Overview

Institute of Science Tokyo (hereinafter: the University) operates under the vision of realizing a virtuous cycle based on academic excellence and thus facilitates research. The most important issue is the consolidation of the University's research infrastructure (devices, human resources, and operating systems). Various initiatives have been pursued to this end, including the consolidation of technical staff. There are many shared facilities at the University that the teachers utilize in large-scale projects. Moreover, many facilities have somehow been kept operational through the faculty's independent efforts, so it is difficult to grasp the extent of the burden on professors and equipment wear and tear. This is a big issue in terms of management strategy. One of our challenges is that we are not utilizing our talented technical staff as partners to facilitate the research conducted by our professors and researchers.

To solve these problems, the University proposed the Open Facility Center (OFC) in the "National University Management Reform Promotion Project" and established it in April 2020. This is an organization that is the core facility of the university, which supervises the research base of the entire university based on the management, education, and research strategy of the university and provides the highest level of research support centered on equipment sharing. Focusing on this OFC, we are promoting "I. Integrated management of shared facilities of our university" and "II. Certification and training of highly specialized human resources related to research infrastructure".

Among these, in "II. Advanced Human Resource Development", we will introduce a system to certify technical staff with high technical ability and research planning ability as technical conductors (hereinafter referred to as TC). TC is a human resource who can realize the research environment for the research concept of the faculty member together with the faculty member. It is a system that visualizes, evaluates, and trains such human resources. Also,TC College will be established to serve as a base for human resources development that enables research planning and management, which will be the pillar of the university's next-generation personnel strategy. Furthermore, we aim to form a research support human resources development network in collaboration with companies and research institutes such as the National Institute of Natural Sciences.