ICReDD prepares to kickoff
University News | December 11, 2018
Meeting participants at Furate Hall in the School of Medicine. Photo taken by Yu Kikuchi.
Looking towards the official kickoff-symposium in March next year, researchers of the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery (ICReDD) at Hokkaido University met on December 4th to exchange ideas for boosting interdisciplinary collaborations.
ICReDD was launched in October this year as part of the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. The institute aims to undertake research to acquire an in-depth understanding of complex chemical reactions and to accelerate the efficient development of new chemical reactions.
At the meeting, ICReDD Director Professor Satoshi Maeda shared his vision for the new center, saying that new chemical reactions can change the world and our daily lives by advancing our health, industry, and environment. “Looking back at history, breakthroughs in chemical reactions have actually brought about big changes in the world as exemplified by combustion reactions in the early modern age and the Haber-Bosch process in agriculture. However, such breakthroughs are few and far between. One of our goals is to significantly speed up developments by integrating the fields of computational science, information science, and experimental science,” said Maeda.
Professor Satoshi Maeda (left) and Professor Hajime Ito (right) giving the opening addresses. Photo taken by Yu Kikuchi.
The Deputy Director of ICReDD, Professor Hajime Ito, emphasized that active participation by young scientists is essential to advance interdisciplinary collaboration and accelerate research. Ito also declared his ambition to make the center a truly international institution to achieve the highest level of scientific research.
In the following program, eleven principal investigators of ICReDD from various fields including computational chemistry, information science, organic chemistry, materials science, and medicine, introduced their research projects in search of possible collaborations for the coming years.
With the attendance of ICReDD’s principal investigators from the Max Plank Institute and the University of Strasbourg, the official international kickoff-symposium will be held in March 2019 at Hokkaido University’s Sapporo Campus.
Written by Naoki Namba
