On 6 March, Kyoto University held an award ceremony for the winners of the 15th Tachibana Award for Outstanding Women Researchers. The annual award honors the University's early-career women scholars who have made exceptional achievements.
As with last year's event, the 2023 ceremony was held without an on-site audience due to Covid-19 concerns but was live-streamed to a large number of viewers tuning in from both on and off campus.
The proceedings began with remarks from Dr Kyoko Inagaki, executive vice-president for gender equality, international affairs, and external affairs, who as the award committee chair reflected on the selection process. President Nagahiro Minato then presented a certificate and plaque to each of the two winners, one in the student category and the other in the researcher category. The student winner was Mai Katada, in her second year of a doctoral program at the Graduate School of Science, and the researcher winner was Masumi Yamada, associate professor at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI). Each also received a Wacoal Prize from Mr Yasuo Kamoshita, Wacoal Corporation's director and managing corporate officer.
Next, the following honorable-mention contestants — two in the student category and one in the researcher category — accepted certificates and additional prizes also from President Minato and Director Kamoshita: Noriko Kurata, third-year doctoral student at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Yuriko Sugiyama, fifth-year doctoral student at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (ASAFAS), and Tomoko Sakai, associate professor at the Institute for Research in Humanities.
President Minato went on to deliver a congratulatory address, wishing all the awardees continued success in their research, followed by Director Kamoshita's congratulations.
Afterward, Ms Katada and Dr Yamada presented their winning research to an attentive audience. Katada discussed her "Study on actions of automorphism groups of free groups on spaces of Jacobi diagrams in which quantum link invariants take values". Dr Yamada talked about "Real-time hazard monitoring using seismometers".
The lively event concluded with an address from Dr Takao Hirajima, executive vice-president for education and student affairs.
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Kyoto University Tachibana Award for Outstanding Women Researchers
