Mitsuyuki Unno

Mitsuyuki Unno

Executive Director
The Nippon Foundation
Mitsuyuki Unno

Mitsuyuki Unno is Executive Director of The Nippon Foundation, having been appointed to this position effective April 2011.

Before taking his current position, he served several posts in the Foundation’s Maritime Department from 1999 to 2011, where he managed human capacity building programs and joint programs with international organizations. In 2007, he represented The Nippon Foundation in a multi-stakeholder initiative to establish a new Cooperative Mechanism for the Malacca Singapore Strait, to ensure safe passage of vessels and preservation of the marine environment.

Under his leadership, the Maritime Department is partnering with the maritime industry, the academia and the public sector to foster technological innovation and build human capacity. Current projects include, the Seabed 2030, which aims to facilitate the complete mapping of the ocean floor by the year 2030, and The Nippon Foundation Nereus Program, which is a global interdisciplinary initiative created to further our knowledge of how best to attain sustainability for the world’s oceans. The Nippon Foundation also partnered with the Japan Coast Guard to jointly host the first Coast Guard Global Summit in Tokyo, in September 2017. The scholarship program at WMU is one of the longest running scholarship programs of The Nippon Foundation. In 2018, WMU and the Foundation will establish the WMU Sasakawa Global Ocean Institute to better address the growing sustainability challenges in the world’s oceans.