Tohoku University is a Japanese national university located in Sendai City with 10 faculties, 16 graduate schools, 3 professional graduate schools and 5 research institutes with approximately 5,400 faculty and staff and 17,800 students. Ever since Tohoku University was established in 1907 as Japan’s third imperial university, its philosophy has been always “Research First” and maintained “Open-Door” policy for emphasizing “Practice-Oriented Research and Education.” Over the years, the university has offered world-class education to its students and succeeded in carrying out world-class research. Resolved to play a leading role, the university has come to a point in redirecting the future course of development towards three main principles which are “Challenge,” “Creation,” and “Innovation.” At its core, there is a spirit of “Challenge” that motivates its students and researchers to achieve a level of excellence required to build the society of the future.
Tohoku University has formulated practical strategies called “Inoue Plan 2007” (March, 2007) which is based upon the three principles mentioned above to aim for a “world-class university.” It consists of 5 areas – education, research, community service, the campus environment and organization/management. The university has accomplished numerous projects in the education area including reestablishment of its curriculum and adaptation of overseas internship programs. As for other areas, the followings are the on-going approaches the university is enforcing: encourage entrepreneurs to undertake business through industry-academia collaboration, upgrade its facilities to meet the international standards throughout the world, reorganize the human resource system in order to support the researchers’ competitive skills internationally, etc. Considering international cooperation highly important, the university is a member of AERU (Association of East Asian Research Universities), T.I.M.E. (Top Industrial Managers for Europe), GE4 (Global Education for European Engineers and Entrepreneurs) and Global E3 (Global Engineering Education Exchange) and is honored to be able to join APRU. These approaches have been successful in gaining acknowledgement as a university with distinctive education and internationality in Japan, which lead the university to be selected for various programs initiated by Japanese government.
Tohoku University has made an enormous step forward to create a new page to its 100-year-history in 2008 and our mission is to continuously encourage our researchers to pursue new types of research and education while promoting international exchange to facilitate the pursuit.
Australia
