Atsuto Suzuki Director General

2009.01.07
2009: Newyear Address

KEK staff and users, colleagues and friends, I wish you a happy new year. At the beginning of a new year, let me make an annual address.

Last year was an eventful year. We had extremely sad news that Yoji Totsuka, the former Director General, had passed away. We also had extremely delightful news that Prof. Kobayashi, Prof. Maskawa and Prof. Nambu had been awarded Nobel Prizes.
I hope we will achieve quiet and strong steady progresses this year.
The top priority is to realize the projects in the KEK roadmap. Above all, the J-PARC construction is nearing to its completion, and upgrading KEKB is urgent. In order to accomplish our plans, it is essential to reconstruct a firm underpinning inside the KEK management structure.

For this, required are two aspects reflecting the KEK mission. One is the business administration that is the common part among government universities and research-institutes. The other is the official management particularly oriented to the KEK research side. The latter has been somehow put aside so far. To facilitate the KEK roadmap, the latter has to become more mature and can be fostered only in KEK. Given the current promotion scheme for the government officials, it is not easy to make new kinds of positions dedicated inside of KEK. However I will work hard to establish such a multi-lateral official management.
As for the management in general, I see the importance of independent mind of each section, charging into difficult projects. However, I also see the importance of working together relationship so that each section are correlated and not secluded from others. Each laboratory or facility should invest in forging its own management scheme to demonstrate its abilities to the maximum. It should come next how each activity in laboratories and facilities is orchestrated, spiraling upward. I have already shown the guideline in the view of KEK organization for my next DG term.

This year, we have to submit the "next medium term goal and plan (2010-2015) of management and activity for the national university corporation" (including KEK) to the government. Taking this opportunity, we should appeal the unique characteristics of KEK much more. There are two viewpoints for the appealing. The first is that KEK is identified as the institute affiliated to all Japanese universities. It is reasonable to state this, considering the KEK achievements upon this. On top of that, we should build more tight interplay and cooperation between KEK and universities. I will start the deliberations soon so as to come up with the realistic and detailed action-plan.
The second point is that KEK is an international frontier research institute employing particle accelerators. We had researchers from outside of Japan stayed in KEK more than 24,000 (in units of researcher times day) stay in 2007. This number is increasing year after year. The size of international projects also tends to become bigger and bigger. In implementing such huge-size international projects, it is the time to devise the new international governance scheme that we have never experienced in Japan. The scheme of European X-Ray Laser Project at DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) is one standard for instance. KEK is a unique institute to enable to develop the international governance model for big-science projects in Japan. The KEKB-upgrade project (Super-KEKB) should be planned under the international governance from the beginning.

The importance that KEK playing the leading role for worldwide researches is keep rising. KEK should forge the new Asian center for accelerator science (temporary name: ACAS) in partnership with the Asian big institutes, for instance IHEP (China), one of major institutes in India and so forth. For us to proceed, it is essential that ACFA (Asian Committee for Future Accelerators) should become active. I would like to ask the chairman of ACFA to form the ACAS assessment soon. We will also start the regular round-table discussion about how to promote the world-unique accelerator project with the CERN and Fermilab delegations.

Finally, let me bring to the Chinese Astrology. This is the year of the Ox. At the beginning of my address, I mentioned "I hope we will achieve quiet and strong steady progresses this year". The words of "quiet and strong steady progresses" come from my image of the Ox. Although the Ox is not so glorious like the Horse in the Derby or in historic battle fields, it has a quiet nature with a strong inner fighting spirit like bullfights, and brings humans various products like meats, milk, cheese, leather and so forth. The Ox is quite adequate for the KEK symbol for this year.

Thank you very much for your kind attention.

Atsuto Suzuki, KEK Director General