The University of Tennessee, Knoxville will lead a collaboration between Japan and the U.S. in an academic interdisciplinary platform called the U.S. – Japan Exchange Program for Green Growth Collaboration through Clean Energy Technologies (EXCET).
EXCET will encourage communication and collaboration with researchers on the issues of renewable energy, green energy, and environmental and energy justice issues. EXCET will also make policy recommendations and identify concrete strategies to promote sustainable, economic, and social development in Japan and the US.
“The EXCET program will expand and deepen UT’s long-term partnership with Japanese universities. The focus on promoting clean energy transitions for climate change and social justice is timely, and a significant priority for UT and our Japanese partners,” says Gretchen Neisler, vice provost for international affairs and director of UT’s Center for Global Engagement (CGE). “We are also thrilled to receive support from the State Department for this work.”
The UT team and their Japanese counterparts will also work together to host workshops, visits, and student and faculty exchanges that will further EXCET’s goals of idea generation through collaboration. Experts from Japan and the U.S. will connect to generate ideas from the perspectives of social science and engineering fields to find different solutions.
The Global Research Office at CGE will support the implementation of the EXCET program. The UT team consists of Mingzhou Jin, professor and department head of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the John D. Tickle College of Engineering and a director of the Institute for Secure and Sustainable Environment (ISSE), Chien-fei Chen, research associate professor and the director of energy and environmental justice at ISSE; and Kevin Tomsovic, CTI Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical Engineering and director of the Center for Ultra-Wide Area Resilient Energy Transmission.
The key Japanese partners of EXCET are professors Yasuhiro Hayashi and Hideo Ishii of Waseda University and professors Shinya Yoshizawa and Yohei Yamaguchi of Osaka University. Hayashi and Ishii specialize in energy management, multi-energy networks, clean energy, and have led large-scale projects on research about sustainable energy at Waseda. Yoshizawa studies the functioning of power systems and Yamaguchi focuses on sustainable energy and urban energy systems.
EXCET activities will be discussed with the embassies, keeping in mind both countries’ barriers, strategies, points of views, and strengths from different backgrounds and disciplines. Long-term collaboration between these countries may serve as a model to support faculty at UT and Japanese universities.