Professor and Chair
University of the Ryukyus Graduate School of Medicine, Japan
Currently a professor and chair of the first internal medicine at only one national university in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. The department includes three divisions: Infectious Diseases, Respiratory and Gastroenterology. She became the first female professor in the university's Faculty of Medicine in October 2022. She specializes in respiratory infections and has been involved in many studies, especially in the areas of pneumococcal pneumonia and COVID-19. Her previous research includes the development of a genetically-based rapid diagnostic method for drug-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae at Nagasaki University and pulmonary innate immunity research at Boston University in the U.S., for which she received many research awards. Currently, she is collaborating with the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan, to study pathogenicity factors of Streptococcus pneumoniae, and is a primary investigator of intervention studies on COVID-19 in Japan, collaboration with companies as specific clinical studies.