RIKEN Advanced Science Institute
Director, ASI
Kohei TAMAO (D.Eng.)
The Advanced Science Institute is a new, and yet old research organ that was formed by merging the Discovery Research Institute, an organization promoting scientific activities in Japan using open ideas, and the Frontier Research System, a flexible body of research projects. The Advanced Science Institute will actively promote the development of research fields in new areas of science through RIKEN's strategy for consolidation.
RIKEN at its inception in 1917 consisted of the Institute Laboratories, which throughout RIKEN's history remained the core of the institute. Later on as RIKEN expanded and became an umbrella for multiple research organs, the ILs were reorganized as the Discovery Research Institute. The RIKEN of today as a whole inherits its philosophy from its forebears. Acclaimed for the great degree of freedom given to its scientists, it has always encouraged free-wheeling creativity and the open exchange of ideas. As RIKEN's core research organ, DRI employed about 200 fully-tenured researchers, engaging in projects in multiple fields of research endeavor based on their own creativity. RIKEN has always responded to the needs of the country, from generation to generation.
The Frontier Research System was launched in 1986 to actively push back the frontiers in novel fields. With limited-term contract researchers as its core, the FRS intensively invested funds and human resources flexibly and as required to conduct term-based projects that were novel and innovative. This philosophy has been highly successful, and it was adopted by RIKEN's strategic research centers such as the Brain Science Institute. This type of organizational management concept is now used at laboratories and universities throughout the country in many world-class research organs.
There is no other research institute like RIKEN in Japan, able to create and implement new ideas in so many diverse fields of research. Minoru Oda, the sixth president of RIKEN as a special corporation, expressed the ever-changing generation and progress of research at RIKEN by comparing it to an amoeba. In order to enhance its ability to create new fields of research, RIKEN has merged two of its major organs, the Discovery Research Institute and Frontier Research System, to form the Advanced Science Institute. The Advanced Science Institute will function as the heart of a circulating research system that creates initial ideas for research from the basic scientific studies done with researchers' open ideas, then cultivates these ideas strategically as new research fields, finally developing them into core research organs.
