On 1 April, the new Rector, Paolo Collini officially started his mandate, as established by the Ministry Decree.
On this date Professor Collini was engaged in an academic mission in Japan, to present the University of Trento to the Japanese industrial and academic world, during the conference “Italy meets Asia”, and above all to work on the creation of an Italian university centre in Kyoto.
According to the Rector Paolo Collini “The University of Trento is among the supporters of this project, which was started last year by the University of Trieste, in Kyoto. With few other institutions - the SISSA (School of International Advanced Studies), the universities of Padua, Venice, Brescia and Udine), we submitted the proposal to the Ambassador Domenico Giorgio. The proposal is now fully supported by the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
The joint objective of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Italian Embassy in Tokyo and of the universities is to enhance the Italian position in the Japanese Kansai region, where the cities of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe are located. The Memorandum of Understanding is being drafted and it currently states “The Italian academic centre of Kyoto will provide the Italian universities and research institutions with a forefront facility to support and provide expertise to find the most suitable partners for the individual research studies and cooperation agreements, and for the mobility of students and researchers”.
The project includes the creation of the “Italian School of Advanced Sciences of Kyoto” (ISASK) for science, technology and medicine, to be structured according to the ISEAS model (Italian School of Studies on Eastern Asia), which focusses on human and social sciences. The overall objective is to foster the academic, scientific and technological cooperation between Italy and Japan, to facilitate the mobility of researchers, post-docs and PhD students, among Italian and Japanese university institutions, to increase the bilateral mobility programmes for students and graduates, to promote the courses of Italian universities in Japan, to activate joint projects in the framework of Horizon 2020 and to highlight and exploit the results of the Italian research studies in the Japanese economic and business world.