 Alright, good morning everybody, nice to see so many of you, we haven't held a welcome ceremony for a couple of years now due to ongoing circumstances, but it's great to finally be able to greet all of you, welcome you and you, and the new students to the OIST community. This is quite a large welcome ceremony because we're able to introduce new faculty who have arrived over the last two years, and also the new students, so this is a welcome to the Class of 2021 and to the Class of 2022. So I would first of all like to call on the President, Dr Peter Gruess, to give an opening remarks, and then I'll introduce the new faculty. Peter Gruess? Well, good morning, who I am, and welcome to all of you. Thank you for joining us today as we warmly welcome OIST's newest member here in our auditorium. Now here in our auditorium, these words sounded trivial three years ago, and yet we all know what has come to pass over these years. And today again, it's my great pleasure to see you all finally here in the biggest room on our campus. During the pandemic, many of you had to work and study remotely and do a delays due to immigration restrictions and a challenging relocation process to finally arrive at OIST. Thank you for not losing patience and hope. Since we can meet today for the first time since the autumn of 2019 for this welcome ceremony, the group of newcomers is longer than usual. And we have different kinds of newcomers. Some of you first joined OIST remotely. Others have been here on campus for almost a year. Many have only just arrived. Today, on behalf of everyone at OIST, we can finally welcome all of you. It's a pleasure to have you as part of the OIST family. Welcome to the PhD students, the class of 2021 and the class of 2022. Welcome to the new faculty members and welcome to the new executives and to every one of you who has joined us over the last two and a half years. Welcome. You have chosen a young and dynamic university. A few months ago, we celebrated our 10 years anniversary. In only a decade, OIST has made many notable accomplishments rising quickly to become a world leading research university in science, technology and innovation. This was achieved by a community of ambitious, hardworking, talented and diverse individuals to which you now belong. I encourage you to embody OIST's creative spirit and the ambition to go even further. Enjoy the campus and the surrounding region that will be your home for the next several years. Its beauty and architecture never fail to amaze me. You chose a career in science or science management. Rightfully so. The potential of science, technology and innovation to meet pressing societal challenges was never so clear as in these last few years. Be it around climate change, health or so many other areas. The COVID-19 pandemic caused unimaginable disruption to our daily lives. To be here today in this auditorium is not a small achievement. At OIST, our entire community of researchers, students and staff came together to face the adversity with a remarkable array of research projects and outreach activities. For instance, here on campus, we set up a highly effective PCR testing laboratory which has performed more than 340,000 tests for Okinawa and it is still going strong. COVID infections will not disappear. So we must live with them as we have learned to live with the influenza virus. In our university, we are well positioned to deal with COVID as the new normal. And here at OIST, we are also dedicated to tackle other pressing challenges through our work. Hence, we are very excited that all of you have chosen to join us. Strengthening OIST leadership team, we welcome Shigaharo Kato, Secretary General and CEO. I think a little morning exercise would help, yes. Amy Shen, a renowned professor at OIST who will serve as provost from October onward. She's taking up the position from Mary Collins who will return to the UK in September. Thank you so much Mary for your remarkable work as OIST provost. Gil Granomaia, Executive Vice President for Technology Development and Innovation. Heather Young, Vice President for Communication and Public Relations. Actually, Gil and Heather joined OIST at the height of the pandemic. They took responsibility for their divisions while they could not enter Japan from Israel and Canada respectively. I admire how both managed to become part of our executive team and lead their departments with expertise and dedication across continents and time zones. Thank you for month of sleepless nights due to the time differences. Maybe you are a night person coming back from the disco and everything you overcame to work with us. We are very glad to have you with us. We also welcome Isaku Higa, Vice President for Financial Management. Isuru Maeda, Vice President for Human Resources. Kethi Takayama, Executive Director of C-Hub. Melanie Chatfield, Senior Advisor to the President. And Nick Laskamp, Incoming Dean of Research who cannot be here with us today, but he deserves a hand as well. The qualifications and wealth of experience you bring with you will lead OIST in its next stage of development. Great leaders inspire their contemporaries, but they also inspired by them. And I hope OIST gives you plenty of inspirations. A warm welcome to our 12 new faculty members. They cover a broad spectrum from quantum physics to synthetic biology from mathematics to sign-ups formation. They enrich our research spectrum, the cooperation and the interdisciplinarity at OIST. We will learn more about each of you later when you introduce yourself and your science. But for now, I would like to say that we are very proud to have you here, this distinguished group of researchers and academics joining us. Your achievements and expertise in diverse areas of science and technology will enhance our dedication to excellence in research and teaching, and will benefit humanity and society. And now, last but not least, to our largest PhD student cluster comprising 79 students who have joined us here today. Congratulations! You are beginning an exciting new journey of exploration and scholarship. During your PhD education, you will acquire new knowledge, skills and the habits of mind that will prepare you to thrive in our increasing complex and interconnected world. This will enhance not just your professional life, but also your personal and civic life. The results of your research will be new discoveries of how the biological and physical world works and new inventions. You will deliver papers, author articles and books, register patents or begin startup companies. All the different ways of taking your new work, your new ideas into the world, your work will contribute to improving human life and the planet on which we live. To all our new members, I want to assure you that as your research unfolds and you find yourself immersed in long days of experiments and classes, we have many resources to support you. Starting with the Graduate School and the Faculty Affairs Office, as well as Kanju Well-Being, Health Research and Child Development Centers and our newly established C-HUB for your career development. All of you have come to OIST from many different parts in the world. Taking time to step outside the lab, outside of OIST to discover the Okinawan community that has generously supported us with its rich culture, tradition and heritage. Our connection with Okinawa roots us in this place, in time and in history. As a university supported by both the Cabinet Office of Japan and the Okinawan Prefecture, our responsibilities extend beyond research and education. OIST is committed to sustainable development of Okinawa and we have established several education, membership, mentorship and outreach programs with the local community. Furthermore, we are working hard to build an innovation park that will help Okinawa generate a high-tech industry. I encourage you to participate in local activities and to nurture your social and civic responsibilities. Become an active member of the OIST and Okinawa communities. I am confident that you will quickly discover, as I did almost six years ago, that OIST is a very special institution, not only in Japan but globally, with a unique model and vision. Make good use of this and don't believe what Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked. Everything in nature goes by law and not by luck. Because as we know, anyone who is doing science, there will always be serendipity involved in discovery and so, for your upcoming time at OIST, I wish you the best of luck in your journey of learning and discovery. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Peter Gruz, for those words of welcome and as echoing what he said, welcome all to the OIST community and to Okinawa. I'd now like to introduce the new faculty one by one. Obviously they know more about themselves than I do, so I will just present their name and then hand them a microphone for them to make their own introductions. So the first person on the list is Professor Ugo Abdullah. Please make your introductions. You may remove your mask. Thank you very much. I'm Ugo Abdullah. I came from Florida Institute of Technology and I joined OIST because I share the great vision and great development and I'm a mathematician. My expertise is analysis and partial differential equations and I hope I can make a small impact to this great development during my stay in Okinawa. I'm also very much interested to be as Dr. Gruz mentioned, to be also a member of the community. I'm very much interested in the culture. I think one of my hobbies is reading and I think after reading Dostoevsky in Russian and Günter Grass in German and Kapote in English, it's time to read Murokami in Japanese. So as he said himself after the quake, no matter how far you travel, you cannot get away from yourself. So I'm equipped with this wisdom of Murokami and my other hobbies is all kind of sport activities and specifically contact sports. I like them very much and Okinawa karate is very attractive activity for me. I'm also thinking about the sumo wrestling but that will be difficult. I have to eat a lot of sushi first. So having said that, so thank you very much for welcome. It's my great pleasure to join this great university. Thank you. Our next professor to introduce is Professor David Armitage. Hi everybody. Welcome all the new students. Having remotely mentored some of you last year, I can just appreciate how difficult and stressful it must have been over the past year. So thank you for sticking with it and coming here finally. As the name of the, as my unit suggests, we're an integrative community ecology unit. So we take a very interdisciplinary approach to the study of interactions between species of organisms and how they deal with things like climate change, variable environments and that sort of thing. So just a plug, you know, there is a place for everybody in our unit, be you a physicist, chemist, physicist, physiologist. Yeah, we do all sorts of things. So yeah, please come speak to me if you're interested in some of the things we do. We study plants, aquatic plants, carnivorous plants, mangroves, microbes and even animals now with bats and caterpillars. So yeah, just a quick plug and originally from Michigan in the United States, some of my hobbies include collecting and deejaying vinyl records. So if you're interested in that, maybe we can go to a record meet sometime and cooking and I just love, you know, experimenting with all the new and interesting ingredients that are found here. So yeah, thank you and welcome again. Do you think David Elkis? Good morning. My name is David Elkis. I'm originally from Spain but I've spent the past seven years and a half in Delft in the Netherlands. My unit studies the theory of quantum computation and quantum communications with a focus on quantum networks, networks of quantum devices. So let me give you two reasons for this choice. So first, we care about quantum networks because they have the promise of being very useful. Applications are for instance fundamentally secure communications, qualitative improvements in sensing, distributed computation among many others. However, most of these applications have never been demonstrated in experiment. By working on novel protocols, error correction theory can help enable the first proof of principle demonstration. And second, quantum information theories are relatively young field. So many of the most basic questions remain unanswered. What are the fundamental limits for studying or for transmitting information? For what problems can quantum computers or quantum networks offer a provable advantage? So if you're interested on any of these topics, please reach out. For the moment, welcome to OIST as I learnt in Okinawan, main story and thanks for your attention. Just a minute. The next person on my list is Professor Yukiko Gorda, which is obviously not this person. Professor Gorda unfortunately can't be with us today due to travel disruptions from last night's weather. And she works in the area of synaptic biology, synaptic formation. I'm sure she'll find a good place here. So welcome to Yukiko Gorda. And now another physicist, Philip Hearn. Yeah, hello everyone. So I'm Philip Hearn. I'm not actually that new to this institute. So I joined more than two years ago, but my start here was delayed due to the pandemic, obviously. But I'm still excited to have joined such a newly growing institute, a very young institute. So the name of my unit is qubits in spacetime. So if you don't know what qubits are, they're basically the most elementary information carriers in quantum theory. And so the name indicates that the research that we do is at somewhat at the interface of quantum foundations, quantum information science and gravitational physics. And the aim is ultimately to understand better certain properties of quantum gravity, the unification of quantum theory and gravitational physics. And one of the things we've been particularly focusing on is the extension of the relativity principle into the quantum realm. But we also do other things. So I'm originally from Berlin, Germany. But I've done my PhD in the Netherlands in Utrecht. And then afterwards I went on the road for a couple of years. I went to Canada for postdoc, then Vienna, Austria, and then London, UK before joining OIST. And on a personal note, my hobbies are much related to the outdoors. So I love nature in all its forms, and in particular the underwater world for which Okinawa is of course a great place. And with that, let me maybe pass on. Thank you very much for correcting me on my definition of qubit. I used to think it was this distance here, but things have moved on. Next to introduce is Liu Qing, a professor in mathematics. Hi. Good morning, everyone. I'm Qing Liu. So probably you find my first name very hard to pronounce. I mean, okay, I usually do this at the beginning of my lecture. So when you see Q in Chinese name, you should pronounce it as C-H. So Qing Liu. So I hope this helped you pronounce my name correctly. So I'm originally from Shanghai, China. I was working in University of Pittsburgh and Coca University before joining OIST. My research interest is also analysis in PDE as UGGER, but I focus on more geometry related to PDEs and also applications in optimal control, game theory, and image processing. So I am very happy to join this community because I found a lot of chances to talk to different people in different fields. So I hope I will get more ideas from a lot of you. I'm looking forward to talk to you in the future. Thank you very much. Next, I'd like to introduce Professor Christine Luscombe. So welcome to all the graduate students, first of all, and welcome to all the executives as well. It's great to see all of you in person. So as was mentioned, my name is Christine Luscombe, and I run the pi-conjugated polymers unit. And you might be wondering, well, what on earth does that mean? But basically what that means is we work on polymers or macromolecules, and the pi-conjugated part means that we work with electronic polymers. So some of the things that we try to do is to try and make these polymers in better ways that the nature can do. But also another thing that we're trying to do is once we make the materials, we try to marry the world of synthetic chemistry with living organisms as well. So that's a new direction of research that we're trying to move in, which is to marry synthetic materials with the natural world. Another new area of research that we're doing in my group is we're working on microplastics research as well. So we have a number of collaborations already started at OIST, looking at the presence of microplastics and a number of sea organisms around Okinawa. So we're very excited to be embarking on this new opportunity. Just on a personal note, I am of mixed heritage. I'm half Japanese, half English. I was born in Japan, and I went to school in Japan. But then I did my degrees at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and then moved to UC Berkeley for my postdoc. And then I spent 15 years as a faculty member at the University of Washington. So for me, coming back to Japan, I figured I would continue my loop around the globe. But also it is like coming home, so I'm very excited to be back in Japan. I missed doing the southern hemisphere, so I'll have to get there sometime. But nevertheless, I guess I'm moving south coming to Okinawa. But nevertheless, I came back because I believed an OIST vision of having a diverse community and also for doing interdisciplinary research. So I look forward to working with all of you and working towards OIST school and achieving that. And on a final note, as of today, I'm the Chair of the Faculty Assembly. So with the Graduate Student Council as well, I look forward to working with you to creating a supportive community at OIST. So thank you. Franz Meitinger. Good morning, everyone. My name is Franz Meitinger. I just arrived one month ago, so I'm quite new here. And it has been a quite exciting time, and I'm looking forward for the next few years. My unit works on cell proliferation. And we are interested in mechanisms of cell proliferation and cell division in the context of cancer development. You use a lot of live cell imaging and gene editing, and if you'd like to learn more about it, please visit us in Lab 1. A little bit about my background. I grew up in Germany. I did my PhD at the German Cancer Research Center. And I went from my postdoc to California to the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Now I'm here. I'm quite excited to start my work here. And I'm also very excited to learn more about Okinawa and its culture. And I'm looking forward to eat much more of the delicious food here. And thank you to everyone. And I'm looking forward to meet you. And the last member of our assembled guest on stage is Lauren Salon. Hello. Welcome, everybody. Like friends, I've been at OIST for a month now, and it seems like I've been here for years. This is an incredible place. I am super impressed with the facilities, with all the people that I've met. And I look forward to meeting more of you and all of you in time. By trading, I am a paleontologist and an integrative biologist. My research involves what's called macroevolution, which is basically looking at environmental change and species change over time scales and global scales that are outside of direct human observation. So in my unit, we combine a lot of different fields together like biomechanics and phylogenetics, genomics, the fossil data in order to tease out different patterns of evolution and see if there are any applications to modern issues, whether they be environmental or we're also looking most recently at shapes for adaptation to things like robotics. So I come from the University of Pennsylvania, where I was for a number of years. The reason that I decided to come to OIST is because my work is interdisciplinary. And so here felt like the right place to be to really maximize the interdisciplinary parts of my research program and really build an international and cross-disciplinary team to address some of the questions that haven't been answered in my field. So echoing what some of the other faculty have said to the new graduate students, if you have any interest at all in anything that I've said or just fishes or just want to know more, contact me. You can do an out-of-field rotation. I'm open to pretty much everyone. And so I'm really excited to be here. I'm really excited to build my unit and I'm really happy to be at OIST. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much. With that, I would like to now ask the new faculty to take their seats back in the audience. Whilst you're doing so, I would like to take the opportunity to also introduce some new faculty who are not able to be with us today. Professor Ulf Dijkmann, Professor Fyodor Kondrashov, Kai Nemoto and Yutaka Yoshida. Welcome to OIST. And also a warm welcome to several new adjunct faculty who, some of whom have been here with us for a while, but this is the first opportunity to acknowledge Professors Carlos Sidd, Arte Ekhet, Jean Myers and Sven Teper. All right, so that concludes the introduction of new faculty, but there are many more new people to welcome. And to begin the introduction to the new students, I would like to call on Professor Ulf Skuglund, the Dean of the Graduate School. Yeah, hello everybody and especially warm hello to all our new students. So, I represent the grad school here at OIST and so you will see us as the interface between your activities in your research units and all the practical things around it. So, we hope to really serve you well. And I was putting together here a little bit of wisdom for you guys that could be good to think about. So, some of these things is slightly a repetition of what our President Peter Gruz said, but still you might want to hear these wisdoms again. I'm not going to pester you with a lot of them, but I've written down eight that I think you should think about. So, you have really managed to mentally or even physically arrive here at OIST despite the maybe receding COVID-19 pandemic or the powerful typhoons that can strongly interfere with travel plans. And you should really welcome to us that you have managed to go through all this. For some of you, the trip to Okinawa has been a slalom journey of strategic choices to avoid travel complications. There are large areas on this planet right now where you can travel safe. And thank you for trusting us to get you here safely. The second point is that you're beginning a very exciting research and educational journey in the following years until you graduate. This journey will for sure define you as a person for a quite long time. And you will grow as persons, learn about exciting science and make your own scientific discoveries, and learn how to do and present research. All of these things sound easy when you just read it like this, but it's a real trip for you. We, of course, realize that coming to beautiful Okinawa has been an important decision point on your side. And we at the grad school feel the responsibility to make it possible for you to reach your best. And we are very proud to have you as our students and we hope to guide and help you well during all these years. We also know that all of you are somewhat old at becoming, at coming to OIS to start your scientific career. Now, let that inspiring feeling spur you to do your best. But please also remember that you are all individuals and who need a social and private life. So with all these aspects of interplay between the disciplines, it might not pay off well for you if you decide to be a nerd. So please make sure that your network of contacts is expanded to also include friends here at OIST and in Okinawa and research acquaintances in the world. And feel sure that the students who have arrived before you, they are very eager to be your friends. Our already graduated students, the alumni, are beginning to spread out of Japan and the world and they can also be your contacts. So science is a very integrated in the social life kind of activity and our university is doing its best to make a very valuable and profound contribution. And you are a very real part of these ambitions of OIST. So that kind of concludes these kind of wise words for you. But life goes on and we really want to feel to be very warmly welcome here at OIST. Thank you. Thank you very much all for those words. And welcome to all the new students. We have very many this time, this time around. To introduce them all one by one and give them the opportunity to speak for three minutes each would take us till about 4.30 this afternoon and that's not actually on the timetable which is kind of short. So in the order of alphabetical by country I'm going to introduce students as a group from each country and then we can make them welcome at the end of each. So the first country on the list is Algeria. We have our first student ever from Algeria, Ilhem Nadia Rabehi. From Belgium, possibly also a first, Julian DeFaist, certainly a first as a student from Botswana is Carabo Quelegano, Juliana Silvia Deos. From China, Chen Jianing, Chengjuli, Liuzong, Qianqi and Wu Jiangming. From Cyprus, Andriani Petro. Not actually our first student from Cyprus, so sorry you don't win there, but this is our first student from Ecuador, Raul Hidalgo. From Egypt, Abdulrahman Bakri. From Finland, Tara Turkey. From France, Emma Geirin. I am assured that he's somewhere in France. From Germany, Jonas Schneider, Julian Lang and Tom Wilfling. There are quite a few students from India, understandably it is a large country, so let me break these into several slides. Sugato Chowdhury, Anjali Gupta, Amal Jose, Anshaman Nayak, Pramita Praveen, Saurav Raj and Saswato Sen. And also Aditya Singh, Harli Sutian, Niveda Velmurgan and Sandeep Vijayan. From Indonesia, Johannes Vibhishana. From Italy, Giulio Forgi and Simone Tandorella. Fittingly, from Japan, we have quite a few. This year, Fukuohara Erika, Fukushima Rui, Higuchi Taesuke and Izawa Tatsuo. Also Kanagawa Yuji, Koseki Morie, Nakatani Rio, Namba Miu. Namba Miu. Noma Tomoya, Okabe Nanako, Onishi Takatsuku and Takara Kazumi, Tomoda Nanami, Tomonaga Sutash, Yamauchi Naohiro, Yokokoji Arisa and Yoshiyoka Rengo. Welcome to OIST. From Latvia, Igor Dubenevich. From Mexico, Esteban Fregoso, Paulette Garcia and Daniel Gutierrez. Arno Hagenbeek, Safiret John, Deon Van Dinte and Jean-Paul Van Vernezel from the Netherlands. From the Philippines, Joshua Carlo Casapal. From Russia, Vera Emilienenko, Georgie Karelin, Timofei Karegin and Dmitri Kovaleski. From Singapore, Jongheng Pua. From South Korea, and surprisingly, this is also a first, Daehikim. A trio from Spain, Christian Amor, Martin Forsberg and David Thomas. Way up the back, hello. From Sri Lanka, a first, Kokila Pereira. From Switzerland, Fabian Hellebrand. From Taiwan, Ming Yang and Sun Shin. Five from the United Kingdom, Alex Hodges, Callum Hudson, Noah Locke, Lily Walker and Amy Young. And finally from the United States, for people, Jack Featherston, Jeffrey Garcia, Mayer Street and Theodor Tinker. It's so good to see all of you finally here, some of whom we have met only online, some of whom I have only seen as names on a list. Welcome to OIST and welcome to the community. So to echo the words of Peter and Ulf, this will be a great time of your life. It's an amazing atmosphere to take the next step in your career, wherever that career may take you. For some of you, you will become scientists. For some of you, you will remain attached to science and do some other productive work. For some of you may leave science altogether. But this PhD period is a momentous time of your life. You are in excellent hands, you're in an excellent community. Please make the most of all the opportunities. So welcome. And now I'd like to call on a member of the Student Council. Welcome remarks and also to present some awards that the students effectively chosen as representative of them is Lakshmi Priya. Fellow students, members of the OIST community and our dear neighbours from the Okinawan community. On behalf of the Student Council, please join me to extend a very warm welcome to the newest members of OIST. Our chair, Leili, unfortunately could not be with us here today. She's currently in Hokkaido presenting science, so therefore I'll be reading her welcome speech. Here goes. Though recent difficulties associated with travel and congregation are slowly alleviating, we are still living through times of great uncertainty and political unrest. It is very human during such times to become isolated and withdrawn, to act in reaction to our own fears and to feel the weight of pessimism threatening to overwhelm us. These feelings itself are neither right nor wrong. They are just that, feelings. But to allow ourselves to acknowledge them is a choice. And in this choice, we must recognize the opportunity in crisis to be brave and to instead hope. A career in science can be an arduous journey to undertake. Whilst in search of wondrous answers, one can be confronted with parts that may lead to sacrifices, failures and frustrations that may leave you feeling alone. But here at OIST, you will never truly be alone, unless you choose to be. The activities and bonds that exist within this multicultural community are one of its greatest strengths. We have fantastic support from the Graduate School and Seahub to sharpen and hone our professional skills. The University Community Services section further supports our personal development by facilitating recreational activities in the form of language courses, numerous music, dance, martial arts and arts clubs, and the human resources for mental and physical well-being to name a few. I encourage you to create opportunities, to teach and to learn from one another, to mentor and find mentorship that meets your needs, to exercise your voice and represent your peers by engaging with the members of the Student Assembly and the Student Council. This is your journey. Find activities and build bonds that will help you achieve excellence in your own way. Most of us are far away from home and immersed in a strange environment. As you hold close to your heart, all the things you left behind make space for everything you stand to gain. See this place as a new home and a new start. Break old habits and grow far beyond who you were when you arrived. Build on that courage. You took a brave step to come to Okinawa. Build on this. Seek out the boundaries of your comfort zone. Stay curious. The measure of a scientist is given by the questions they are willing to ask, as much as by the answers they supply. Remain inquisitive and don't believe the answers until they make sense to you. If we have learned anything from the last few years, it is that nature always has something up its sleeve that will be beyond our current technical expertise. This prompts us as scientists to develop a better relationship of understanding and cooperation with the rest of the world. OIST has a strong commitment to sustainable development goals. In Okinawa, I believe the most useful way to enact this is to think global and act local. No matter where the river flows down from, all waters are united when they reach the ocean. Remember that when you look out onto our beloved Okinawan coastline. Deep down, we all share the same dream, to create a better life for everyone in harmony with every other species on this planet. I am eager to see all the different things you will learn and achieve and all the different ways in which you will grow. I will leave you now all to celebrate and begin your journey amongst us. A very big thank you to all the organizing hands for making your relocation and this ceremony a reality. Menso-re, the OIST community, warmly welcomes you all. The students and the faculty are two important components out of the many that make up the OIST community. While OIST would not be a university without students, there cannot be students without teachers. Therefore, today, we would like to acknowledge the teaching efforts of our faculty which contribute to the wealth of resources available here at OIST. This year, I am pleased to announce that the Students' Choice Teaching Award goes to both Professor Tom Bourguignon and Professor Keiko Kono. This is an award in recognition of their excellence in teaching and making learning accessible and inspiring, so please give them another round of applause. This year, we will also be awarding a special mention for non-faculty teachers. The winner of the special mention by the rules was not eligible for the main award as it's mainly for faculty, but they were completely appreciated by their students. I am pleased to announce that the special mention teaching award goes to David O'Connell. Please give him a round of applause. Thank you all and let's welcome our newest members once more with a round of applause. That concludes the presentations and the introductions part of the ceremony. Now, I would like to hand over to one of our staff members, Ms Chucky Chibana. She works with us in the Graduate School. She will be introducing and explaining the cultural part of the event, and we will be closing with this part, so I would like her to explain some of the traditions and characters involved. Hi everyone, and new students and faculty members, welcome to Okinawa. As you know, Okinawa has its own history as Ryukyu Kingdom, and we would like to welcome you to the community and to the island in a very traditional way. We'll perform two dances for you today. The first one is called Yotsudake. It's traditionally performed to welcome guests or important guests from overseas. The noobs of the dancers express the joy of this wonderful day of celebration. You can probably hear the Sanshin, right? And the dance is done by OIST community members, Moyas, and the music is by OIST Sanshin group, Chinda Mitz, led by Satsuki Agena Shinshi Sensei, who used to work at OIST and who's been teaching Sanshin to the OIST community for the past couple years. I hope you will enjoy the traditional Okinawan culture and feel welcome to the island today. Thank you. So that was the traditional and rather classical dance performance for important guests, but the second piece is for the community members. It's called Tanchame. It literally means in front of Tancha and we are in Tancha, right? So this song is about us, the people living in Tancha. The dance shows the daily life of people in Tancha going fishing and selling the fish. I hope you will enjoy the dance, but again also you will enjoy the life, your own life in this community, Tancha and in Okinawa. And for this piece, we are honored to have professional dancers from Shimabukuru School of Shimabuku, Chihiro Kai, led by Shimabukuro Kimiko Sensei, the dance masters in Okinawa. Please enjoy Tanchame. Well thank you so much to all of our performers. Thank you to all of you for coming. That concludes our welcome ceremony today. Once again a big welcome to our new executives, our new faculty and of course all of our new students. So thank you for coming. I just a reminder to the new students to stay where you are because we'll want to take some photos of you later. And to everybody, a reminder that yes this weekend will be very blowy. Please make sure to clear the drains on your balconies. Please make sure to tie down your errant dogs and pot plants and park in a safe place. So stay safe everybody. Thank you very much for coming and have a good weekend.