The Leadership Forum 2007 will be held at the National Institution for Youth Education in Tokyo, Japan, from August 18 through August 26, 2007. This Forum will bring together 20 students from US, mostly from universities in Greater Boston area, and 20 students from Japan, mostly from universities in Tokyo area. The Forum consists of three components: a leadership education session (keynote speeches and workshops), thematic sessions on two contemporary issues, "energy and climate change" and "globalization and manufacturing" (lectures, discussions, and site visits), and the aforementioned experiential group project, Rube Goldberg Machine.
We will invite leaders in science and technology from various backgrounds to give keynote speeches, while the leadership education session will build on existing programs with expert lecturers to provide a firm foundation of leadership for the participants to make the following activities highly effective. In the thematic sessions, students will not only learn about the specifics of the topics through lectures and site visits, but also reflect on how they behave in discussion sessions in a multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary setting.
As described above, the Rube Goldberg Machine project is the centerpiece of the Forum. The supervisors of the group project are Professor Takashi Kiriyama from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Professor Kiriyama has conducted a number of workshops with his students that involve creative engineering. The final products will be publicly displayed at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan).
We anticipate that the Leadership Forum will become an annual event. To maintain the network created during the Leadership Forum 2007 and support continued leadership learning, the project plans to form the STeLA Alumni Association, the objectives of which will include the advising
of the organizing committee of STeLA Leadership Forum 2008 and beyond.
We will select the venue for Forum 2008 a year prior to the forum and annouce it in the end of Forum 2007. To broaden the diversity in our program, we will select venues from all over the world.
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