Category: English

礒谷 有亮 Yusuke Isotani

Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the City University of New York, specializing in the history of photography. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on the evolution of photography in France between the two World Wars.

Originally from Osaka, Japan. During his master’s program at Osaka University’s Graduate School of Letters, he spent a year as an exchange student in Strasbourg, France. He then moved to the U.S. for his doctoral studies, where he has also taught as a lecturer at various CUNY campuses while pursuing his research.

Because his field focuses on France, he frequently travels between the U.S., Europe, and Japan. From a young age, he has been fascinated by language in general—exploring dialects and standard forms, comparing different languages, examining spoken versus written language, and studying wordplay, onomatopoeia, and etymology from around the world has now become a full-fledged hobby.

松川 倫子 Tomoko Matsukawa

Manager at the nonprofit organization Acumen. She is involved in designing learning content focused on perspectives, skills, and leadership essential for addressing social challenges. Specifically, she played a central role in launching +Acumen’s large-scale online courses and is a core member of the Acumen Fellows Program, currently offered in Pakistan, India, and East Africa.

Her professional background includes positions at Goldman Sachs Japan and Globis Corporation. In 2012, she moved to the United States for graduate studies, earning a Master’s degree in Education in 2013. She is currently based in New York. Since 2016, she has also served as a board member of PIECES, a nonprofit organization in Japan.

Blog: “Learning?”
+ACUMEN COURSES

嶋田 健一 Kenichi Shimada

A postdoctoral researcher in pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His work addresses the serious risks of drug-induced organ damage, which can occur when medicines that treat illnesses inadvertently harm organs such as the liver. If undetected, such damage can lead to complete loss of organ function—a condition for which no cure currently exists. Drawing on biology, chemistry, and information science, he investigates diseases caused by these forms of drug toxicity.

Originally from Tokyo, he spent four years in the Netherlands during elementary school due to his father’s work assignment, attending a Japanese school there and thus not acquiring English. After completing his education in Japan through the master’s level, he made a decisive move in 2006 to begin a Ph.D. program at Columbia University in New York. He earned his doctorate with research on anticancer drugs and has been in his current position since 2015.

平松 里英 Rié Hiramatsu

A London-based Japanese–English conference interpreter and university lecturer. After studying abroad, she worked in-house at Japanese subsidiaries of foreign firms in Japan and at Japanese companies in the UK before becoming a freelance interpreter. Her areas of expertise include marketing, telecommunications, media (television, radio, internet), and website translation (transcreation). Drawing on her experience in announcer training, she also enjoys voice-over work. In addition to interpreter training and honing her English skills, she studies French to keep a beginner’s mindset in language learning, and plans to brush up her Spanish next. She holds an MA in International Media Studies from Ulster University (Northern Ireland), a PGDip in Interpreting from London Metropolitan University, and a PGCert in Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language from IIEL. She is currently a regular columnist for Tsūyaku Honyaku WEB, writing the series Interpreter’s Notes from London.

村井 裕実子 Yumiko Murai

Postdoctoral Researcher at the MIT Media Lab. Her research focuses on how human connections develop within online learning communities, and how these connections influence learners’ motivation and confidence. Currently, she is working on themes such as leveraging online learning communities for teacher training in creativity education and STEM fields, as well as supporting non-native English speakers’ participation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). After earning a B.A. in Environmental Information and an M.A. in Media Design in Japan, she moved to the United States in 2010 to pursue graduate studies, receiving her Ph.D. in Education in 2015.

Profile on MIT Media Lab