The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has selected four projects, including Tohoku University, to create experiential content to be exhibited at pre-events to build momentum for the 2025 World Expo, Osaka-Kansai. The ministry called for proposals based on research results achieved by universities and public research institutes in industry-academia-government collaboration, and will provide financial support of up to 4 million yen for selected projects.
According to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the selected projects are
・"Seeing" and "diagnosing": A micro clinic in 2040 looking into the future through the eyes (Tohoku University)
・Mobile Museum "Hello Future! 100 Year Museum" (Tokyo University of the Arts, National Museum of Art)
・Action from materials science towards "aqua-regeneration" to regenerate the water planet Earth (Shinshu University)
・Life Journey: Weaving our minds and bodies into the future and thinking about the world (Hokkaido University, Keio University)
A committee of five experts, including Yoshie Okusa, director of the nonprofit organization Natural Science, and Osamu Imamura, head of the Expo Promotion Office at Mitsubishi Research Institute, reviewed the contents of 4 applications and selected the four.
The four selected projects are scheduled to be exhibited at a pre-Expo event scheduled to be held in Tokyo between January and March 4. After that, the projects will be further refined by the universities and other institutions that planned them, and then exhibited at the actual event during the Expo, scheduled for around August 2025.
The aim of the current call for proposals is to use the opportunity of the Expo, which will attract international attention, to disseminate the results of industry-academia-government collaboration to the world. It also aims to show what a future society in which research themes have been realized will look like within the Expo site.
