the sophistication of our research activities by combining our traditional practices of hiring and inviting foreign researchers with the overseas dispatch of our faculty members. Under the ARC Teams framework, several faculty members who wish to take a sabbatical will be dispatched abroad for long-term assignments, working collaboratively under the guidance of their team leader. Through these two-way exchanges, we aim to simultaneously accelerate international joint research and strengthen the basic research capabilities of our faculty members.

We will make further contributions to fortify the university’s potential and to build the foundation for the university system reform.

We appreciate your cooperation and support in domestic and foreign affairs, as well as inside and outside the university.

Tomoko Yoshino
Dean, Institute of Global Innovation Research