People :
Second Campus Venture Double Prizewinning;Grand Prize in the GP national convention andPrize of Minister of Education
Mr. Yonghan Paku

Mr. Yonghan Paku He was born in 1981 and went to Shibaura technical high school. After graduation from Shibaura technical college, he was admitted to the Master's program in the Waseda Graduate School of Science and Engineering. Now he is a first-year PhD student and belongs to Professor Umezu's laboratory. He is a Ministry of Education intellectual cluster project researcher in the field of medical patient robots. His hobbies are flying planes and playing the electronic piano. He belongs to the electronic piano club AUGMENT. He is a third-generation Korean resident of Japan.

When he was a senior, he tried to transfer into medical school, because he thought, ‘there is nothing more precious than life in this world and I wanted to gain the ability to save lives.’ Though he stressed in the final interview that he wanted to be a bridge between medical science and engineering, he had no concrete achievements to offer and was rejected. At about that time, he learned about Professor Umezu from the Waseda website. He sympathized with Professor Umezu's idea of Engineering Based Medicine, and entered Waseda. His prizewinning ‘Development and Sales of Training Devices for Surgery’ is a training apparatus based on precisely the philosophy of Professor Umezu that Mr. Paku first responded to.

Asked the secret of winning the prize, he said with a friendly smile, ‘Human beings are like personal computers. If there are some capacities we want, all we have to do is install them into our brain and body. The important thing is what we install in our limited lifetime’. On winning the prize he decided that this was where it would all begin. As if to express this decision he is going to spend the prize money for start-up costs. He explained rapid-fire, ‘For a long time I've had a budget. For example, I have a self-development fund, and if I want to obtain some certification, I can use money from that fund. So, I'm not rich but I've arranged things so that I don't have to worry about money when there's something I want to do.’ His energetic manner of speaking has an amazing power to convince his listeners.

He says with sparkling eyes, ‘Every day is fun for me because I have a field I want to pursue for the rest of my life. I think it's important to involve in our plans even things that don't appear to be related to them.’ The fusion of medical science and engineering will continue to emerge from the connections he makes, and it will not be long until his technology helps many people.