I am honored to have an opportunity to greet you as the newly appointed professor of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Fukuoka University.

  After graduating from Faculty of Medicine, Kyushu University in 1993, I started my career as a cardiologist. During the clinical training, I became intrigued by the way evidence for treatment decision making was produced, and decided to work as an epidemiologist for the Hisayama Study, a Japanese ongoing large-scale cohort study established in 1961, at Kyushu University, where I obtained a PhD degree in Medicine.

  I was also involved in PROGRESS, INTERACT2 and ENCHANTED, the international multicenter randomized trials, as a Senior Lecturer and afterwards as an Associate Professor at the George Institute for Global Health, the University of Sydney.

  After returning to Japan in 2014, I spent 2 years as a Special Contract Professor at Center for Epidemiologic Research in Asia, Shiga University of Medical Science to engage in education and development of public health.

  Our department aims to develop research skills and a spirit of public health in medical students through lectures and practice training so that they can contribute to a community health improvement. In lectures, we focus on developing policy making skills in students in the process of understanding community health, medical care, and social welfare. Practice training provides fieldwork experiences and problem-based learning in healthcare settings to deepen insights into community health care and occupational safety and health.

  We are also committed to public health approach to disease prevention and treatment as professional epidemiologists and clinical researchers and setting up new research programs in our original cohort to provide high-quality evidence cooperating with clinicians.

  Through the development of medical education and high-quality research, we would like to contribute to health and wellbeing for the whole of society.