President Charles Vest will travel to Japan next week to attend the annual meeting of the Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS), an international collaboration formed in 1994 by the University of Tokyo, the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and MIT.
Dr. Vest will give a welcoming address at the AGS conference, which runs from January 19-23. The consortium takes a multidisciplinary, multicultural and multi-institutional approach to environmental problems.
At the meeting--which will be attended by more than 200 academics, students, researchers and business leaders from a dozen countries--research results will be presented, individual research groups addressing topics of global sustainability will integrate their work, and the scope of AGS in the coming century will be addressed.
While in Japan from January 16-23, Dr. Vest also will take part in a series of meetings with industry leaders, MIT alumni/ae and friends of the Institute. He plans to attend an event in Tokyo commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Office of Corporate Relations' Industrial Liaison Program.
Among his planned stops is a gathering at the MIT Club of Japan. Around 1,250 MIT alumni/ae live in Japan, representing the largest concentration of MIT graduates living in any country outside of North America.
MIT shares a long-standing tradition of mutual support with Japan and Japanese industry. Since the mid-19th century, cultural, academic and technological exchanges have taken place between MIT and Japan.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 13, 1999.
