Greetings from CRN's New Director - Director's Blog

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Greetings from CRN's New Director

Japanese

I am pleased to begin serving as CRN Director from April 1, 2013. I am both honored and humbled to be succeeding Dr. Kobayashi at CRN, an organization that he established and nurtured.

Since my postgraduate internship in the Department of Pediatric Medicine at the University of Tokyo where he was a professor, I have known Dr. Kobayashi both as a teacher and someone who applies new and unconstrained perspectives to the field of medicine where old habits die hard.

In those days, lectures in the medical school were given in large auditoriums by professors and assistant professors, figures of authority who expounded on the latest theories, while students listened with interest and awe. Of course, that is not longer the case now.

Dr. Kobayashi was different - he not only gave lectures, but also invited leading researchers from all over the world to come and lecture. These included Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, and Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his slow virus research.

One day, I was asked to lecture on the patient with the rarest disease that I had treated as a research physician. I did so nervously and was struck by Dr. Kobayashi's open-mindedness that would trust a young researcher as myself. When he approached me about succeeding him at CRN, that feeling of 35 years ago came back to me.

Please excuse the rather stiff tone of this first of many blogs to come. I look forward to communicating with you. As Director of CRN, I will strive to live up to Dr. Kobayashi's ideals, and ask for your support in doing so.

Profile:
Sakakihara_Yoichi.bmp Yoichi Sakakihara
M.D., Ph.D., Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences, Ochanomizu University; Director of Child Research Net, Deputy Director of Japanese Society of Child Science. Specializes in pediatric neurology, developmental neurology, in particular, treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Asperger's syndrome and other developmental disorders, and neuroscience. Born in 1951. Graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, the University of Tokyo in 1976 and taught as an instructor in the Department of the Pediatrics before assuming current post.

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