Format: Face-to-face hybrid, invitation only
Meeting style: Semi-closed, Chatham House Rules
Organisers
• Lead: UTokyo-Cambridge Voices (Strategic Partnership)
• Co-Organiser: University of Tokyo STIG Bioeconomy Study Group
Venue: SMBC Academia Hall, International Academic Research Building, Hongo Campus, UTokyo
Click HERE for the Program
Speakers
Makiko Matsuo
Project Associate Professor,
Graduate School of Public Policy
the University of Tokyo
Makiko Matsuo is currently serving as a Project Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy, the University of Tokyo, where she engages in teaching and research on topics within Science, Technology, and Innovation Governance (STIG program). She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Institute for Future Initiatives at the University of Tokyo. She serves as a member and advisor on multiple Japanese government councils and funding agencies.
Her areas of concern are interdisciplinary in nature and cover analysis frameworks and approaches such as technology assessment, science and technology policy studies, governance research (technology governance, global health governance), risk research (risk governance, risk regulation, international harmonization), ELSI (Ethical, Legal, Social Implications/Issues), and RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation). Her applied fields of study include new biotechnology (genome editing and synthetic biology/engineering biology), food safety, and global health.
https://researchmap.jp/makiko_matsuo?lang=en
Jenny Molly
Senior Research Associate
Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology
University of Cambridge
Dr Jenny Molloy is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and a Group Leader at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), where she develops open source technologies for engineering biology and biomanufacturing. Prior to this she was the Programme Coordinator of the University of Cambridge Strategic Research Initiative in Synthetic Biology and the OpenPlant Synthetic Biology Research Center. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge and a DPhil in Zoology from the University of Oxford focused on genetic control of dengue mosquitoes.
Jenny’s research is centered around local, distributed biomanufacturing of enzymes to enhance global capacity for biological research and advance applications in health and sustainability. Ongoing projects include developing open source DNA toolkits for recombinant protein expression using synthetic biology-based platform technologies, high-quality protein purification in low-resource contexts, open source microbial strain engineering, CRISPR-based molecular diagnostics for infectious diseases and enzyme-based carbon capture and upcycling.
Jenny is a former Fellow and Member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology and since 2015 she has co-founded four social enterprises and nonprofits making open source tools more accessible to researchers and building communities for open source tool developers. She currently sits on the board of the US non-profit Open Science Hardware Foundation, the UK non-profit Beneficial Bio and the Kenyan NGO ISAAA Africenter.
Norikazu Ichihashi
Professor
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
The University of Tokyo
Norikazu Ichihashi is a professor at the University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Science, University of Tokyo in 2006. He then worked in the field of in vitro synthetic biology at Osaka University as a postdoctoral fellow and associate professor until 2018 and moved to his current position at the University of Tokyo in 2019. He is trying to understand how complex biological phenomena emerge from an assembly of molecules through design and evolution. His group is now constructing a self-reproducible molecular system in a test tube, which can be used for controllable and designable bioproduction.
Mark Howarth
Sheild Professor of Pharmacology
Department of Pharmacology
University of Cambridge
Mark Howarth is the Sheild Professor in Cambridge University Department of Pharmacology. His group has developed a range of protein superglues that are widely used in academia and industry. For this work he received the Royal Society of Chemistry Norman Heatley Award for chemical biology. He co-founded the vaccine company SpyBiotech and 9 alumni from his lab have spun out their own companies. He is also the Translational Champion for his Department, working to develop entrepreneurship and increase collaborations with companies around the world.
Kotaro Tsuboyama
Lecturer (PI)
Institute of Industrial Science (IIS)
The University of Tokyo
Kotaro Tsuboyama’s research focuses on De novo proteins, large-scale measurements, machine learning, and deep learning. His lab focuses on combining large-scale measurements with machine learning, including deep learning, to gain a better understanding of the relationships between amino acid sequence, structure, and function. Then, based on this new knowledge, his lab designs de novo proteins to verify and reanalyze the new findings. In this way, his lab repeats such analysis and design to achieve both an understanding of the fundamental laws of proteins and rational de novo protein design.
Tomohisa Hasunuma
Professor
Director of Engineering Biology Research Center
Kobe University
Tomohisa Hasunuma is the Director of Engineering Biology Research Center, and concurrently serves as a Professor at the Graduate School of Science, Technology and Innovation at Kobe University, Japan. He earned his B.Sc. (1998), M.Sc. (2000) and PhD (2004) in the Department of Biotechnology at Osaka University, Japan. In 2004, Dr. Hasunuma joined Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE), before transitioning to Kobe University in 2008. From 2011 to 2014, he held the position of the Researcher for Precursory Research in Embryonic Science and Technology (PRESTO) under the Japan Science and Technology Agency. Dr. Hasunuma has authored over 210 peer-reviewed journal papers and 80 reviews and book chapters. Since 2024, he has served an Associate Editor for ACS Synthetic Biology. His research focuses on engineering biology of microorganisms such as yeast, Escherichia coli, cyanobacteria and microalgae with a particular emphasis on metabolic engineering based on metabolism analysis for the production of biofuels, commodity chemicals and highly functional compounds from renewable biomass and carbon dioxide. Dr. Hasunuma was awarded the Fermentation and Metabolism Research Prize of Japan Bioindustry Association in 2013 and the Biotechnology Encouragement Prize of Biotechnology Society of Japan in 2014.
Miles Upton
Regional General Manager (Asia), Cambridge Consultants (CC)
Miles is responsible for CC’s strategy and business in Asia and has built the current team including offices in Singapore and Tokyo. He has 25 years’ experience building deep tech, IP-based businesses in Asia especially in the mobile, semiconductor, industrial and consumer industries.
Prior to setting up CC’s Asia operation in 2013, he worked for a range of multinationals including Mentor Graphics and Motorola, where he was responsible for software and hardware IP licensing in key markets including Japan, Korea and Greater China. He established the Asia sales and R&D team for a European-listed startup in the mobile software industry, building offices in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo through a mixture of organic growth and M&A.
His technical background is in RF systems design and EMC, developing radar and communications systems for the automotive and aerospace industries. Miles has a PhD in Electronics and a BSc in Electronic Engineering from University of York (UK).