Masayuki Takeuchi（Director, Research Center for Macromolecules and Biomaterials, National Institute for Materials Science）

The purpose of this Research Area is to develop a trans-scale approach toward materials innovation, with the goal of building a better society. Materials innovation, a highlight of industry-academia cooperation in Japan, constitutes vital core technology that can contribute to all aspects of the national growth strategy under the Japanese government’s agenda to forge a New Form of Capitalism. The key to materials innovation is to transcend scale—to straddle the nano, meso, and macro scales. Crucially, such a trans-scale approach can address a critical problem in functionalizing materials: understanding at the nanoscale is not always directly related to understanding at the macroscale. In this Research Area, we will promote approaches that transcend spatiotemporal scales, while remaining rooted in basic research, to realize materials innovation that creates truly functional and innovative materials in various research fields such as structure, computation, measurement, and data.
In this Research Area, materials include, besides substances and raw materials, processes, nanotechnology, and devices. The nano-scale covered in this Research Area include atoms, molecules, crystals, supramolecules, particles, transmission electron microscopes, atomic force microscopes, X-rays, ab initio calculations, molecular dynamics, and materials informatics. The macro-scale covered in this Research Area include polymers, metallography, composite materials, optical microscopes, the finite element method, materials informatics, and process informatics.
In facilitating such research, we will prioritize talent development. In other words, we will provide opportunities for young researchers in disparate fields to engage with one another with a view to cultivating a body of researchers who contribute to advanced technology and to building a researcher network that will enable collaborative research in the future.