About

Purpose of the Interdisciplinary Research Office

The Research Institute for Applied Mechanics comprises multiple divisions and centers grounded in a wide range of specialized fields, including fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, plasma science, mathematics, and computational science. Each of these research organizations possesses advanced expertise and has pursued research through its own distinctive approaches to address broad societal challenges such as energy, disaster mitigation, the environment, advanced materials, and space and nuclear fusion.

At the same time, today’s societal challenges are becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated, and a growing number of problems can no longer be adequately solved by the knowledge of a single discipline or a single organization alone. By connecting the diverse research fields and methodologies within the Institute in a cross-cutting manner, new problem formulations and pathways to solutions can emerge—ones that become visible only through such integration.

Against this backdrop, the Interdisciplinary Research Office was established in December 2023. Its mission is to reconnect the research activities distributed across the Institute’s divisions and centers by bridging disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives, and to develop them into higher-order solutions to societal challenges that go beyond individual research outcomes.

The Office pursues this mission through activities such as:

• Visualizing research themes and technologies across different divisions and centers
• Creating cross-disciplinary problem definitions and research scenarios
• Identifying emerging opportunities and “research seeds” for new interdisciplinary and convergent studies
• Reorganizing and linking research knowledge by leveraging AI and data-driven approaches

Through these efforts, the Office plays a role in organically connecting the Institute’s collective intellectual assets.We do not begin from the assumption of any particular field or theme. Instead, we continually ask how the diverse knowledge accumulated within the Research Institute for Applied Mechanics can be combined to generate new value for society. The Interdisciplinary Research Office will serve as a hub for creating RIAM’s distinctive interdisciplinary research by acting as a point of contact—within and beyond the Institute—among researchers, engineers, and society.