International Program in Agricultural Development Studies (IPADS)

Programme overview

IPADS is the only Master's programme taught entirely in English at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, run on the Yayoi Campus in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo. Launched in the 2010/2011 academic year, it is a two-year MSc (Agricultural Sciences) that trains graduates to identify and implement solutions to agricultural, environmental and resource-management problems in developing countries. The programme describes itself as "issue-oriented rather than methodology-oriented", drawing on both natural and social sciences — plant science, plant material science, plant biotechnology, agricultural and environmental economics and sociology, animal science, food science, agroinformatics, forestry, fisheries, environmental science, soil science and ecology. Students are fully integrated members of the School's Department of Global Agricultural Sciences. The taught component is concentrated into the first six months, after which students spend roughly eighteen months on full-time thesis research in a supervisor's laboratory. Admission is by a two-round online prescreening followed by a shortlisted-only document round and, for some candidates, an online interview; applicants do not contact supervisors before being shortlisted. The programme's funding routes are unusually central to its admissions design: MEXT University Recommendation and the University of Tokyo Fellowship are decided inside the IPADS selection, while the Joint Japan/World Bank Graduate Scholarship Program requires an unconditional IPADS offer first. This record reflects the October 2026 intake — the most recent cycle for which the University has published a guideline.

IPADS sits inside the Department of Global Agricultural Sciences of the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, on the Yayoi Campus. The MSc is "a two-year coursework and research program towards the University of Tokyo's MSc (Agricultural Sciences) degree": to graduate "students must gain equal or more than 30 credit points and pass the defense of their Master's thesis". The year is front-loaded — "Typically, students in MSc complete the coursework component of the program in their first six months whilst designing and preparing for their original research, and then engage in full-time research for the remaining 18 months." Six IPADS subjects totalling 17 credits are compulsory, including 8 credits of IPADS Master's Research and 4 credits across IPADS Research Seminars I and II; the balance is made up from an IPADS elective list and, with the supervisor's prior approval, from courses of the Department of Global Agricultural Sciences, common courses of the Graduate School, common graduate courses of the University and other departments and graduate schools. "The research component of the MSc program... [is] conducted under the supervision of one or more of the School's faculty." Students are attached to the School's research community throughout, "participating in weekly seminars, thematic workshops and academic conferences". Teaching is delivered mainly by professors of the Department of Global Agricultural Sciences, and the entire programme is taught in English.

Important facts