On May 29th, we held the 50th Find-Your-Role-Model Session. We invited Dr. Kanna Sugiura, a psychiatrist. After she graduated from Tokyo Women’s Medical University in 2003, Dr. Sugiura trained as a resident with a focus on psychiatry at Yokohama City University. In 2010, she earned a Master’s degree from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and then worked at Fiji National University, the WHO, and a national hospital in Equatorial Guinea. After returning to Japan, Dr. Sugiura joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an administrative official and she remains active in the front lines of clinical medicine as a psychiatrist and occupational health physician. In addition, since 2016, she has been conducting a study about decision-making in the mental health field for her PhD at the University of Tokyo.

After Dr. Sugiura’s discussion of her career path, the session proceeded with students and faculty asking questions. Dr. Sugiura said that she became interested in mental health systems because she was very shocked to see photographs of developing countries. Students and faculty were impressed to hear her brave stories, and how she took advantage of every opportunity, making the most of each in order to achieve her goal. In addition, she told us that she makes good use of her spare time to handle a variety of tasks.

At the end of the session, Dr. Sugiura emphasized that in order to achieve our career goals, we should take every great opportunity we can and work on building networks. Throughout the session, the atmosphere allowed students and faculty to ask questions freely thanks to Dr. Sugiura’s kind personality. Dr. Sugiura provided us the precise and clear answers to our questions and gave us a chance to think about our own career vision for the future.