Dean’s Message

In our current world, we face many challenges. On a global scale, climate change, intensifying disasters, conflict and discrimination, and poverty and inequality are crucial concerns. In local communities, along with coping with declining and aging populations, the promotion of regional revitalization that makes the most of their unique characteristics has become a key issue. These societal needs are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to solve as they are intertwined. It is difficult to derive solutions for these pressing demands when limited with only narrow expertise from one academic discipline.

Is a conventional university education in which each student deepens his or her expertise in a single academic field sufficient to overcome increasingly complex social issues and realize a sustainable and safe society where everyone can live prosperously and happily with dignity? The Faculty of Global Interdisciplinary Science and Innovation was borne out of this question.

The Faculty of Global Interdisciplinary Science and Innovation aims to enable students who are interested in social issues to examine them from multiple perspectives, collaborate with people with various standpoints and values, and connect diverse knowledge to devise solutions to these issues.

We provide students with a wide range of basic knowledge in the humanities and the sciences, and on this basis, develop insight that can be applied to society by connecting the specialized tools necessary to solve problems. The program also seeks to equip students with the ability to be proactive in crafting responses on site, the communication skills to work together with others with different perspectives and values through persistent dialogue, the competence to understand linkage among global and local issues, and the aptitude to use data sciences to analyze society objectively based on evidence.

To this end, we will fully utilize the educational and research resources that Shizuoka University has developed over the years. We offer unique educational opportunities such as study abroad programs, practical English language courses, data science, fieldwork, to name a few. We also have faculty members with a wide variety of expertise to tackle issues from many different angles and perspectives.

Answers to today’s social challenges are not easy to come by. That is why we should push ourselves. We look forward to pioneering new learning for the coming era with you.

Dean, Faculty of Global Interdisciplinary Science and Innovation IKEDA Keiko