Graduate School of Pure and Applied Sciences

Doctoral Programs / Three-year Doctoral Programs

17. Cooperative Graduate School System

Due to the rapid progress and further sophistication of science and technology, research fields have become more departmentalized and specialized. At the same time, there emerge new interdisciplinary fields that go beyond the boundaries of traditional academic systems, prompting the need for integrated research.
Interdisciplinary research that requires a wide range of knowledge from basics to application areas has attached more importance to cooperation between researchers from different fields. There is an increased demand for new methods of fostering researchers.
The Cooperative Graduate School System was established to respond to these academic and social needs. We have cooperated with a large number of research institutes run by the government, National Research and Development Agency, and private companies in and outside of Tsukuba Science City. We employ researchers from these institutes as Professors (Cooperative Graduate School) and Associate Professors (Cooperative Graduate School) and have them supervise the research of our students at laboratories equipped with the latest facilities. Our aim is to diversify and expand the educational and research domain for further enhancement of graduate school education, and to develop new research areas by promoting exchanges with these research institutes.
Among these efforts, the Cooperative Graduate School System is distinguished as the method organized solely by researchers from research institutes, who give research guidance in each program (from selection of students to granting of degrees) utilizing their advanced research environment.

Usually a group of teachers dealing with Cooperative Graduate School System consists of three members who are researching in the same research institute.
In Advanced interdisciplinary field in doctoral program in Physics, however, a group of teachers consists of three members who are researching in several research institutes and one or more anchor teachers from University of Tsukuba who will support students’ research and school life.

One of the three teachers is to be a supervisor and the other two and anchor teachers are to be deputy supervisors.

Anchor teachers from our university are deputy supervisors, but they are in charge of managing whole educational system such as the decision when to dispatch students to research institutes. Students can learn in a program teachers made after careful consideration.