Senior Associate Professor of linguistics, Dr. Tomoyuki Yoshida, is one of five ICU faculty members to receive a grant from the JICUF during the spring term. He has been awarded ¥600,000 to host the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL) at ICU in spring 2017. Dr. Yoshida was kind enough to answer a few questions about the program.
The Japan ICU Foundation is happy to announce that we have hired a new Director of Communications. Starting this month, Ms. Aki Takada will join the staff and continue her active role with JICUF. We asked Aki to share her background with our readers
Emily Kariya is a former OYR (’92-93) and an accomplished Japanese Language Teacher at Santa Monica High School in Southern California. She welcomed a combined ICU-JICUF team to her classes this past autumn as part of our September Admissions school visits. JICUF had the chance to follow up with her and learn about her own specific connections to Japan and ICU.
Dr. David W. Vikner retired as President of the Japan ICU Foundation this past August after 13 years of service. David’s career in global education spanned five decades and two continents, North America and Asia. He taught and worked in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and in New York City, where he spent the latter half of his career serving as the President of two significant organizations, the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia and the Japan ICU Foundation.
Megumi Nishikura received the Rotary Peace Fellowship and attended ICU as a Master’s degree student from 2006 – 08. Megumi’s passion is to use the medium of film and video to remind people of our common humanity. In 2009, she began to explore stories from the multiracial community in both Japan and the United States. Her directorial feature debut, “Hafu – the mixed-race experience in Japan” screened theatrically in Japan, aired on PBS, and won the Best Documentary award at the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival in 2013.
Steven Houghton is Senior Program Manager, Global Scholarship Programs at the Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York. He speaks English, Spanish, Japanese, and his specialties include coordinating incoming international students and outgoing study abroad programs.
ICU alumna Yuko Maeno (June, 2010) stopped by the Japan ICU Foundation to tell us about her exciting transition to graduate school. From September of this year, she will be a new Rotary Peace Fellow at the University of Bradford in the UK. It’s the latest chapter in her fascinating global career!
