Marvin Starominski-Uehara

Temple University Japan

Based in

Japan
Asia

I am an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Temple University Japan (TUJ). AT TUJ, I teach courses on international business and environmental studies. I adopt the ‘Flipped Classroom’ and ‘Minimally Invasive Education’ methods in my classes. As for my research, it focuses on the intersections between individual risk perception and decision making under uncertainty. I have published in peer-reviewed scientific journals including ‘Disasters’, the flagship journal in the field of Disaster Risk Reduction. I am currently developing and testing a theory on how autonomous acts leave digital traces that become reproducible in domains and scalable by platforms. This theory is called ‘Stigmergy Network Theory’ and key concepts this theory measures and evaluates are: mediated digital environments, uncoordinated flow and error-control, recurrent collective needs, perceived reward satisfaction, and deliberate algorithmic manipulation.

I completed my doctoral degree at the University of Queensland, Australia, in 2018. I accepted a postdoctoral position at Sam Houston State University in Texas, the US, in 2019. I became the chair and developed the program on Disaster Risk and Resilience at Singapore University of Social Sciences in 2020. I have then relocated to Kyushu, Japan, where I have been teaching online for TUJ since 2021. Currently, I also serve as a guest speaker for the Institute of Sustainability Studies in Ireland and collaborate on digital design projects with IADE|UNIDCOM in Portugal.

Before starting my doctoral degree in Australia, I completed a Master’s in Public Administration at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) with a certificate in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at UHM. I was also a research assistant at Umeå University in Sweden and a visiting research at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. I am an alum of Asia Pacific Leadership Program at the East-West Center in Hawaii, the US, and a scholarship recipient of the Worldwide Uchinanchu Business Association.Finally, I am passionate about entrepreneurship, leadership, and creative media. I have been advising local businesses and communities in Japan on how to make their presence felt in the digital world to inform and attract customers. My work with grassroots communities have drawn nearly thirty million views on Google. I was also the first graduate student at UQ to be awarded with the Career Development Scholarship, which allowed me to engage with innovators and creators in Australia and launch a startup on artificial intelligence powered by natural language processing to sort and classify online reviews. This enterprise was supported by UQ Ventures and CSIRO.

ps. I am the father of three children, who are not shy of humbling me with their implacable stubbornness.