Research

The Osaka University Center for Twin Research is staffed by researchers from a wide range of academic disciplines, including not only medicine and nursing but also dentistry, the humanities, economics, pharmaceutics and others. Through this multidisciplinary approach we hope to support the development and contribute to the research of the various humanistic, scientific and mixes fields of learning branding off from twin studies, thereby working towards the unraveling of the secrets of human life and behavior and contributing to the stability and happiness of the whole of our society.

For more information on our research, see here.

Education

The Center organizes various seminars and workshop in order to train new researchers ready to assume responsibility for future’s twin studies and able to operate both domestically and internationally. Most of the events are lecture seminars that focus on the fundamental tools of twin research, the statistical analysis methods of epidemiology, and are intended for the center’s researchers and graduate students of related fields. The aim of these seminars is to teach practical research data analysis skills.

Twin Studies Methodology Seminar

This seminar has been organized since fiscal year 2013 and is intended primarily as a means of providing the researchers of the Department of Twin Research information and a place for academic discussion regarding the statistical methods of twin studies.

Regular Seminar

The Regular Seminar has been organized annually since fiscal year 2013. The researchers of the Department of Research voluntarily gather to present their latest findings based on the data gathered by the Center, and to exchange views and comments in preparation for publication of their works.

Twin Research Seminar

The Twin Research Seminar is an annual seminar series where the lecturers of each field of study gather to give lectures on their latest findings. The annual number of participants is between 20 to 50 persons, and because the language of the seminar of 2015 was English the participants that year also included some exchange students.

Research Report Conference

In order to improve academic quality and the circulation of information regarding ongoing research activities, the Center organizes a Research Report Conference at the end of every fiscal year. The conference offers a place for academic discussion necessary for conducting twin research according to international standards, and features reports of research results from the fields of genetic epidem

Joint research with other domestic universities

In order to spearhead the development of twin studies in our country, the Center collaborates with other major domestic and international twin research institutes and conducts joint projects with them.

Up until recently, Japanese researchers conducting twin studies domestically have had to search out their research participants independently. Universities have tried to recruit twins either by contacting likely twins randomly from the resident register of a particular area, by contacting all likely twins in an area, or by spreading information of their activities and receiving contacts from volunteers. All of these methods share the problem that their yield of twin pairs tends to remain small compared to the number of participants required by most twin analysis methods. This is considered one of the largest obstacles for utilization of twin methodology in Japan. In other countries, researchers attempting to identify twins often have access to birth registries, which enables them to effectively use various recruitment methods, even volunteer-based ones.

In order to solve this problem, the Center strongly promotes networking and cooperation between domestic twin researchers and active exchange of information regarding sampling methods etc. with the aim of stimulating Japanese twin research and building a research infrastructure for twin studies.