A family affair

To say that Toshiyuki Ide was in the nuclear business before he could walk may be an overstatement, but it is no exaggeration to state that it runs in the family. Toshi's father, who was a government official in the nuclear field, certainly transmitted his knowledge and passion for that field to his son. So after Toshi, who is Senior Administrator at the ITER Finance Division, finished his studies in Macroeconomics in 1981, it was no surprise that he would join the JAEA (Japan Atomic Energy Agency).

And his encounter with nuclear fusion was almost immediate. His first assignment was in project management of JT 60, the Japanese tokamak, which at that time was being built. When he changed assignments after almost 3 years, to work as a member of the project management team of the nuclear ship project in 1983, he also got a new boss... a certain Mr Kaname Ikeda... a small world indeed.

In 1989, when ITER was in the engineering design phase, Toshi joined the project and was at that time involved in the negotiations to get it to Japan. When the decision was taken to split up into three sites, Naka in Japan, Garching in Germany and San Diego in the US, he was part of the team responsible for accommodation, housing and schooling of the new arrivals and their families. This understanding of the ins and outs of relocating people came in handy when, after various other assignments with the JAEA, one of which in Vienna, he was offered a position with ITER in Cadarache in 2006. "I have always been an advocate of Cadarache as the ideal host of the ITER project," says Toshi, "and getting the chance to go and see for myself was a great opportunity. Having been here for more than two years now, what strikes me most is the exponential growth of the organization. Making sure our infrastructure, systems and administrative processes keep pace with this growth is probably the biggest current challenge in terms of management". In his current position within ITER, Toshi is part of the team that is making the implementation of SAP happen. He is also responsible for some of the financial reporting.