Message from the Director (Tohru MIZUUCHI)

In order to keep the rich environment of the earth and to realize sustainable development of human beings on the earth, we have to find solutions for the global environment and energy issues. Institute of Advanced Energy (IAE) was established in 1996 for the investigation of energy science and technology aiming at sophistication of every processes during the energy generation, energy conversion, and energy utilization.

The energy system for next generation should be an environment-friendly (or ecologically sustainable) one. "Advanced Energy", which is crowned as the name of our institute, means an energy that has high-level compatibility between the "quality" ensuring the environmental-friendliness and the "sufficient amount" covering the global energy demand. Toward realization of such an Advanced Energy system, we are preforming interdisciplinary studies to explore the new science and technology for the Advanced Energy. At the same time, we educate students for excellent scientists/engineers in energy relating fields as a member of the Graduate School of Energy Science, Kyoto University, as well as train up young researchers, including post-doctoral fellows.

Since the establishment of IAE, "collaborative research" is an important key-word of the institute. We have been conducting a lot of collaborative research with domestic and international colleagues. Here, we are also acting as a core institution of international energy researches, especially in the Asian region. Encounter of wisdoms from different academic fields can make a chance to provide new academic fields. "Cooperation with scientists from different academic fields" is another key word of our institution.

Since 2010, we have proposed a concept of "Zero-emission Energy (ZE)" as an innovative concept for Advanced Energy. This idea of ZE comes from our fruitful results of individual and collaborative researches including collaboration projects performed with a lot of member from relating departments in Kyoto University, such as the 21st COE program for "Establishment of COE on Sustainable-Energy System" and the Global COE Program for "Energy Science in the Age of Global Warming - Toward a CO2 Zero-emission Energy System". In order to deepen and expand this ZE concept, IAE has promoted interdisciplinary joint usage and joint research program for colleagues of energy relating communities of various energy relevant fields under the support from MEXT, as a Joint Usage/Research Center (JURC), "Center of Zero-emission Energy Research" since 2011. The education and training of young students/researchers in the field of advanced energy science is also one of the important tasks of the Center of Zero-Emission Energy Research, too. Thanks to a lot of support from the communities for these four years, the concept of ZE is gradually recognized year by year.

As next steps, we are challenging to extend these activities for Zero-emission Energy to world-wide ones and provide our institute a function as an international hub of "Zero-emission Energy Research Network" for getting solutions for global problems of energy and environment.

We do our best toward our goals and we would like to ask your continual support, guidance and cooperation for these activities.

April 2015
Tohru MIZUUCHI

2015.4 - 2017.3