2019 Portraits of Student Diversity at Keio

In August 2019, Moeka Tsuji stood atop the Japanese world of college women’s go, winning the grandmaster of go at the 55th National Women’s Student Hon'inbo Championships. She first watched anime Hikaru no Go when she was just three years old and took an interest in the game after learning how to play from an elderly man in the neighborhood. Moeka began competing in the women’s amateur league when she was in the fourth grade and started learning from a professional go player in fifth grade. As part of her high school’s go team, she won both the group and individual events at the National High School Go Championships. Since coming to Keio, she has continued to play go but also enjoys music through a student acapella group, saying that she had dreamed of joining a more "normal" student club once she got to university. In academics, she has a burgeoning interest in social psychology and is searching for a career path where she can make use of her specialization. "And of course, I want to continue playing go," Moeka says. "I’d like to try and compete at East Asian international tournaments."

(Original article published in Portrait in the Winter 2020 (No. 305) Issue of Juku.)

Yukio Nozawa is the creator of the sound-only game Screaming Strike, which took the Tokyo Game Show by storm at Chiba’s Makuhari Messe in 2018. He followed up Screaming Strike with another new game in 2019. Having lost his eyesight at three years old, Yukio resolved to make games of his own at the age of ten. "I used the Internet to learn how to program games all on my own," he explains. Yukio is a part of Prof. Jun Murai’s student research group at SFC, where he uses his disability to his advantage, researching web accessibility issues while developing plenty of games and other apps for the visually impaired. "One of the biggest benefits of my college life has been the many friends I’ve made all across the world through game development." He is scheduled to start his career as an engineer at an IT company in the spring of 2020. "Even after I start working, I plan to continue creating new games," he says.

(Original article published in Portrait in the Autumn 2019 (No. 304) Issue of Juku.)

In August 2018, Tsubasa Nakagawa served as an executive chair for the 17th Asia-Pacific Pharmaceutical Student Symposium (APPS) held in Japan. After first participating in APPS in Thailand as a second-year student, she says her world opened up in a significant way after seeing the high aspirations of pharmacy students abroad. With a desire to provide more fellow Japanese peers with a similar experience, Tsubasa started preparing to invite the symposium to Japan more than two years in advance. The theme: "This is a start." She aimed to create a symposium that would be a new step forward for everyone involved, paying attention to every detail of the program and activities. Tsubasa is currently collaborating with a laboratory at the School of Medicine, where she is working on her bachelor’s thesis on the effects psychotropic drugs have on brain waves.

(Original article published in Portrait in the Summer 2019 (No. 303) Issue of Juku.)

Maika Itsuno was one of two Japanese candidates sent to the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar, which is held in conjunction with events related to the Nobel Prize. There she presented to high school students regarding her research on the use of iPS cells to discover the causes of dementia. She also discussed the latest issues in science with students from around the world. Maika attended the Nobel Prize awards ceremony and had a chance to meet with Kyoto University Distinguished Professor Tasuku Honjo, who won the Prize in Physiology or Medicine. "I was inspired by his passionate belief in the importance of basic medical research," she recalls. Maika says she was originally interested in clinical medicine, but after she began researching iPS cells in Prof. Hideyuki Okano's lab in her fourth year. After talking with Dr. Honjo, her interests are shifting toward basic research.

(Original article published in Portrait in the Spring 2019 (No. 302) Issue of Juku.)

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