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Recruitment and Retention (From IPMU News No. 4)

The most important element to build an excellent research institution is people. The institution is only as good as its scientific membership. As I told you in the previous issue of IPMU News, we exceeded our goal of having a half of our scientific staff to come from abroad. More importantly people we hired are of very high quality, coming from leading universities like Harvard, Princeton, Max-Plank institute, Kyoto University, University College London, or my own Berkeley.

The world took notice. We are already facing the problem that other institutions try to snatch away our young scientists. We successfully retained one by a promotion. The second one we lost to another university in Japan. Now the third one is being interviewed for a job in Germany. It is a tremendous challenge to attract world-class talents. To retain them is yet another challenge.

Given the challenge in both recruitment and retention, we decided to start a fundraising campaign. We need flexible funds to bring in the best scientists from around the world so that they can see IPMU in person and will consider our positions. We need funds to make exceptional arrangements to retain some of our young members. In addition, we also need to pay careful attention to make sure that the spouses of our members are happy. The funding from the government, no matter how generous they may be, cannot be used for most of these purposes. In addition, we would like to start building endowment to ensure our future beyond the guaranteed funding of ten years. To maintain the current level of activity, we will need to build at least $250M of endowment.

Here is the chicken-and-egg problem. We would also like to open a foundation Friends of IPMU to accept donations, which will require staffing and seed money. Unless there is a substantial amount of funds to begin with, we cannot even get started.

The University of Tokyo listened to us. They are setting up a new homepage where anybody can make a donation by a secure credit-card transaction. You access

https://payment.utf.u-tokyo.ac.jp/general.html

and can make contributions to IPMU, both in English and Japanese. Under the question "How you would like your donation to be used", click the button "other", and then make sure to specify IPMU in the blank space right under it. Remember Barack Obama: small donations can make a history. Yes, we can!

Director of IPMU Hitoshi Murayama

(1) Click "Payment by credit card" or "Payment by bank transfer"

(2) Select "Other" and specify "IPMU".