Taiwan’s Interior Minister Hong-Yuan Lee Visits DPRI

July 25, 2013 From Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior, Minister Hong-Yuan Lee, Secretary Yen-Hsu Chen, National Fire Agency Deputy Director-General Wen-Long Chen and National Fire Agency Secretary Ming-Yuan Shih visited Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI) at Uji Campus, Kyoto University, accompanied by Assist. Prof. Sawyer Mars (Ming Chuan University), Ms. Yi Tzu Lin (PhD/Doctoral student at National Chi Nan University), Assist. Prof. Chi-Ying Cheng (Singapore Management University) and Mr. Yu-Shu Chen (chief of the immigration control section of Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Osaka).

Prof. Naoto Oshiman, Director of DPRI, greeted them with a welcome message and introduced DPRI’s organization and ongoing research activities with Prof. Hiroshi Kawase (Vice-Director), Prof. Hirokazu Tatano (Vice-Director), Prof. Hajime Nakagawa and Assist. Prof. Hao Zhang, who also gathered for this meeting.

After the meeting, Minister Lee spoke about aggravated natural disasters which Taiwan is facing and measures against them in his lecture titled “Global Climate Change ntegration, Coherence and Governance (Taiwan Experience)”, which was presented as the 40th GCOE-ARS* Seminar.

Following the lecture, the guests had a tour to experimental facilities in the campus such as the strong earthquake response simulator (introduced by Prof. Kawase and Assoc. Prof. Takahashi), the geotechnical centrifuge (introduced by Assoc. Prof. Tobita) and the ring shear apparatus (introduced by Assist. Prof. Wang).

* Global Center of Excellence-Adaptation and Resilience for Sustainable/ Survivable Society