On 27 May, a ceremony was held to celebrate the opening of JSPS’s San Francisco Office. The venue was the Radisson Hotel Berkeley Marina in California. This is JSPS’s second base of operations in the US, the first having been established in Washington, DC in 1990.
The office is housed in a building near the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Its principal functions will be to provide and gather information and materials needed to advance scientific cooperation and exchange with researchers mainly on the West Coast of the United States. The office will also carry out cooperative activities with local research institutions, among which science fora are slated to proactively disseminate information on the latest scientific programs and developments in Japan.
Prof. Seishi Takeda, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, will concurrently hold the directorships of both JSPS’s Washington, DC and San Francisco offices.
The ceremony opened with an address by JSPS director general Mr. Motoyuki Ono, who asked the guests for their support and cooperation to the new office. He was followed by Mr. Masayuki Inoue, senior deputy director-general, Science and Technology Policy Bureau, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), who read in proxy a message of greeting from minister Ms Atsuko Toyama. Among the some 140 in attendance were consul general Shigeru Nakamura, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco; Prof. C. Judson King, provost and senior vice president, Academic Affairs of University of California (UC) System; Prof. Beth Burnside, vice chancellor for research, University of California, Berkeley; and representatives of universities and other scientific research institutions in Northern California. They all applauded the opening of the office as forming a new base for scientific exchange between the West Coast and Japan.
In remarks based on their own experiences in US-Japan joint research, Prof. Christopher McKee, University of California, Berkeley, and Prof. James McEwan Paterson, Stanford University, expressed high expectation in the success of the new office’s activities. Lauding JSPS’s international exchange programs for their effectiveness, other attendants were quick to offer various ideas on cooperative activities that the office might initiate. All in all, the ceremony was a very meaningful event.
Fully utilizing its East and West Coast hubs of operation, JSPS will strive to promote further scientific exchange between the US and Japan.
