My Mission and Vision
At Lab Hope, my mission is to empower students and clients through quality online education and training in research communication with a focus on improving the use of English in multiple settings.
With over two decades of experience in research environments I know what works and what doesn’t work in communicating research and results to others in one’s own field and outside of it. My vision is to raise the level of communication of researchers so that peers (experts) and laypeople (the general public) can benefit.
Meet Your Instructor
Dr. Tom Hope
Founder & Lead Educator
Originally hailing from the United Kingdom, I moved to Japan to pursue my research career after completing my PhD in Sociology at the University of York. I worked at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), a large government-funded institution, where I studied the social aspects of science and engineering, and science communication. While there I played a key role in introducing the ‘science cafe’ form of science communication to Japan.
My research focus subsequently explored the formation of community via tangible social networking technology, and the use of mobile technology in museums. A constant theme has been how people make sense of socio-technical relationships in interaction.
In 2009 I began working at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech, now Institute of Science Tokyo), Japan’s top science and engineering-focused university. There I taught courses at undergraduate and graduate levels and continued my research with national and international collaborations. I also worked for internationalization in the university’s public relations. I left Tokyo Tech in 2022 and now focus on Lab Hope.
My research papers can be found on Google Scholar.