EAJS2015: East Asia Joint Symposium 2015

The East Asia Joint Symposium (EAJS) was initiated as a joint research conference between Institute of Medical Science of University of Tokyo and Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Seoul National University (Korea) at 1994, and has been held annually for recent twenty years. During these twenty years, the EAJS has been expanded by inviting other four institutes including (1) Virus Research Institute of Kyoto University (Japan), (2) Samsung Biomedical Research Institute of Sungkyunkwan University (Korea), (3) Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology (China), and (4) Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of National Taiwan University (Taiwan). In June 2013, an Academic exchange agreement was concluded between the Institute of Medical Science of University of Tokyo and OIST (see http://www.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/imsut/en/info/conclusion_of_academic_exchang.php), in order to facilitate the interaction of researchers by organizing joint meetings.

A major aim of the EAJS 2015 is to invite faculty members from top class institutes and universities in Asia (currently Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan) to OIST and provide a platform where they interact with each other as well as interact with OIST faculty members, researchers and students. In previous cases, invited speakers were nominated by each of the participating institutes and usually covered a broad field of biology for example cell biology, cancer biology, developmental biology, neurobiology, virology and structural biology. Although topics were a bit diverse, individual oral presentation levels were high enough to inspire people in different fields. Furthermore, the EAJS functions as a training place, where students give oral and poster presentations. We will follow this conventional format of the symposium, but we would like to input some OIST flavor in the EAJS 2015. Since the OIST is strong in marine biology, evolution, ecology and neuroscience, and also has interdisciplinary areas such as epigenetics, we are planning one special symposium day on which we invite Asia scientists in these fields. Second, we will invite OIST members and students to the EAJS 2015 and provide them with the chance to expand their activity in Asian community. Especially we believe that it is a good chance for OIST graduate students to see a high standard of graduate students in top class Asian universities.