Think Global, Link Global:
NTU and UTokyo co-launch interdisciplinary meeting for the first time on NTU campus

(Office of International Affairs News) University of Tokyo (UTokyo) and National Taiwan University (NTU) co-organized the NTU-UTokyo Joint Conference from November 30 to December 1, 2016. This was the first time the conference was held on the NTU campus. Joined by UTokyo’s vice president and 91 teachers and students, the event also marked the first time since the Meiji era that the century-plus-old Japanese university held an interdisciplinary meeting with one of its sister institutions in Asia.

Both sides have been working together as sister universities to hold bilateral conferences across various disciplines since 2015. In that year, NTU delegated the Executive Vice President for Academics and Research, who led nearly 100 teachers and students from over 30 NTU colleges/departments to attend the first meeting at UTokyo. The aim was to foster interdisciplinary exchanges among different fields.

This year, Masashi Haneda (羽田正), vice president of UTokyo, led a delegation formed by 91 UTokyo teachers and students to Taiwan. These visitors from Japan had 11 panel discussions with representatives from a total of ten colleges and five first-level administrative units of NTU. The total number of attendees surpassed 300.

The NTU-UTokyo Joint Conference 2016 kicked off with remarks by Pan-Chyr Yang (楊泮池), president of NTU, and Prof. Haneda on November 30, 2016. In his welcoming remark, Dr. Yang traced the history of NTU-UTokyo collaborations, which started from the school’s early years. As the world is ushering in a new era of creative higher education, President Yang also advocated the slogan “Think Global, Link Global” in a bid to innovate collaborative models between and among countries. On the other hand, Prof. Haneda urged both sides, as top research universities in Asia, to utilize more of their advantages that lie in various disciplines. In this regard, he expected inter-collegiate development of unique solutions to major global challenges.On November 30, Tei-Wei Kuo (郭大維), vice president of NTU, took the “Innovative Ecological System for Start-ups” as an example to illustrate his keynote speech. The theme was about interdisciplinary research and industry-academia cooperation. Then on December 1, there were the closing ceremony and wrap-up meeting, which featured two talks: “The Kuroshio, eddies, and typhoons: The link between the East and Northeast Asia” by Prof. Sen Jan (詹森) from NTU, and “Environmental Adaptation of Marine Organisms” by Prof. Susumu Hyodo (兵藤晋) from UTokyo. The 11 panels also discussed each group’s development and progress of their international studies. The goal was to lay a strong foundation for the co-launched interdisciplinary project.

Visit the website of NTU-UTokyo Joint Conference 2016 for programs and photos.