Koichi Mikami

Dr. Koichi Mikami is an interdisciplinary social science scholar focusing on issues of life sciences and biotechnology, with backgrounds in economics, management studies and sociology.

For his D.Phil degree at Said Business School, University of Oxford, he conducted a comparative study of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine research in the UK and Japan. In 2010, he took up his first academic post as an assistant professor at the Center for the Promotion of Interdisciplinary Sciences of the Graduate University for Adavaned Studies (SOKENDAI), where he also took part in its Science and Society education prgoram. In 2014, he moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he spent three years studing the historical development of rare diseases research as a research fellow of the Wellcome Trust-funded project Making Genomic Medicine (led by Prof. Steve Sturdy). On his return to Japan, he became a project assistant professor of the Science Interpreter Training Program at the University of Tokyo. In 2019, he was appointed as an assistant professor of the Faculty of Science and Technology at Keio University, where he is responsible for various courses concerning the relationship between science and technology and society for both undergraduate and graduate students with science and/or engineering major. He became an associate professor in 2022.

His current research interest ranges from the politics of rare diseases research and issues of patient involvement to emerging fields of research intersecting biology and engineering, such as synthetic biology, genome synthesis and molecular robotics, and their governance.