President David M. Dooley of the University of Rhode Island (URI), in the U.S., visited Okayama University on August 3 to pay a courtesy call to President Hirofumi Makino.

During the visit, President Dooley exchanged views with President Makino about strengthening future exchanges and collaborative relations between the two universities. President Dooley mentioned that URI is focusing on enhancing the Japanese major in its International Engineering Program (IEP),* and that URI shares many common points with Okayama University in terms of targets and scales, with the possibility, therefore, of further exchanges not only with the Faculty of Engineering but also across a wider range of academic disciplines.

Subsequently, President Dooley visited laboratories of Professor Toru Ide, Professor Satoshi Hayakawa, and Professor Hiroshi Tokumitsu of the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in Health Systems, and also visited Professor Jian-Ren Shen, Vice Dean of the Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Science to exchange views on their respective research efforts.

* International Engineering Program (IEP):
IEP is a 5-year program to learn engineering and second languages for nurturing global engineers. In this program students in their fourth year are required to participate in a half-year language training and culture study program and a half-year internship program in a country where their second languages are spoken as the native language.