About McGill - RIKEN Partnership
About the partnership
McGill has a long-standing relationship with RIKEN, having first signed a memorandum of understanding in 2004 for research collaborations in the field of developmental biology, followed by a series of delegations to and from Japan to share research findings in science, engineering, neuroscience and green chemistry. In 2010, RIKEN and McGill again signed an MOU, followed by workshops among scientists.
RIKEN - McGill MOU Signatures (2018). Front row (l to r): Dr. Rémi Quirion, Hiroshi Matsumoto and Martha Crago. Back row (l to r): Dr. Ichiro Taniuchi, Professor Mark Lathrop, Motoko Kotani, Tadashi Yamamoto, Atsushi Kogirima.
In November 2017, the institutional collaboration was further strengthened through a new joint graduate school initiative, the “International Program Associate”. The program will enable RIKEN’s investigators to have adjunct professorial appointments at McGill and to supervise McGill PhD students in their laboratories in Japan for up to three years.
Also in 2017, RIKEN and McGill joined forces again at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) and the McGill Faculty of Medicine (FoM), with the goals of answering major scientific and public health questions arising from recent advances in genomic medicine, immunology and cancer. Researchers at the IMS center have complementary expertise to that of researchers in McGill’s Faculty of Medicine, making the combined strengths even more powerful.
Screenshot from the Webinar “Facing the Pandemic Together: Canada-Japan Science and Technology Cooperation” (Feb. 2021)
In 2018, the McGill-RIKEN partnership received support from Quebec’s Fonds de Recherche (FRQ). A new 5-year McGill-RIKEN agreement, signed on July 15, 2020, covers the assignment of joint laboratory space for the collaboration at McGill and the RIKEN Yokohama site, exchanges of scientists and trainees, and continuation of a joint symposium that has been held annually since 2017. In July, the RIKEN International Affairs Section also made a 5-year award towards these joint activities. The collaboration with RIKEN is part of McGill's wider engagement with Japanese academic institutions, which includes the joint McGill-University of Kyoto PhD degree in genomic medicine established in 2018, which is also supported by the FRQ and is the first of its kind for the two Universities.