Agricultural Sciences

This six-week summer course provides individual research training through the experience of belonging to a specific laboratory at Tohoku University. Students are assigned to a laboratory research group with Japanese and international students under the supervision of Tohoku University faculty. They participate in various group activities, including seminars, for the purpose of training in research methods and developing teamwork skills. The specific topic studied depends on the instructor in charge of the laboratory to which each student is assigned. The methods of assessment vary with the student's project and laboratory instructor. Students submit an abstract concerning the results of their individual research each semester and present the results near the end of this program.

Plants are continuously challenged by sometimes life-threatening changes in their environment. These can severely impact their development and even kill plants. Interestingly, plants can flexibly adjust their development to deal with these environmental changes. They can for example adjust root anatomy to resist drought, overall root architecture to forage for nutrients, and shoot architecture to escape from shade or submergence. In order to ascertain optimal development, plants have evolved a broad variety of mechanisms of developmental plasticity. This course discusses how plants control their development, how plants sense the environmental cues flooding and salinity, and how environmental signaling controls plant development through a combination of molecular genetics, physiology, and functional genomics.  This course combines lectures with hands-on practice in wet lab practicals and data labs. This includes practicing how to define research questions and hypotheses, how to design and perform experiments, how to collect and analyze data, and how to interpret results in the biological context. In the wet labs, learn how to carry out experiments with plants, such as treating plants with different light and water regimes, measuring phenotypic traits, and assessing molecular level changes to protein and mRNA. In the data labs, learn how to analyze large gene expression datasets using online databases to gain biological insight on how roots and shoot respond to changes in their environment. Assumed previous knowledge is plants and micro-organisms, and Plant Physiology and Development are required. Molecular Genetic Research Techniques (B-B2MGOT14) and Plants in Context (B-B2PICO21) are recommended.

This course provides an interdisciplinary exploration of sustainable agriculture, food systems, and ecological practices within the context of the Mediterranean, with a specific focus on Sicily. Students engage with ecological concepts and principles fundamental to designing and managing sustainable agroecosystems, with a whole systems approach encompassing the multiple dimensions of sustainability. Local engagement is aimed at enhancing students’ critical thinking about global food systems, the SDGs and sustainable agricultural practices.

In addition to the core focus on sustainable agriculture and food systems, this course provides a deeper historical and environmental framing, exploring the long-standing cultural overlays that have shaped Sicily’s agricultural practices. Students examine the island's ecological history and agricultural evolution under indigenous, Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman and Spanish influences, while gaining insight into how historical globalization has impacted local food systems. Special attention is given to the role of commodity trade over time and its influence on current agricultural structures.

This course covers the application of management science methodology to various decision-making problems in the agricultural and food industry, models them mathematically, and derives optimal strategies. The course enables students to actually apply and discuss management science methodology to corporate cases related to the agricultural and food industry. Specifically, in this course, students acquire theoretical models for linear programming, network models, integer programming, nonlinear programming, multi-objective decision-making, decision-making under uncertainty, simulation, and queueing, and learn how to analyze them. In addition, it enables students to apply management science methodology to topics such as agricultural cultivation, food distribution and supply chain, and agricultural and food production planning, and derive and interpret results.