Greeting

The International Center for Young Scientists (ICYS), inaugurated in 2003 in NIMS, offers unique environment represented by “In4”, that is, International, Interdisciplinary, Independent and Innovative. So far, we received applications from over 90 countries and accepted researchers from 30 countries. So far, about 50 tenured researchers in NIMS are the alumni of ICYS.

The mission of an ICYS Research Fellow (ICYS-RF) is to pursue independent research based on their original innovative idea. So, the ICYS-RFs have to set the goal for their research and make the research plan by themselves to achieve best possible results. This is an important difference from usual post-doc researchers hired for particular research projects.

For each ICYS-RF, we assign two mentors, who are the experts in the pertinent research area from inside or outside NIMS.
 But the mentors are not their “boses”. They are there to give the advice for the research directions set by the RF.

The office spaces are provided, where the ICYS-RFs working on the different topics sit together. This environment is designed to encourage day-to-day interactions between the RFs working on the different discipline. Bi-weekly ICYS seminars offer good opportunity for the ICYS-RFs to present their research progress and to get new ideas from their colleagues and NIMS researchers through lively and stimulative discussion.

After the ICYS, a number of the fellows obtained tenure researcher positions in NIMS or found faculty positions in top-ranked universities, research institutes as well as companies world-wide.

ICYS will continue to foster leading materials scientists for the next generation. Please follow our activity through Facebook,X(formerly Twitters) and LinkedIn: