NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
TOKYO REGIONAL OFFICE

August 21, 2002

The National Science Foundation's Tokyo Regional Office periodically reports on developments in Japan that are related to the Foundation's mission.  It also provides occasional reports on developments in other East Asian countries.

Tokyo Office Report Memoranda are intended to provide information for the use of NSF program officers and policy makers; they are not statements of NSF policy.

Mr. Matthew Butler, from the University of California, is conducting research under the direction of Prof. Ken-ichi Honma in the Department of Physiology in Hokkaido University’s Graduate School of Medicine in Sapporo. Prof. Honma and his colleagues are conducting research at four levels on biological rhythms in mammals: (1) with human (mainly student) volunteers who are subject to artificial daytime and nighttime conditions for varying lengths of time, (2) with mice, rats, and hamsters who are subject to similar although more drastic conditions, (3) at the level of individual neurons from the portion of the brains of mice and rats; and (4) at the bimolecular level. Mr. Butler is working closely with one of Prof. Honma's colleagues to learn the intricacies of a technique pioneered in his laboratory to study the electrical behavior of single-neuron cells extracted from the brains of mice and rats over periods that can range up to weeks and months. Mr. Butler, who has completed the first year of his Ph.D. studies at Berkeley, believes that the experimental techniques he is learning at Hokkaido will serve him well in the dissertation research that he hopes to conduct at home. On the other hand, he confesses that he hopes to spend at least an appreciable portion of his time working on his dissertation research in Prof. Honma's laboratory.

Among our 64 Summer Program graduate students this year, Mr. Butler is unusual in at least two respects. First, he has had considerably more experience in Japan than most of our students. He spent a year in Sendai as a child when his father, an academic, was a visiting professor at Tohoku University. Between his graduation from college and the beginning of his Ph.D. course at Berkeley, he spent a year conducting research at the Hokkaido University Graduate School of Environmental Earth Science supported by a Fulbright Grant. As one result his command of spoken Japanese approaches fluency. According to one of Prof. Honma's senior colleagues, his command of written Japanese is more than credible.

Mr. Butler is also unique among our students with respect to the length of time he will spend in Japan. He arrived approximately a month earlier than June 25, the arrival date of the majority of our students. And he will remain at Hokkaido until late December, whereas most of our students will depart on August 24. The circumstances of Mr. Butler's extended stay are interesting and encouraging for the prospects of another long-term collaboration between research groups in Japan and the United States. One of Prof. Honma's graduate students will spend the fall quarter at the University of California/Berkley (courtesy of a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, JSPS) working with Mr. Butler's faculty mentor. He has been asked to fill in for her during her time in the United States, courtesy of funds from Hokkaido. I do not perceive that his arm was twisted too hard before he agreed! Be that as it may, Mr. Butler's relatively long-term working visit to Prof. Honma's Chronobiology Laboratory might well provide the impetus for a fruitful, long-term collaboration between Hokkaido and Berkeley.

Ms. Jennifer Engels, from the University of Hawaii, is conducting research under the direction of Prof. Motoyoshi Ikeda, International Arctic Research Center, at Hokkaido University’s Graduate School of Environmental Earth Science. Prof. Ikeda's is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on computer modeling of the effects of long-term climactic changes in the oceans, with an emphasis on the Polar Regions. Ms. Engels, who has completed the first year of her Ph.D. studies, based her Masters Thesis at the University of Hawaii on data obtained from underwater explorations of the Arctic sea floor that exhibits striking and unexplained evidence of glaciation. Ms. Engels hopes that over the course of the summer she can learn enough about one of Prof. Ikeda's models to account for ice formation and glaciation in the Arctic that may help explain the glaciation effects on the sea bottom which she described in her Masters thesis. In any event, she expects that Prof. Ikeda's model will serve her well for her Ph.D. dissertation research.

Ms. Engels has been fascinated with Japan for many years. A native or Oregon, she decided to pursue her graduate studies in Hawaii because she perceived it could offer a point of departure for research in Japan. She has studied the Japanese language for three years. Although she confessed that she thought she had a better command of Japanese before she arrived than she does now, from my perspective she is doing just fine!

Mr. Bryan Jones, a microbiologist who has completed the first two years of his Ph.D. studies at the University of New Mexico, is working under the guidance of Dr. Akihiko Maruyama, leader of the Molecular and Microbial Ecology Research Group in the Research Institute of Biological Resources of the National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Mr. Jones intends to explore symbiotic relations between bacteria and squid for his Ph.D. dissertation. Dr. Maruyama’s research involves studies of bacterial colonies at hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. Even though this research is rather far removed from the work that Mr. Bryan will be carrying out, he informed me that luminescence techniques developed by Dr. Maruyama to study and characterize colonies of marine bacteria will be very useful in his own research. He read a paper of Dr. Maruyama describing these techniques and the basis of that paper, wrote to request that Dr. Maruyama accept him as a summer program student in his laboratory.

Mr. Jones has had previous experience living in Japan and, according to Dr. Maruyama, speaks very good Japanese. During his undergraduate years, he took a year-long leave of absence to come to Japan as an exchange student, where he lived in a small town in Chiba Prefecture, north of Tokyo.

Ms. Sarah Albano, who expects to complete her Masters Degree course in geological sciences in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington within a year, is dividing her time between the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, and AIST’s Institute of Geoscience at Tsukuba. She is among thirteen students in this year’s Natural Disaster Mitigation Japan (NHMJ) Program. At Tsukuba, she is working under the guidance of Dr. Norio Matsumoto, in the Tectono-hydrology Research Group. Ms. Albano previously obtained some data correlating water levels in wells near Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines with its volcanic activity. Dr. Matsumoto has data for several years on water levels in wells on the volcanic island, Miyake-jima south of Tokyo, and Mt. Usu in Hokkaido, both of which experienced spectacular eruptions in 2000. Both eruptions were preceded by a few days by noticeable changes in water levels in nearby wells. He has given Ms. Albano permission to use these data in her Masters thesis which, needless to say, has her very excited.

According to Ms. Albano, the study of well water levels as precursors to volcanic activity (as opposed to earthquake activity) is a relatively new field but one whose significance is being increasingly recognized. She met Dr. Matsumoto at a conference in Italy a year ago where he presented a paper on his research. On the basis of that meeting, she asked to work with him this summer. For various reasons, it turned out to be preferable for Prof. Hidefumi Watanabe at the University of Tokyo to serve as her official host. However, he has made arrangements for her to come to Tsukuba as often as necessary to work with Dr. Matsumoto, who is a close colleague.

Ms. Julie Thurston, also one of this year’s NHMJ participants, is a Masters Degree candidate in the Engineering School at Duke University. She is working under the guidance of Dr. Chikahiro Minowa of the Disaster Prevention Research Group at the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) in Tsukuba. Dr. Minowa and Ms. Thurston’s dissertation adviser at Duke have been colleagues for many years. Currently they are working on an NSF-JSPS funded cooperative research project studying the efficacy of various types of active and semi-active dampers on buildings during simulated earthquakes. Ms. Thurston brought with her to Japan a new type of semi-active damper developed at Duke to be tested on a three-story structure mounted on the NIED shake table. A six day test had just been completed with the Duke damper and Ms. Thurston showed me a video exhibiting the ways that the structure behaved without the damper, when the damper was set in a rigid mode, and when it was set in a semi-active mode. She was very excited about the results. For the remainder of her stay at Tsukuba she will analyze her own data, while participating in experiments with other types of dampers.

Ms. Thurston also showed me the Duke damper with NSF and JSPS prominently painted on it. She promised to have a photo taken with it that we can post on the NSF/Tokyo homepage.

Mr. Brian Padgett, also a NHMJ program participant, is perhaps the most unusual of this year’s Summer Program students in terms of his interests. He has just completed his Masters Degree in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and is working under the guidance of Dr. Ko-ichi Kusunoki in the Department of Structural Engineering at the Building Research Institute (BRI) in Tsukuba. Dr. Kusunoki and his group were about to start several days of pseudo-dynamic tests using hydraulic actuators at the BRI large-scale testing laboratory to study the effects of torsional stresses during earthquakes. Mr. Padgett was quite excited to have been involved in those test runs. On the other hand, his primary interest is not in earthquake simulation engineering per se, but rather in comparing the engineering and architectural professions and their practices in Japan and the United States. Pursuing this interest adequately will obviously be a long-term proposition, and Mr. Padgett intends to explore various means of support that will permit him to return to Japan in the not too distant future. Meanwhile, he reports that people he has met at BRI have been exceedingly helpful in discussing his long-term interests with him and in suggesting people he should meet elsewhere in Japan, and interesting modern buildings he should try to visit.

Prof. Dana Buntrock, who served as Mr. Padgett’s mentor at Berkeley, has been studying Japanese architecture for many years and published a well-regarded book on the subject about a year ago. Working with her sparked Mr. Padgett’s interest in Japanese architecture, particularly contemporary architecture, and last year he came to Japan for about a week to see and study a few interesting buildings. It was that experience (along with Buntrock’s encouragement) that stimulated his interest in a comparative study of US and Japanese architecture and engineering.

Mr. Christopher Cannon, also a NHMJ program participant, has completed two years of his Ph.D. studies in geology at the University of Colorado. He is working under the guidance of Dr. Yuichi Sugiyama of AIST’s Active Faults Research Center in Tsukuba. Dr. Sugiyama and his colleagues are in the midst of a five-year study to map all active faults in Japan and assess the hazards that would occur if any were to become sites for earthquakes. In this context, Mr. Cannon is studying historical data on faults underlying Tokyo and Osaka to try to understand the migration of these faults with time, with a view towards predicting when they might emerge at the surface. This is the type of work he plans to undertake for his Ph.D. dissertation at Colorado.

Mr. Cannon’s dissertation adviser and Dr. Sugiyama have enjoyed close professional relations for many year. Last summer his adviser obtained a small grant to permit Mr. Cannon to visit Tsukuba for two weeks, where he met Dr. Sugiyama and his colleagues and, on the basis of that experience, applied to NSF to participate in the 2002 Summer Program in Japan.

Ms. Jennifer Jordan expects to complete her Ph.D. in Materials Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in about a year. She is working under the guidance of Dr. Toshimori Sekine in the High Pressure Research Station in the Advanced Materials Laboratory at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba. The High Pressure Research Station at NIMS has three advanced, state of the art devices for producing very high velocity shock waves for use in high pressure studies. Ms. Jordan brought samples with her to conduct research on one of these devices, making use of an in situ technique developed by Dr. Sekine. She showed me the devices, as well as the results of some of the research she has carried on her samples. She is also participating in some of the other research projects that Dr. Sekine and his colleagues are conducting.

A year ago, Ms. Jordan was one of several recipients of awards given to its under graduate and graduate students by Georgia Tech to permit them to travel to foreign research facilities during the summer. She chose to come to Japan, where (among other institutions) she visited the Advanced Materials Laboratory at NIMS and on that basis decided to apply to NSF to participate in the 2002 Summer Program in Japan.

Graduate Students in Tokyo

Mr. Evan Berglund is a graduate student at the University Minnesota (Department of Civil Engineering) who has been studying troublesome details in steel bridges and one of participants in the Natural Hazards Mitigation Japan (NHMJ) Program. His host is Dr. Chitoshi Miki, Professor of Department of Civil Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT). Dr. Miki is very positive and would like to receive more graduate students from US. According to him, although there has been no problem on their research as of today, two months stay is too short and he hopes students can stay at his laboratory at least for three months if possible. Dr. Miki indicated TIT was the only national university in Japan that has large experimental facilities, so Mr. Berglund is having a valuable experience there.

Mr. Ryan Thom is a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Department of Chemistry) who has been studying molecular spectroscopy. His host is Dr. Hideto Kanamori, Associate Professor of Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology. Dr. Kanamori received an e-mail message with the Summer Program 2002 announcement we sent from NSF/Tokyo and forwarded it to Mr. Thom, and he applied for the program. His advisor in MIT has been a good relationship with Dr. Kanamori and he came to Japan one and one half years ago. Mr. Thom has spent most his time at the laboratory conducting experiments.

Mr. Andreas Verras is a graduate student at University of California, San Francisco (Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology) who has been studying drug design (Imidazole Inhibitors of cytochrome P450). His host is Dr. Yuichi Sugiyama, Professor of Department of Biopharmaceutics, University of Tokyo. Mr. Verras has spent his time working with his computer at his desk. He has no problem with his research, however, since he is living nearby at a weekly-mansion.

Ms. Karen Thickman is a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University (Program in Molecular Biophysics). Her research interests focus on learning new ways to determine protein structure and function. Her host is Dr. Yoshinori Satow, Professor of Laboratory of Protein Structural Biology, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tokyo. Since the facilities in Dr. Satow's laboratory are rare for Ms. Thickman, this opportunity is very valuable for her. She will get new skills and new techniques.

Mr. Zaki Megeed is a graduate student at the University of Maryland (School of Pharmacy) who has been studying polymers for drug delivery. His host is Dr. Kazunori Kataoka, Professor of Department of Materials Science, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Tokyo. Dr. Kataoka hosted a student from France under the summer program two years ago and has now hosted some foreign students from Argentina, Korea and China. He hopes to exchange students more with other countries. He will organize a symposium in September between Switzerland and Japan, and also take care of the workshop related to Nanotechnology between NSF and MEXT.

Ms. Sarah Rothenberg is a graduate student at University of California, Los Angeles (Department of Statistics) who has been analyzing data on water quality in the Asia Pacific. Her host is Dr. Takashi Onishi, Professor of Urban and Environment Systems, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo. Ms. Rothenberg has spent most her time in the library to collect the data and has obtained many good data so far.

Mr. Mark Wochner is a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University (Graduate Program in Acoustics) who has been working on noise created by jet engines. His host is Dr. Hideki Tachibana, Professor of Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo. Dr. Jiri Tichy who is a professor in Mr. Wochner's department has a good relationship with Dr. Tachibana. Dr. Tachibna's research focuses on analyzing sounds in a music hall, so it is a little different from Mr. Wochner's research theme. However, since there is good experimental equipment in IIS and some kind of experiments has been conducted, Mr. Wochner has attended them and had good experiences.

Ms. Stacy Dees is a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Department of Mechanical Engineering), and has been working on Underwater Vehicles. Her host is Dr. Tamaki Ura, Professor of Underwater Technology Research Center, Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo. I couldn't meet him because he was out of office. While we were walking around the laboratory, we met one Japanese graduate student. According to Ms. Dees, he is working with her closely and always helps her.

Mr. Mark Matheson is a graduate student at Oregon State University (College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences) who has been working on the ship track study. His host is Dr. Teruyuki Nakajima, Professor of Center for Climate System Research, University of Tokyo. Dr. Nakajima has known Ms. Reina Nakamura (Mr. Matheson's wife and also one of this year's summer program participants) for a long time. Mr. Matheson traveled to Kyushu and Awaji island with Dr. Nakajima to attend a conference soon after the orientation in Hayama.

Ms. Wendy McCausland is a graduate student at University of Washington (Earth and Space Sciences) who has been working on volcano seismology and one of participants in the Natural Hazards Mitigation Japan (NHMJ) Program. Her host is Dr. Hidefumi Watanabe, Professor of Volcano Research Center, Earthquake Research Institute (ERI), University of Tokyo. Dr. Watanabe is one of members in the Mt. Fuji Volcano Project and they will start the big project soon. Ms. McCausland traveled to Hokkaido (Mt. Usu) and Tsukuba for her research, and will visit the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMC) and Tohoku University to exchange data with Professor Hasegawa's group. According to her, she has obtained a lot of good data.

Mr. Jhon Smith-Pardo is a graduate student at Purdue University (Department of Civil Engineering) who has been working on earthquake resistant building structures and is one of the participants in the Natural Hazards Mitigation Japan (NHMJ) Program. His host is Dr. Shunsuke Otani, Professor of Department of Architecture, Materials, Structures and Construction, Graduate School of Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo. Mr. Smith-Pardo has recently switched his PhD topic to Bridge Engineering. According to Mr. Smith-Pardo, Dr. Otani is very famous in his department in the United States. He is glad to be hosted by Dr. Otani; however he is strongly feeling that two months is too short for his research. He hopes to come back to Japan in the future.

Mr. Lawrence Batch is a graduate student at Duke University (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering). He is involved with ultraviolet disinfection of water. His host is Dr. Shinichiro Ohgaki, Professor of Department of Urban Engineering, School of Urban Engineering, University of Tokyo. Dr. Ohgaki and Dr. Linden (Mr. Batch's advisor in Duke University) have known each other for a long time. According to Dr. Ohgaki, Mr. Batch's research theme is very specific, since they discussed the research topic under the Summer Program with each other before Mr. Batch came to Japan. He has been spending his time in three different laboratories.

Ms. Terri Norton, a graduate student at Florida A&M University (Department of Civil Engineering), has been working under the guidance of Dr. Yozo Fujino, of the Department of Civil Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Tokyo. She is a participant in the NHMJ Program and this summer has been conducting research in the area of earthquake engineering and structural dynamics. Ms. Norton’s advisor at Florida A&M is Prof. Makola Abdullah, who is Co-Principal Investigator with Prof. Shirley Dyke on the international REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) Program that enabled eight undergraduates to spend about a month at The Tokyo University Department of Civil Engineering earlier this summer. Ms. Norton accompanied Professors Abdullah and Dyke to Tokyo in June 2001 when the latter came here to assess the feasibility of the REU program which they launched this year at the University of Tokyo’s Civil Engineering Department. Dr. Fujino is one of Japanese coordinators of NHMJ Program and has been working closely with Bill Spencer, formerly of Notre Dame University now at the University of Illinois, Urbana, who is a the Principal Investigator for the program. Dr. Fujino organizes the Tokyo segment of the program every year and hopes to continue to do so. He has also sent one Japanese student to Dr. Spencer's laboratory this summer. He would like to send more students in the future and is looking for any funds to do so.

Mr. Sean Duffy has completed the first three years of his PhD program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. This summer he has been working under the guidance of Dr. Shinobu Kitayama, Associate Professor of Information Sciences in the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies at Kyoto University. Mr. Duffy met Dr. Kitayama two years ago when the latter was spending a sabbatical year at Chicago, and began a research collaboration with him at that time. Their research involved rather simple tests to determine possible differences in the ways that Americans and Japanese perceive objects relative to their environment. This summer, he has been working on a refinement and extension of the research initiated two years ago. Mr. Duffy and Dr. Kitayama are among four authors (two American, two Japanese) of a paper entitled, “Perceiving an Object and its Context in Different Cultures: A Cultural Look at New Look,” submitted in July for publication in the journal, Psychological Sciences.

Mr. Jacog Loverich, a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, is working under the guidance of Dr. Hiroshi Matsuhisa of the Department of Precision Engineering at Kyoto University. Mr. Loverich’s research interests involve the use of piezo-electric materials as actuators in small, high speed motors. Dr. Matsuhisa is considered one of the world’s experts in the field of piezo-electric “smart” materials. He showed us a model of a device he invented in which piezo-actuators are used to damp the swings in the suspended gondolas of cable cars which is in actual use in Japan. Although Dr. Matsuhisa’s research directions are somewhat different than those of his own, Mr. Loverich feels that the techniques he has acquired in Dr. Matsuhisa’s laboratory have significantly broadened his understanding of the potential uses of piezo-electric materials in precision engineering applications.

Ms. Katherine Leighty, who has completed the first two years of her PhD program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia, is being hosted by Dr. Kazou Fujita in the Department of Psychology of Kyoto University. At Georgia, Ms. Leighty has begun to learn experimental techniques involved in determining responses to visual stimuli by animals, primarily monkeys. At Kyoto she has been working on animal perception experiments in Dr. Fujita’s primate laboratory. In addition, she has been learning techniques to determine responses to visual responses by pigeons. Ms. Leighty has had no prior experience with pigeons, but noted that it is much easier to obtain the necessary permissions required to work with pigeons than with monkeys.

Ms. Leighty’s faculty advisor at Georgia has been working with a close colleague of Dr. Fujita for several years and it was her familiarity with Dr. Fujita’s laboratory that first led to Ms. Leighty’s interest in becoming a participant in the Summer Program in Japan so that she could work with Dr. Fikota. Her advisor made an approximately week-long visit to the laboratory of Dr. Fujita’s colleague in July and, of course, visited Ms. Leighty as well.

Mr. Jimmy Qi Guang Lam, who has just completed his Masters Degree in Civil Engineering at Stanford University, has been working under the direction of Dr. Hirokazu Iemura in the Graduate School of Civil Engineering at Kyoto University. Mr. Lam is a participant in the Natural Hazards Mitigation?Japan (NHMJ) Program. He informed me that when he first heard about the Summer Program in Japan he was tempted to apply, but concluded that he had little chance of being accepted. Later her heard about the NHMJ program and wrote to Prof. Bill Spencer (Notre Dame University) the prime mover of that program to ask for further details. Prof. Spencer urged him to apply, which he did with less than a week to spare.

When I arrived at Dr. Iemura’s office a few minutes prior to the appointed time, I was conducted to a small conference room where Mr. Lam was presenting the results of his summer research to Dr. Iemura, two junior faculty members, and four graduate students?two of them foreign. The session focused on suggestions for refining and improving a seven page draft paper that Mr. Lam had prepared entitled, “Use of High Strength Steel Bars as Unbonded Reinforcement in Reinforced Concrete Piers”. The discussion was frank but entirely cordial, with Dr. Iemura joining in. In particular, he stressed the need to revise several passages which he thought too technical to be understood by non-specialists.

Mr. Shawn Archibeque, who estimates that he is within a year of completing the requirements for his PhD in animal studies at Texas A&M University, is working under the direction of Dr. Hideo Yano in the Laboratory of Nutritional Science, Graduate School of Agriculture at Kyoto University. Mr. Archibeque research at Texas A&M involves a particular fatty acid produced by cattle. This fatty acid is known to have beneficial effects when administered in concentrated form to ruminants. However, little is known about its effects on the cattle while they are actually producing it, and that has been the focus of Mr. Archibeque’s dissertation research. He first became interested in coming to Kyoto because of Dr. Yano’s research on involving biochemical mechanisms which influence the marbleization of beef. Although the research itself is somewhat removed from his own substantive interests, Mr. Archibeque was eager to learn first hand about some of the techniques that Dr. Yano and his colleagues have been using. Soon after arriving in Kyoto he struck up a conversation with one of Dr. Yano’s graduate students which led them to propose a modest joint research project which they are about to complete. Mr. Archibeque is delighted not only that he has achieved his original objective of gaining first hand knowledge of Dr. Yano’s techniques that are pertinent to his own interests, but also that he actually carried out a successful research project. That he carried out that research with a Japanese graduate student has convinced Mr. Archibeque that the potential exists for a long and fruitful career involving research collaboration with Japanese colleagues.

Ms. Catherine Purcell, who has completed the first year of her PhD studies in fisheries biology at the University of Southern California, is being hosted by Prof. Masaru Tanaka in the Division of Applied Biosciences in the Graduate School of Agriculture at Kyoto University. She is very excited about her summer activities. Last spring, it seems, researchers at a private university near Kyoto succeeded in obtaining spawns from second-generation, domesticated blue fin tuna who are the descendants of parents taken from the sea. Apparently this is the first time that anyone has ever succeeded in obtaining live spawns from domesticated blue fins. The population of this species, which is an important component of the Japanese diet, has been decreasing so that success in breeding blue fins domestically would be both scientifically and commercially significant.

Dr. Tanaka obtained a number of the blue fin spawns from colleagues at the nearby private university shortly after Ms. Purcell’s arrival. She spent two weeks studying the spawns in experimental tanks at a site maintained by Kyoto University on the Sea of Japan. Unfortunately, none of the spawns survived beyond a month. However, Ms. Purcell and Dr. Tanaka believe that they gained sufficient information about them to make the probability of survival of a new batch of spawns reasonably good. Of course Ms. Purcell regrets that she will not be able to continue her work with a new batch. However, she intends to maintain her association with Dr. Tanaka and his group. He plan to make a presentation at an international conference at Santa Cruz next year. Given the proximity of Santa Cruz to Los Angeles, Ms. Purcell plans to ask her advisor to invite him to the University of Southern California to meet some of the faculty there and discuss his work.

Although Ms. Purcell knew that unique and interesting work in her area of interest is conducted in Japan, neither she nor her advisor was aware of any specifics. She found Dr. Tanaka’s name and contact information from the Japan Host Database accessible from the NSF Tokyo Office Homepage.

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