Working with Industry About the Cooperative Graduate School System

Medical science and medical care have been constantly improving in recent years. Much of this is due to wider development in the life sciences. Technical innovation in medical care and the development of new materials have also been invaluable. The structure of our Graduate School of Medicine well reflects this current pattern; as well as courses in basic and clinical medicine, we have encompassed facilities within Osaka University which have recorded particularly outstanding research findings in the life sciences, including the Research Institute for Microbial Diseases, the Institute for Protein Research, the former Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology (reformed as the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences in 2002), and the School of Health and Sports Sciences.

However, the rapid development we are seeing in medical science and medical care has also brought about the polarization of our discipline into basic research and clinical application fields. The specialization and subdivision that are also increasingly common are leading to a dearth of talent in certain specific areas of research.

Our Cooperative Graduate School System has been designed to combat this. The System works in collaboration with public and private research institutes alike to encourage the participation of preeminent researchers with the Graduate School, to introduce cutting-edge research systems, and to invite guest lecturers are invited from our cooperative research facilities; this helps to diversify and enrich the range of research being carried out at the Graduate School. At the very heart of the system is a clear goal: to make a contribution to the development of medical science and medical treatment.

There are other benefits, too. This sort of structure allows the Graduate School to become more adaptable to specialized and to interdisciplinary research. It enables us to integrate basic and clinical research on a much higher dimension. It brings together all the elements we need to start translating our findings back to wider society, making it better with high quality medical care.

For our doctoral students, this means that although they must, as a general rule, accumulate the number of credits required to graduate from courses within the Graduate School, for their dissertation they are free to work with an external research facility, providing it is affiliated to one of the Collaborative Graduate Schools. Students also have access to a deputy academic advisor.