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Dr Nao Kodate is Associate Professor in Social Policy and Welfare Technology, and the Founding Director of the multi-disciplinary UCD Centre for Japanese Studies (UCD-JaSt). He holds a BA (International Relations) and LL.M from the University of Tokyo, MSc in European Politics and Policy, and a Ph.D in Political Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Nao is co-Director of the Public Policy Programme in UCD.

Nao is also Adjunct Research Professor at the Center for Frontier Medical Engineering, Chiba University and a senior researcher at Hokkaido University's Public Policy Research Centre, and at the Institute for Future Initiatives (IFI), the University of Tokyo. He is affiliated with the Geary Institute for Public Policy at UCD, la Fondation France-Japon, EHESS, France, and the Universal Accessibility & Ageing Research Centre (UA-ARC) in Nishitokyo, Japan. He served as Visiting Professor at Hokkaido University (July 2017 and July 2018) and at EHESS (May 2024).

He is a founding member and on the Board of Directors, the Future Technologies for Integrated Care Research Network (FTIC), Japan. Nao is a member of the Dementia Research Network Ireland and the Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE). He is a member of the Board of Academic Councilors, the Japanese Society for Wellbeing Science and Assistive Technology.

He was previously a researcher at King's College London (UK's National Institute for Health Research King's Patient Safety and Service Quality Research Centre) and the University of Tokyo, a DAAD visiting researcher/lecturer at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and a visiting researcher at EHESS (l'Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux, IRIS) in France.

His research straddles comparative healthcare politics and policy, and science & technology studies (STS). Key themes include: care and caring, health services research, systems thinking, safety & care quality, social robotics, welfare technologies, implementation science and organizational learning. His recent research projects have been looking at the impact of digitalization and eHealth (e.g. robots) on care, patient safety regulation (e.g. incident reporting systems), and gender equality in science and technology education. His books include "Japanese Women in Science and Engineering: History and Policy Change" (Routledge, 2015), and "New International Handbook on Social Welfare in UK & Ireland" (旬報社, 2019, in Japanese). He has successfully obtained competitive research funding and led international and interdisciplinary research projects, working with engineers, scientists, healthcare professionals, social scientists, anthropologists, linguists and historians.

He was the Principal Investigator of a three-year Toyota Foundation-funded research project "Harmonization towards the establishment of Person-centered, Robotics-aided Care System (HARP: RoCS)", working with interdisciplinary teams in Ireland, Japan, Hong Kong and France (2019-22). He co-produced a documentary film "Circuits of Care: Ageing and Japan's Robot Revolution" (2021) and co-edited "Systems Thinking for Global Health" (Oxford University Press, 2022). He is currently working on a research project in collaboration with the Toyota Central R&D Labs (2023-) and the France 2030 program, ANR-funded INNOVCARE (2024-2028).

https://filmfreeway.com/CircuitsofCare

He was the Project Leader of the Japan Foundation-sponsored "Ireland-Japan Social Science Symposia: Sharing knowledge, shaping the future of the welfare society in Europe and Japan" (2014-15), which was a joint project between UCD and the University of Tokyo. He jointly carried out a research project entitled "Introduction of a safety monitoring system for older people with ICT and AI-based communicative robots for realizing integrated care".

Nao served as Director of Research for the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice (2021-2024). While having served as the Director for Internationalization, he brought many new academic partnerships to the university including UT, and was successful in obtaining Erasmus+ICM with the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2018) and Hokkaido University (2018 & 2022). He contributed to the university's Athena SWAN Steering Group, and its subgroup ‘Organizational Culture’ (2015-17), and represented the College of Social Sciences and Law on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group, and its subgroup ‘Ethnic Diversity’ (2015-18).