Greetings and welcome to CSEAS. My name is Fumiharu Mieno, the Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Area Studies (CSEAS) since April 1 2022. My research area is economic development and finance systems, with a primary focus on Thailand, Myanmar and Laos, studying the characteristics of economic systems including financial institutions and corporations. With empirical research that focuses on regions such Southeast Asian studies there is a need for the integration of two different academic approaches: discipline-based frameworks for the systematic understanding of phenomena, and area studies-based skills for observing “what is actually happening and occurring there”