The Institute for Basic Science (IBS) and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) held a meeting on April 6 at IBS headquarters in Daejeon. The meeting was held upon the visit of OIST President Jonathan Dorfan to IBS with the purpose of promoting collaboration between the two institutes. At the meeting, plans for collaboration and benchmarking were discussed, which will further support research activities and help establish measures and policies for institutional development.

▲ OIST President Jonathan Dorfan visiting the head office of IBS

OIST was founded in 2011 with a vision to develop itself into a world-class all-graduate research university in science and technology. It possesses advanced research infrastructure and competent faculty and researchers with expertise in their specific discipline. OIST is a highly globalized institute with foreigners making up more than half of its members

The visit of the OIST president is meaningful to IBS in that a channel for communication has been established between the two institutes to lay the groundwork for international collaborations and to engage in them actively “OIST has a strong interest in cross-disciplinary research and IBS is a research institute for basic and natural sciences. As the two institutes’ scope of work is largely overlapped, research collaboration between the two will be facilitated,” said President Dorfan.

IBS president KIM Doo-Chul will visit OIST in the first half of this year with specific benchmarking strategies and collaborative plans for many important issues such as the management of overseas research personnel, administrative and operative systems, strategies to recruit young researchers and research collaboration.

▲ On April 6th, IBS and OIST had a meeting for establishing research cooperation channel between the two institutes. From left, Professor KIM Yeong-duk, Director of the Center for Underground Physics (CUP); IBS President KIM Doochul; OIST President Jonathan Dorfan; Stephen Olsen, Emeritus Research Fellow of the CUP; and SHIM Shi-bo, Head of Department of Communications attended this meeting.

▲ OIST President Jonathan Dorfan expressed a great interest in basic science, looking around diverse experiment equipment of the Center for Underground Physics.