On 19 January 2010, RIKEN and the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (MPG) signed a memorandum of understanding toward the establishment of a new joint center focused on research in chemical biology.
The memorandum was signed by RIKEN President Ryoji Noyori, MPG President Peter Gruss and RIKEN Advanced Science Institute Director Kohei Tamao at the MPG headquarters in Munich, Germany.
On the same day, RIKEN also signed a comprehensive cooperation agreement with the Technische Universität München (TUM). While RIKEN and the TUM have cooperated in the past in the area of accelerator science, the new agreement aims to expand this cooperation to a broad range of fields including chemistry, the life sciences and engineering.
Both partnerships set the seeds for new cross-border research between Japan and Germany and present exciting new possibilities for the future of basic and applied science.
