NAIST

Our international exchange program with the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) has been in place since 1998. Trainees who participate in the NAIST program may conduct research or do a "lab rotation" in a host laboratory during their two-to-three week stay.

Katie Wlaschin visited NAIST in November, 2003 with husband and fellow trainee Aaron Wlaschin and former trainee Erik Peterson. She said of her experience, "Traveling like this teaches you about how to adjust to working and interacting with different systems and diverse settings. We really learned a lot about the way research and education are conducted in Japan. An added benefit of the trips is that they can even establish the groundwork for future research collaborations. Our Japanese hosts were extremely nice; they took the time to show us a Japan beyond the traditional tourist sites. By inviting us into their homes for dinners and going with us on day trip visits, we saw the real Japan. It was a wonderful experience."

Heather Haemig, a trainee who recently returned from a trip to Japan, described her experience in the following way: "Visiting Japan for two weeks and actively participating in a lab at NAIST was an eye-opening experience. My stereotypes about Japanese culture were shattered, and I left knowing that good science and the pursuit of answers are definitely common goals between our laboratories."

There have also been an equal number of Japanese students who visited BTI and worked in different trainer's laboratories during the past four years. In the autumn of 2003, four Japanese students and eight faculty members visited the University of Minnesota. While here, they shared in daily lab activities with our trainees and participated in a number of training grant events, including a fabulous dinner at a favorite local Thai restaurant, The King and I.

There have been several joint workshops between NAIST and UMN training faculty and students during the course of the collaboration, and we are glad to continue this valuable experience. Because both NAIST and our program are accelerating our educational and training efforts on bioinformatics, our next joint workshop, scheduled in July, 2004 in Minneapolis, will focus on developing training materials for bioinformatics.