Dr. Nobuhiko Hata is an ardent Educator and devoted Research Leader who had dedicated 25 years of his career studying the niche of Medical Robotics and Image-Guided Therapy. He was bestowed the Doctorate Degree in Precision Machinery Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1998 after earning the B.S and M.S Degrees in Precision Machinery Engineering from the same university in 1993 and 1995 respectively.
In the year 1995, Dr. Hata joined Image Guided Therapy Program at Brigham’s Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School to conduct pre-doctoral & post-doctoral research prior to becoming faculty of Harvard University in 2000. For the past 20 years, Dr. Hata had been serving Harvard Medical School and had relished working in the capacities of Instructor, Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor. In the year 2017, Dr. Hata was promoted to the position of Professor and was awarded an honorary master’s degree of Harvard concurrently.
Dr. Nobuhiko Hata continues to actively contribute to Image-Guided Therapy and Medical Robotics and designed numerous devices and developed innovative engineering methods geared towards amalgamating technology with real-life clinical applications. Dr. Hata’s research had significantly influenced the modernized Navigation Methods, MRI and CT Guided Therapies and paved the way for the futuristic developments in Medical Robotics. He is particularly well regarded in the field of MRI-guided intervention, though he has expanded his scopes of research to robotics in pulmonary, plastic, and urological surgery more recently. Dr. Hata teaches semester-long classes in Robotics and Medical Imaging and ad-hoc classes on medical device innovation in graduate schools in the Boston area.
Dr. Hata has authored or co-authored ninety-one peer-reviewed scientific publications and eleven issued US patents in the field of medical robotics and image-guided therapy. Dr. Hata also helps editing journals and managing academic conferences by administering a peer-review process to nominate high-impact papers to the journals; most notably, he is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Biomedical Engineering organizing and program chairs of Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention conferences. Dr. Hata has been a Principal Investigator and Co-Investigators of over fifteen NIH grants competitively selected by peer reviewers in NIH review panels. In return, Dr. Hata has also served the peer review panels over twenty-five times to help US researchers successfully launch innovative research programs funded by NIH. Lastly, serving as an entrepreneur, Dr. Hata had formulated multiple Medical Device startups and Annex R&D Centers of Medical Device Companies.