Initiative Research Units

The Initiative Research Unit program provides young researchers with unique, creative ideas to work independently on their own research. The program was launched in June 2001 with the objective of pioneering new fields of research.

The Initiative Research Unit is headed by an Initiative Research Scientist and is limited to a 5-year period of activity. Core laboratory members are fixed-term researchers, and the lab budget is funded by an allocation of RIKEN’s operational funds and external funds.

Initiative Research Units list

Yu Initiative Research Unit

Initiative Research Scientist: Hsiao-hua Yu

Research in our unit targets on the development of a multidisciplinary program involving the triad of chemistry, electronic materials, and biomedical/biological investigations based on molecular and nano-assembled building blocks of organic conductive materials.

Zhang Initiative Research Unit

Initiative Research Scientist: Kam Zhang

We seek to exploit methodologies developed for protein folding prediction and utilize them to solve the X-ray crystallographic phase problem.

Initiative Research Units