Biography
Assistant Professor at the Centre for Global Communication Strategies (CGCS) at the College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan. I also teach in the Department of English Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan. I am a youth sociologist researching a variety of contexts. More recently my work has been focused on informal learning spaces in higher education. Since 2019, I have been working on a project titled, The Role of Informal Learning Spaces in the Japanese University Context, for which I have received a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). My research projects have received funding totalling to approximately $A1,225,000 from various institutions and organizations around the world.
My research as a youth sociologist has also allowed me to work on a wide range of topics involving young people, including civic participation, technology and wellbeing, discourses of social entrepreneurship and change-making. I have been involved in government and private industry-funded research projects investigating topics such as cyber-bullying in schools, student leadership, peer-to-peer learning for sustainability, and media literacy.
At university, I teach courses on academic writing, sociology and social science topics, quantitative and qualitative research and evaluation methodologies in youth. Recently, I have been teaching counseling and psychotherapy research at postgraduate level. I received my Ph.D. in 2009 from The University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to joining The University of Tokyo, I worked as a Manager of Policy and Evaluation at The Foundation for Young Australians (Melbourne, Australia) and as a Social and Field Research Manager at the BBC (London, UK). I have worked as a Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne (Australia) on a large multidisciplinary evaluation exploring the impact of community arts on health (funded by the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation).
Finally, I have been Associate Editor of the UNESCO Observatory Multi-Disciplinary Research in the Arts e-Journal since its inception in 2007.
Here are the links to my University of Tokyo faculty page and my Google Scholar profile. You can also find me on Academia and ResearchGate.