Marie Saitou

Centre of Integrative Genetics (CIGENE), Faculty of Biosciences, Norwegian University of Life Sciences

Principal Investigator (Tenure-track)

What has been the most challenging in your research so far?

My big and immediate goal is to pass the tenure evaluation in five years. In order to achieve the goal, I need to secure external funding to cover the research cost and my salary, supervise graduate students and publish high-quality papers, and lead and organize courses.

Compared to Japan, what is your impression of the research environment in Norway?

This is my personal experience, but I was impressed by the rich and organized system to support research. Various experts are in charge of administration, laboratory, and server management. Our URA (university research administrator) organizes the agenda for the faculty meetings in advance to keep the meetings short. Besides that, once I arrived, a senior adviser from the external funding office (who had worked for the JSPS-equivalent organization in Norway) came to me, explained the European research funding system, and later edited my application.

Do you have any advice for young scientists who dream of going to Norway to do research?

Norway is a small country, so not all research fields are competitive. However, Norway is leading some research areas with affluent funding such as sustainability-related fields, geology, ocean science, and fisheries-related fields in addition to genome biology at CIGENE. If you find an attractive research group, you will be able to gain fruitful research experience. Norway also has a good societal system and safety, and we can use English anywhere. There are not many Japanese people here, but there are surprisingly many researchers who have visited or studied in Japan. We are looking forward to seeing you.