The University of Shizuoka is located in Shizuoka City, which can be reached in around one hour from Tokyo by shinkansen bullet train. Shizuoka Prefecture is well known in Japan as ranking number one in the production and consumption of tea and other cultivated plant products. The statistics reveal that Shizuoka’s residents are both health-conscious and active, qualities that have helped the prefecture become one of Japan’s leaders in healthy life expectancy.

Shizuoka produces a large volume of agricultural and marine products. It was in this rich environment that our university initiated the School of Food and Nutritional Sciences in 1987, integrating these two areas of study for the first time in Japan. Furthermore, in 2012 we established our Graduate School of Integrated Pharmaceutical and Nutritional Sciences through the merger of our research programs food science, nutrition, and pharmaceutical science, another first in Japan. The Graduate School consists of the Graduate Division of Nutritional and Environmental Sciences and the Graduate Division of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Since then, the University of Shizuoka has placed first in the Agriculture category of the Thompson-Reuters University Rankings for Japan in 2013 and 2014, as well as in the Dietary Science category in Japan’s National Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research Funding Program in 2016.

In Shizuoka Prefecture, local industry and civil society groups aim to cultivate and expand their activities worldwide. Similarly, our Graduate School has already established partnerships with four universities in Asia and five in the United States. We promote exchange programs with these partner universities at the student and researcher levels, and we accept a large number of foreign students. We are continuing to pursue our mission of contributing to society by extending healthy life expectancy through the fields of food science, nutrition, and environmental science, in the form of our dual pursuits of research and education.