Postgraduate student Yosuke Matsumiya (Balliol 2022) has been awarded the Sakaguchi Scholarship – a scholarship for outstanding Japanese DPhil students at Oxford who are intending to take a leadership role in an international organisation in future.
For his DPhil in Women’s and Reproductive Health, Yosuke is looking at whether technology can be used to donate isolated mitochondria as a treatment for placental diseases, such as intra-uterine growth restriction, as well as researching the role of mitochondria in placental function and diseases.
He spent three years out of programme in Japan, where he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo and a visiting lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at Keio University. While in Japan he facilitated a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between RCOG and JSOG (Japanese Society of Obstetrics & Gynaecology) to develop shared goals towards the betterment of women’s health in the UK and Japan. He is a voluntary health advisor for WomEnpowered International (WE Int.). a membership association committed to empowering women and promoting gender equality in Japan. He also established a research agreement between the University of Oxford and LUCA Science, a Japanese biopharmaceutical company which has developed a proprietary method for isolating intact mitochondria and used these to demonstrate significant improvements in cellular and organ function.
The Sakaguchi Scholarship invites applications Japanese DPhil students at Oxford across all subjects, and the application and interview are in Japanese. Yosuke says he is ‘very honoured’ to have been selected.