KITAGWA Tomoko (Kate) is Director of the Space Education Office at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). She is passionate about developing STEAM programmes on the theme of space and aeronautical science and is working to enhance the space education all over the world.

Her educational background is mathematics, life sciences, and history, and she has worked in diplomacy. She has a doctoral degree from Princeton and taught history courses at Harvard University. She has written six books in Japanese; her debut book in Japanese became a national bestseller in Japan. She has researched the history of mathematics and the history of space exploration at the University of California, Berkeley, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, the University of Oxford, the University of Pretoria, and the Science Museum, London, from 2018 to 2022, before moving to JAXA.