My name is Nobuhide Kasagi from Japan Science and Technology and I am Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo. We have a very excellent panelist here today. I'd like to introduce each of them. From my left, Professor Peter Stephan, Technische Universitat (TU) Darmstadt from Germany; Professor Dimos Poulikakos, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich; Professor Yogesh Jaluria from Rutgers University, United States; Professor Joon Sik Lee from Seoul National University and Professor Yildiz Bayazitoglu from Rice University.

As you see here, the issue the Role of Thermal Science in Meeting Societal Challenge, of course broad issue and for which we cannot immediately prepare the right answers nor consensus of our research community, but after the plenary lecture driven by Prof, Yoshikawa, I believe many of you have been stimulated to think about this for the last few days. I will first give your background or motivation why we prompted this panel discussion here during this conference.

We have glorious history of heat transfer research or thermal science, starting from the neutron, with recent development of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, statistical mechanics and so forth and over last century, the modern system of knowledge on the transfer or even wider named thermal science have been developed by this research community.

The 21st century can be characterized by several keywords, for example, technology breakthrough, innovation, globalization, which all leading to rapid changes in the industrial structures and social systems. In the meantime, there is, of course, a social wish for sustainable development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

The 21st century can be characterized by several keywords, for example, technology breakthrough, innovation, globalization, which all leading to rapid changes in the industrial structures and social systems. In the meantime, there is, of course, a social wish for sustainable development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

There is a paradigm shift, which is driven by the International Council of Science and it's 1999 Budapest Declaration that is this four words – science in society and science for society. Also Dr. Lubchenco, who is a marine scientist, wrote in science journal, there is an implicit social contract between scientists and society when they conduct scientific research by spending public fund.

In Japan, particularly after 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, we have been striving to deal with various major issues, such as recovery and rebuilding, future energy plan, deindustrialization, ageing with declining population and the sovereign debt and economic crisis. In spite of these difficult issues, Japanese government decided, approved the 4th Science and Technology Basic Plan in 2011 and secured science and technology budget of about 4.6 trillion yen or US$46 billion. It's still being increased.

This figure shows the percentage fraction of the public research funding against the GDP for various countries. Japan is almost in the middle spending perhaps 0.8 to 0.9% of the total GDP. Some countries spending more and some country spending less, but anyway this is a huge amount of money which the public offered to the science community.

In reality, the scientists want to do the research by their own motivation. In many cases scientific research is driven by scientific curiosity. That is good, but on the other hand, the society wants to have their dreams or wishes fulfilled by science and technology. There is clearly asymmetric relationship between the science community and the society. So the essential question is how to effectively link science to innovation and economic growth and social welfare.

There are lot of issues of seeds-push versus issue-driven research or bottom-up versus top-down research, but in many countries science and technology policies has been declined to top-down or state-determined issue driven research. So how do we keep or cultivate research motivation in such research environment? So I pose two important questions –
first, roles of scientists and engineers of thermal science in resolving various societal issues and enabling further societal development?
The second – How research themes and schemes should be designed in order to meet societal challenges while keeping spontaneous motivation of researchers in issue-driven research?