The tenth student is Yu Shimada (D2) of the Graduate School of Bioresource and Bioenvironmental Sciences.
Challenging spirit and inquisitiveness for food
I graduated from Ehime University with a bachelor’s degree and started my master’s program at Kyushu University.
I have always loved eating and interesting in food and health, so I studied in department of bioscience. In the undergraduate program, I studied food functionality and immunology under the supervision of Professor Takuya Sugahara. I also had the opportunity to be involved in product development in collaboration with a local company, which was a valuable experience for me to learn the difficulty of designing products with the consumer in mind and the importance of working with people from other fields. Later, I decided that I wanted to work on the prevention of neurodegenerative diseases due to my personal experience, so I started my master’s program in the Laboratory of Food Chemical Biology in Kyushu University. In the laboratory, I make effort the study on the protection of brain function by food factors under the supervision of Distinguished Professor Hirofumi Tachibana. Prof. Tachibana has been very supportive of my desire to do research on brain function and has encouraged me to take on new experimental challenges. In this blessed environment, I have had the opportunity to discover three food factors with protective effects on brain function, including polyphenols that improve cognitive function and aromatic ingredients. In addition, I was given the opportunity to actively present my research at academic conferences and had the valuable experience of exchanging opinions with researchers have various backgrounds. I learned the basics of research and its social implementation in the bachelor’s program, and in the master’s and doctoral programs, I learned how to approach social issues with my own research based on the latest findings, and by deepening one study, I was able to sharpen my thinking, necessary knowledge, and analysis techniques to logically prove my findings. In the future, I would like to continue to challenge new functional food research and contribute to people’s health by making use of what I have learned under both professors.
