Adrienne Sabety, PhD, is a Wilson Family LEO Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. She is also a research faculty member at the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at Notre Dame. Her research focuses on access to care and treatment for disadvantaged populations, like undocumented immigrants. She also studies major changes in health care markets, such as the design of insurance marketplaces and adverse climate shocks. She received an AS in Mathematics from Cuesta Community College, a BA in Economics from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in Health Policy from Harvard in 2020.

Stephen Kissler is an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He earned his PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, where he studied the transmission of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. At Harvard, Stephen has focused on identifying drivers of antibiotic resistance and, more recently, on SARS-CoV-2 response. In addition to his research, he has consulted with Partners in Health and provided comments for numerous media outlets during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This event will offer simultaneous translation between Japanese and English. 
当イベントは日本語と英語の同時通訳がついています。

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.
当イベントはZoomウェビナーで行われます。ウェビナーに参加するためには、こちらのリンクをクリックし、事前登録をして下さい。

Febuary 14, 4-5:30 p.m. California time/ February 15, 9-10:30 a.m. Japan time

This event is part of the 2022 Japan Program Winter webinar series, The Future of Social Tech: U.S.-Japan Partnership in Advancing Technology and Innovation with Social Impact

 

COVID-19 has changed the way we work. While remote work has become the norm, the pandemic has also highlighted the inequity in childcare, elderly care, and household work. Japanese workplaces feel a particularly acute need for adjustment, as lack of digitalization and persistent gender inequality continue to limit productivity gains and diversity in the workforce. Social entrepreneurs in Japan have started offering new technologies that address these problems and transform Japanese work environments, using matching algorithms, innovative apps, and other new technologies. How can these social technologies reshape the workplace? What principles do we need in using these technologies in practice, in order to unlock the keys to untapped human resource potentials and realize a more equitable and inclusive work environment in Japan, the United States, and elsewhere?  Fuhito Kojima, a renowned economist specializing in matching theory, will talk about market design from the perspective of regulation design and economics, and Eiko Nakazawa, an influential entrepreneur, will speak about her experiences founding education and childcare startups in the United States and Japan, moderated by Yasumasa Yamamoto, a leading expert on technology and business in Japan and the United States. 

 

Panelists

Fuhito Kojima is a Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo and Director of the University of Tokyo Market Design Center. He received a B.A. at University of Tokyo (2003) and PhD at Harvard (2008), both in economics and taught at Yale (2008-2009, as postdoc) and then Stanford (2009-2020, as professor) while spending one year at Columbia in his sabbatical year. His research involves game theory, with a particular focus on “market design,” a field where game-theoretic analysis is applied to study the design of various mechanisms and institutions. His recent works include matching mechanism designs with complex constraints, and he is working on improving medical residency match and daycare seat allocation in Japan based on his academic work. Outside of academia, he serves as an advisor for Keizai Doyu Kai as well as several private companies.

 

Eiko Nakazawa is the Founder and CEO of Dearest, Inc., a VC-Backed startup in the United States that makes high-quality learning, childcare, and parenting support accessible by helping employers subsidize those costs for their working families. She also advises and invests in early-stage startups, and has recently co-founded Ikura, Inc., an education x fintech company in Japan. Prior to founding Dearest, Nakazawa spent 11 years with Sony Corporation, where she led global marketing, turnaround, and new business launch initiatives. Nakazawa earned an M.S. in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

 

 

Moderator

Yasumasa Yamamoto is a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University graduate school of management and has been a specialist in emerging technology such as fintech, blockchain, and deep learning. He was previously industry analyst at Google, senior specialist in quantitative analysis of secularized products, as well as derivatives at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi in New York. Yamamoto holds a M.S. from Harvard University and a masters degree from University of Tokyo.

 

This event will offer simultaneous translation between Japanese and English. 
当イベントは日本語と英語の同時通訳がついています。

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.
当イベントはZoomウェビナーで行われます。ウェビナーに参加するためには、こちらのリンクをクリックし、事前登録をして下さい。

February 7, 5-6:30 p.m. California time/ February 8, 10-11:30 a.m. Japan time

This event is part of the 2022 Japan Program Winter webinar series, The Future of Social Tech: U.S.-Japan Partnership in Advancing Technology and Innovation with Social Impact

Japan’s startup scene has become more exciting in recent years, but in the medical field, the failure to develop COVID-19 vaccines highlighted the shortcomings of Japan’s medical industry. What should Japan do to foster more impactful biotechnology entrepreneurship that would leverage vibrant medical research carried out at Japanese universities? The panel features two speakers who founded and grew their medical ventures in Japan's rapidly maturing startup ecosystem, both with deep connections to university research. 

Tadahisa Kagimoto founded his first company right after finishing his medical degree at Kyushu University, pioneering a pathway of commercializing biotechnology from Japanese university research. His second startup, Healios, founded in 2013 with the goal of becoming a pioneer in regenerative medicine utilizing iPS, was successfully listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2015 and has been growing since.

Shoko Takahashi was a PhD student in molecular bioscience at the University of Tokyo when she founded her company, Genequest, to offer home DNA testing. The firm was purchased by another biotech startup founded by a University of Tokyo graduate, Euglena, in 2017, and the company has partnered with a variety of pharmaceutical, food and beverage companies, and universities in its research. Their entrepreneurial journeys reveal Japan's changing startup ecosystem that has rapidly matured over the past decade and signal a need for further development in regulatory environments, human resource development, and university-industry collaboration in the biotechnology industry.

 

Panelists

Hardy TS Kagimoto, MD is founder, Chairman and CEO of HEALIOS K.K., a Tokyo-based, clinical-stage world leader in regenerative medicine and cell therapy. 

After founding Healios in 2011, Dr. Kagimoto led the company’s listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2015 and has built the company to its current scale of more than 140 people across its Japan and US offices. Healios leverages the favorable Japanese regulatory framework for regenerative medicine to efficiently deliver results for patients and its stakeholders. It is currently running two pivotal clinical trials for ischemic stroke and acute respiratory distress syndrome using bone marrow-derived allogeneic multipotent adult progenitor cells. At the same time, Healios is developing best-in-class, next generation pipeline assets in immuno-oncology, ophthalmology, and organ buds utilizing its innovative, proprietary universal donor iPS cell platform.

 

Shoko Takahashi founded the Japanese personal genome company Genequest Inc. in 2013 while a graduate student at the University of Tokyo. Genequest provides a web-based personal genetic service for consumers and collaborates with research institutions in a large-scale genome research project to maximize synergistic effects between research and personal genome services. She is filled with ambition to accelerate genetic research and contribute to human health all over the world. She graduated from the University of Tokyo with a Ph.D. in Molecular Bioscience in 2015, and Kyoto University with a Bachelor of Biochemistry Science in 2010. She has been awarded the Japan Venture Award and received the highest rating by the Japan Ministry of Economy. In 2015, she was commended by the Japan Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology as one of the researchers contributing major innovations to science technologies in Japan.

She received the 2018 Young Global Leaders award from the World Economic Forum and was selected for Newsweek's ‘100 respected Japanese in the world’ list.

 

Moderator

Kenji E. Kushida is a Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously was with the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as a research scholar.

Kushida’s research and projects focused on the following streams : 1) how politics and regulations shape the development and diffusion of Information Technology such as AI; 2) institutional underpinnings of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, 2) Japan's transforming political economy, 3) Japan's startup ecosystem, 4) the role of foreign multinational firms in Japan, 4) Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster. He spearheaded the Silicon Valley - New Japan project that brought together large Japanese firms and the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

He has published several books and numerous articles in each of these streams, including “The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries,” “Japan’s Startup Ecosystem,” "How Politics and Market Dynamics Trapped Innovations in Japan’s Domestic 'Galapagos' Telecommunications Sector," “Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance,” and others. His latest business book in Japanese is “The Algorithmic Revolution’s Disruption: a Silicon Valley Vantage on IoT, Fintech, Cloud, and AI” (Asahi Shimbun Shuppan 2016).

 

Utibe R. Essien, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, a general internist and health disparities researcher in the VA Pittsburgh Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion. Dr. Essien’s research focuses on racial disparities in the use of novel therapeutics in the management of chronic diseases including atrial fibrillation and was recently awarded a 5-year, $1 million Career Development Award from the Department of Veterans Affairs. He has applied his health equity research framework to the COVID-19 pandemic, rapidly becoming an expert in examining the disparities that disproportionately affect minority communities with COVID-19. His work has been featured in leading medical journals including JAMA and the NEJM and he has been interviewed by several national news outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR. Dr. Essien is a fierce advocate for diversity and equity in medicine, speaking nationally on the topic and co-founding an “Antiracism in Medicine” podcast for the Clinical Problem Solvers podcast. Dr. Essien's leadership in advancing health equity has resulted in several local and national awards including the 2021 AAMC Herbert Nickens Award.

Mary K. Goldstein, MD, MS, is a Professor of Health Policy and a core faculty member at the Department of Health Policy and the Center for Health Policy, and the Director of the Geriatrics Research Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She directs the Stanford/VA Palo Alto Geriatric Medicine Fellowship Program, and the Special Fellowship Program in Advanced Geriatrics at VA Palo Alto. She also serves as associate director for the Physician Post-Residency Fellowship Program in Health Services Research and Development, and for the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Medical Informatics, both at VA Palo Alto Health Care System.

Goldstein studies innovative methods of implementing evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for quality improvement. She leads the ATHENA Decision Support System project that has developed and implemented an automated clinical decision support system for primary care clinicians, using hypertension as a model, and now extended into several other clinical domains.  Goldstein's research also explores older adults' health preferences (health utility) for application to cost-effectiveness analysis.

Mark Helfand, MD, MS, FACP, is Professor of Medicine and Professor of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at the Oregon Health & Science University. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and practices hospital medicine at the Portland VA Medical Center, where he is a staff physician and directs the VA Evidence Synthesis Program Coordinating Center. He founded the Oregon Evidence-based Practice Center (now the Pacific Northwest EPC) in 1997 and, in the 2000’s, led the EPC’s work for the US Preventive Services Task Force and for OHSU’s pioneering Drug Effectiveness Review Project.