Environmental Science Center

Yoshiko Tsuji

Universities have the social responsibilities of preventing accident, assuring safety and keeping compliance, while at the same time, they have the duties to graduate human resources with global qualifications on environmental safety. In recent years, universities are faced with ever accelerating dynamic, diversified, and interdisciplinary research activities with diverse and global members that are constantly flowing. As a result, we are faced with the management of advanced, complex, and diverse risks. Under these circumstances, there are limits in acknowledging environmental safety as just one of the infrastructures for supporting academic research activities. In other words, to keep producing talented people with the skills to solve problems in safety enhancement and environmental safety into the midth of research fields that are continually adding complexity and diversity, we need to establish new grounds in environmental safety science to handle the research fields where “people,” “objects,” and “utilities” mutually intertwine tightly in “space.”

Environmental Science Center, University-wide Centers in the University of Tokyo where faculty members of diverse background with advanced specialized knowledge about environmental safety gathered to promote academic integration of environmental safety science, enhance environmental safety standards in all fields of studies, and spread information about the accomplishments in and out of the country. The center, at the same time, makes contributions to management and education of environmental safety by applying its research results to develop hardware (equipment and facilities) and software (procedures, skills, and operations) for securing environmental safety, and establishing educational programs with the flexibility to adopt to any special field, rationally, effectively and in detail manners. In its efforts for establishing and promoting environmental safety science through integration of study fields beyond their walls, in the rapidly evolving fields of research and development, the center added, in its third period from 2013, double-post faculty members from other graduate schools or institute and enhanced its coordination with the university’s Division of Environment, Health and Safety Headquarters. We continue to emphasize promoting environmental safety management and education for novel, diverse, and academic research and education at our university.

43 years has passed since our inauguration Environmental Safety Center was established in 1975. We will carry on the accomplishments our forerunners have made, make adaptions for the future societies at the frontline of environmental safety, and pass on our contributions to the next generation. We will push Environmental Science Center into a worldwide hub for environmental safety education with a leading role in the field. As we establish world-class methodologies for environmental safety management and implement them in the societies, our university will be the model for compliance necessary for safe and secure societies in conjunction with the diversity and interdisciplinary researches with constant flow of people at universities. We are determined to pursue our efforts.

April, 2019