[No. 107] Takahiro Hasegawa

Exactly ten years have passed since my graduation, and I have been given the opportunity to contribute to the alumni relay column, "Jukuin Raiou."

I discovered the fascination of statistics in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and, with the desire to make it my profession, I joined a pharmaceutical company. I am currently involved in drug development as a biostatistician. Drug development can take nearly ten years, from the selection of candidate compounds to obtaining approval. The probability of success is also low, so it is necessary to proceed as rationally as possible and to assess the potential of a drug under development at an early stage. This is where statistical thinking becomes essential. The work of a biostatistician begins with planning clinical trial designs, then conducting analyses and interpreting the results. However, I did not aim for this path from the time I entered university, nor did I even know that such a profession existed. I would like to introduce the story of how I came to be here.

I have always liked mathematical thinking and wanted to apply it to something practical, so I was interested in industrial engineering. Therefore, I entered Division II with the aim of joining the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Thanks to this divisional system, I was able to explore a wide range of related subjects before honing my specialty. While I began to understand what industrial engineering was, I also learned about academic fields I had not previously considered. One of them was statistics. Until high school, statistics to me meant that if you tossed a coin 100 times and got 50 heads, the probability of getting heads was 50%. But the statistics I learned after entering university was about thinking that the probability of getting heads would almost certainly fall within the range of 40% to 60%. And as the number of coin tosses increased, this range would narrow, allowing for interpretation down to the precision indicated by the data. For me, it was a shocking encounter that completely blew my mind. After that, I joined Professor Shinozaki's laboratory, studied statistics as a specialty, and came to the decision that I wanted to pursue a career as a biostatistician at a pharmaceutical company, a place where I could use this knowledge to protect people's health. Professor Shinozaki introduced me to data from a certain hospital and gave me the opportunity to tackle concrete problems that arose while I proceeded with the analysis, discussing it with doctors. It was a valuable experience where I could feel both the fascination of academia in solving problems and the fascination of the interpretations derived from analysis results, which strengthened my resolve. I am filled with gratitude for Professor Shinozaki, who created such an environment for me.

Having started on the path of a biostatistician, I found that the data handled in actual clinical trials is vast, requiring programming skills to handle it correctly. Clinical knowledge is also necessary to understand the properties of the drug under development. The specialized knowledge learned at university is only a small part of the knowledge needed in the real world. However, I believe that having this expertise as a solid foundation provides a foothold when facing various obstacles and gives me the strength to overcome them. In my third year at the company, I had the opportunity to take a course for training biostatisticians, which allowed me to learn anew while being mindful of the practical challenges I had experienced up to that point. I realized that balancing academic study and practical experience is crucial for enhancing one's expertise. In my actual work, I also experienced the entire process from the start of development to approval and was able to deliver a drug to the medical field. I feel the joy of knowing that a drug I was involved in developing is helping patients, and that I was able to use my expertise to contribute to society.

I also enjoyed club activities during my university days. It was a computer club, but it was very event-oriented. We would gather in the club room between lectures to chat, go out for drinks at night, and go on outings on weekends. For people who walk a highly specialized path, the proportion of friends from outside their field of expertise tends to be lower than it was up to high school. Making friends from outside the Faculty of Science and Technology during my time at Hiyoshi Campus until my second year of university is a great asset. Also, through club activities, we naturally got to know each other well, and my club friends were always together, whether it was for our graduation trip to New Zealand or the party after the graduation ceremony. Even now, we maintain a very good relationship where if someone just says the word, we immediately get together for drinks.

In an environment like the Faculty of Science and Technology, which deals with a wide variety of problems, I believe that by finding something you genuinely find interesting and dedicating yourself to it, you will begin to see the path you should aim for in the future. During my university life, I was fortunate enough to find a profession that suited me. I am grateful for this good fortune and want to aim to be a biostatistician who combines both academic expertise and the applied skills based on practical experience. I hope that all of you at Keio University will also find an academic field that you can be passionate about.