Features of the School
Our school aims to understand Planet Earth and its environment, and to develop the state-of-the-art technologies needed to build the foundations of our society. It offers three courses: Earth and Planetary Science, Civil Engineering and Disaster Prevention, and Environmental and Urban Engineering. Our goal is to produce graduates who can contribute to society with their expertise.
Introduction
Outline
Our school provides education and conducts research in both science and engineering; the disciplines offered are Earth and Planetary Science, and Civil and Urban engineering. Our curriculum covers the 4.6-billion-year history of the Earth and life, our environment, natural disasters, and the infrastructures that form the basis of our daily lives.
Our Principles and Goals
Our newly established school offers science and engineering disciplines. We aim to understand Planet Earth and its environment and to build the foundations necessary for a livable environment and cities. Our school offers three integrated courses: Earth and Planetary Science, Civil Engineering and Disaster Prevention, and Environmental and Urban Engineering. We train our students to become researchers who will study the Earth and its environment, engineers who will solve problems by applying the new ideas and techniques, and educators who will teach the findings to their students.


Course in Earth and Planetary Science
Earth, our living planet: life and evolution through the ages? from past to present and into the future
We provide education and conduct research in Earth and
Planetary Science, covering a wide variety of fields including
the materials that make up the Earth and other planets, the
environment, the history of life forms, and the dynamics of the
Earth’s interior and surface. Our course offers lectures on the
basics necessary to understand the Earth, laboratory work to
learn cutting-edge analytical methods, and fieldwork to acquire
the necessary skills and experience. Our goal is to educate and
train students to become researchers and engineers who will
contribute to solving a broad range of global and local problems,
or to become science teachers.
If the Earth’s history were compressed into one year, humans
would appear on December 31. How did the earth prepare the stage
for humans? If we imagine the Earth to be an egg, the Earth’s
crust is only as thick as an eggshell. No one has seen the world
under the shell of the Earth or other planets. The Earth is
filled with poorly understood frontiers. That is the starting
point for our exploration of the Earth.

Deformation microstructure of mantle rock including olivine and antigorite. These minerals play important roles in the geodynamics of seismogenetic areasin deep subduction zones.

We reveal the Earth's history using paleoenvironmental records preserved in fossils (left: planktonic foraminifera living in surface ocean, right: ammonite from the Cretaceous period).
Course in Civil Engineering and Disaster Prevention
We aim to construct safe, comfortable and resilient infrastructures, based on theories, experiments and on-site training.
We are now facing the major challenge of building a nation
that is harmonized with the natural environment yet resistant to
disasters. Our school aims to produce engineers who will take on
this challenge from the perspectives of design, construction and
maintenance of infrastructure, and environmental preservation.
Engineering is a field of manufacturing products; however, our
goal is not to produce a large amount of cheap products, but
rather to accomplish projects of large-scale infrastructure such
as roads, bridges, tunnels and harbors, which should be tailored
to regional conditions. Infrastructures produced through the
ingenuity of “professional engineers” with advanced
technologies will be handed down to subsequent generations as
legacies. After completing this course, students will work as
leading engineers on large-scale projects at various sites around
the world; this will be the beginning of new legacies.
“They are not ordinary products; they are projects that will
become legacies over time.”

Taking on the challenge of the last frontier: an underground project (New Hokuriku Shinkansen Tunnel): Advanced tunneling technology being used in the Kanazawa area

Raging winter waves over the levee: The small yet strong levee constructed based on minute calculations continues to protect people.
Course in Environmental and Urban Engineering
We solve various problems in city planning from the perspectives of transportation and the environment through a combination of arts and sciences.
“What is a city? It is not merely a place where people get
together to live. It is a complex that contains many facilities
for the convenience of residents and visitors, as well as
transportation that allows for their free movement. Who planned
and created them? When we live together, we may encounter serious
problems such as conflicts of interest and environmental
pollution; however, we go about our lives without being aware of
those problems. Who is solving the problems and supporting our
life?
The keywords of this course are “coexistence with the
environment” and “the present as a page of history”.
Students will learn about the creation and development of cities
from a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary perspective. We produce
“human-friendly, environment-friendly engineers” who examine
the safety and convenience of life in a comfortable environment
from an engineering viewpoint. Moreover, they consider the
standpoint of the users when carrying out civil engineering
projects. “Rome was not built in a day. Then, in how many days
was my hometown built? What will it be like in the future?” You
will find the answers to these questions at our school.


Many foreign visitors arriving in Kanazawa on a luxury cruise ship: A student is asking questions for his PhD thesis.

Kahokugata Lagoon water-quality testing: A glass of water reveals environmental changes and makes us realize the value of clean water.
Work carried out in laboratories is subsequently applied to fieldwork. This is a feature of Course in Civil Engineering and Disaster Prevention and Course in Environmental and Urban Engineering.