Tatsuro Ishibashi, President of Kyushu University

We have published the “Kyushu University Faculty Handbook 2024”. This handbook provides newly hired faculty members and research fellows with concise and easy-to-understand information on a wide range of topics. The information includes the University's philosophy and policies, administrative organization, education and research systems, service and ethics regulations, use of facilities and equipment, and various administrative procedures. The purpose is to share the University's administrative policies and to enforce strict compliance with the laws.

Kyushu University was designated as a "Designated National University Corporation" on November 22, 2021. Based on that, we have made plans which show our direction and policy for the next ten years as “Kyushu University Vision 2030”. Our vision is to be a “university that leads social innovation with comprehensive knowledge”.
To fulfill this vision, we are working to solve social issues in the three areas of decarbonization, medicine/health, and environment/food and promote degital transformtaion, and are developing activities that contribute to social change in addition to education and research.

In line with this, in April 2022, we established the “Integrated Initiative for Designing Future Society”, the “Data-Driven Innovation Initiative” and the “Open Innovation Platform” as infrastructure to promote social innovation.Starting in AY 2023, the Integrated Initiative for Designing Future Society – “Think Tank Unit”- has been in full operation. It serves as a core organization for solving social issues by backcasting based on the ideal future society. In addition to starting collaboration with the three exiting units, the Data Driven Innovation Initiative has established an organization to promote health and medical data transformation in addition to education and research date transformation, and is also starting to promote business data transformation.

Moreover, in March 2023, we created a common platform “Kyushu ・ Okinawa Open University (KOOU)” to cooperate with 11 national university corporations in Kyushu and Okinawa area. This platform is centered on cooperative efforts in the improvement of research abilities. We are implementing drastic measures to improve research environments; something difficult to work on as an individual university. We also formed a comprehensive cooperation agreement with the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) aiming to solve social issues by producing excellent research results from integrating research using both universities strengths and characteristics.

We hope that all new faculty members and academic researchers at Kyushu University will have our vision and initiatives in mind while engaging in educational and research activities that contribute to them and that this guidebook will be helpful for you in all your future activities.