(20.12.22) To further strengthen the cooperation between the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), DFG President Professor Dr. Katja Becker, DFG General Secretary Dr. Heide Ahrens and AMED President Professor Dr. MISHIMA Yoshinao signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC). Under the MoC, the two organizations agree to promote research and development in the field of medical research in Germany and Japan through joint research project funding, workshops and personnel exchange.

There is a long-standing cooperation between Japan and Germany in the field of neuroscience and the DFG has been supporting joint international projects since 2010. Those joint initiatives in the field of neuroscience have been handed over from the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) to AMED after its establishment in 2015 and have been continued to date. German-Japanese projects in neuroscience in the field of “computational connectomics” are currently running between the second funding period of the DFG Priority Programme 2041 and the Strategic International Collaborative Research Program of AMED. With this MoC signing, the DFG and AMED will further foster the initiation of research collaborations in promising areas of medical research between Germany and Japan.