Speaker Bio
Senior Vice-Rector at United Nations University, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and Project Professor at the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the University of Tokyo. Dr Shirahase received her D.Phil. in sociology from the University of Oxford, conducted post-doctoral research at the East Asian Institute, Columbia University as a junior researcher, and held positions of Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Tsukuba University.
Her research interests include comparative social stratification and demographic transformation, gender and generational relations, family change and social security system. Dr. Shirahase serves as Vice President of the International Science Council.
She is the author of Social Inequality in Japan (Routledge, 2014) and Demographic Change and Inequality in Japan (ed.) (TransPacific Press, 2011), and her recent publications are “Social Stratification Theory and Population Aging Reconsidered,” (Social Science Japan Journal 24(2): 277–288, 2021) and Social Stratification in an Aging Society with Low Fertility: The Case of Japan (ed.) (Springer, 2022).