Mariko Kanamori, Doctoral program in Social Medicine at the Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, has been awarded the "Ikushi Prize" by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, with the award winning research title "Identifying the social determinants of suicide in rural areas and developing a community empowerment model for suicide prevention".

JSPS Ikushi Prize awards

This is the most prestigious award for doctoral students in all academic fields in Japan. The Japanese Emperor will encourage the awarded students.

I hope that this award will shed some light on the research field

Research conducted within the SMASH programme

Mariko Kanamori has visited the Department of Public Health Sciences on several occasions, as a researcher withing the SMASH programme. She has mainly been active within a sub-project regarding contextual exposures, examining the influence of area-level characteristics. The project examines how residential contextual level factors influence health among persons with foreign backgrounds.

"Our research using Swedish registry data was of great interest to the jury members in the interview. I hope that this award will shed some light on the research field" says Mariko Kanamori.

Recent publications

Some of Mariko Kanamori's work has been performed within the SMASH programme during her visits as a guest researcher at the Department of Public Health Sciences. Two recent research papers from Mariko Kanamori, based on the Swedish registry data in collaboration with the SMASH researchers:

Rural life and suicide: Does the effect of the community context vary by country of birth? A Swedish registry-based multilevel cohort study

Does increased migration affect the rural–urban divide in suicide? A register-based repeated cohort study in Sweden from 1991 to 2015