U.S.-Japan Exchange Program for Green Growth Collaboration through Clean Energy Technologies (EXCET)
The union of Japan and the United States is powerful as a team working on strategies and solutions to promote interdisciplinary problem-solving. This strong partnership is shared by the vision of promoting clean energy together to combat climate change and decarbonization. The program name will be EXCET, which is short for the “U.S-Japan Exchange Program for Green Growth Collaboration through Clean Energy Technologies''. The purpose of EXCET is to encourage communication and collaboration with researchers on the topic of renewable energy, green energy, and working towards a more environmental future for all.
The University of Tennessee will lead the collaboration between Japan and the USA in being an academic interdisciplinary platform for EXCET. Being the home of many speakers from Japan and encouraging the sharing of ideas with each other. The UT/Japanese Program helps exchange researchers to share intercultural and interdisciplinary perspectives in working on solutions in decarburization, sustainability, and clean energy.
The UT team as discussed for the increased collaboration is Mingzhou Jin, Chien-fei Chen, and Keven Tomsovic. Dr. Jin (PI) is a professor and director of the Institute for Secure and Sustainable Environment. Dr. Chen (Co-PI) is the Research Associate professor and the director of energy and environmental justice at ISSE. She has led many interdisciplinary projects focusing on social justice and worked closely with Japanese researchers on topics about building sustainability and green energy technology. Dr. Tomsovic (Co-PI) is a professor in Electrical engineering and the Director of the Center for Ultra Wide Area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission (CURENT). He co-hosted the 2015 JST-NSF-DFT-RCN Workshop, which was supported by Japan Science Technology (JST) and U.S. NSF. More than 40 Japanese researchers and practitioners in power systems attended the workshop. Jamie McGowan the director of GRO, will help provide inputs for implementing strategies for successful international collaboration.
The key Japanese partners of EXCET are Professor Yasuhiro Hayashi and Hideo Ishii at Waseda University and Osaka University Assistant Professor, Shinya Yoshizawa and Yohei Yamaguchi.
The overall goals of EXCET will be to provide policy recommendations and identify concrete strategies to promote sustainable, economic, and social development in Japan and the U.S. There will be a large positive impact among academic, industry members, and community-based organizations from this project. The UT team and their Japanese partners will work together to put on these exchange events such as workshops, visits, and student and faculty exchanges, and work on making EXCET meet its goals of idea generation through collaboration. These activities will connect experts from Japan and the US to generate ideas from many different perspectives, therefore finding many different solutions.
Bringing together diverse experts from social science and engineering fields will help generate integrated solutions about how to make the world a better place by reducing carbon emissions. At the same time, the group will work on environmental and energy justice issues. A place that is sustainable and where technology can give back to the environment and community. Having a dedicated organization organize events for people to meet can help the right people find each other and share their specific experiences in the fields. The different backgrounds provide a place of growth and idea generation, making this a unique opportunity. EXCET is doing the behind-the-scenes, important work, needed for change and innovation to occur!
Looking into the future, The EXCET team members and their partners will continue to grow the collaboration. EXCET activities will be discussed with the embassies of both countries’ barriers, strategies, points of view, and strengths from different backgrounds, and interdisciplinary discussion. Long-term collaboration between these countries can serve as a model to support faculty at UTK and Japanese Universities. These connections can be made as the team works with UT's global research office and the Japanese program
