Satoshi Watanabe

I am deeply humbled and grateful to have been selected for the Young Investigator Award from the APSR for the ATS 2023 International Conference. This award has given me the opportunity to share my research with a wider audience, and it has inspired me to continue my work. I am excited to see what the future holds for me as a young scholar, and I am confident that I will be able to make a positive contribution to the field of pulmonary medicine.

As part of the award, I was invited to make a brief presentation on my research at the ATS international colloquium, which was held on 20 May 2023 at the Walter E. Washington Conference Center in Washington DC. I was nervous about giving a talk in front of a large audience in English, but was also excited to share my work with my peers coming from all around the world.

My talk focused on my research on how the gut microbiome signature predicts early treatment response of patients with Mycobacterium abscessus complex pulmonary disease. It was a valuable experience to summarize the rationale, methods, results, and key takeaways of my research into a 3-minute pitch. It was also great to receive a lot of positive feedback and comments afterwards. I was thoroughly impressed by the works that are being done by the people I befriended at the colloquium and I am excited to see what they will accomplish in the years to come.

I stayed at the Homewood Suites, which is a hotel located close to the conference center centre. I had a wonderful stay, with a great breakfast and a comfortable room for one person. The hotel was very quiet, which allowed me to prepare for the presentation I had to give on 22 May during a session titled, “The Happy Couple: Bronchiectasis and Nontuberculous Mycobacteria”. I did not have enough time to prepare during my regular working hours in Seoul, so I needed some preparation time during the ATS Conference. The hotel was the perfect place to be for this.

During my presentation, I was able to get through all the points I wanted to make, and there were some great questions about the use of probiotics, the probable mechanism of how the organism I discovered can affect the response to treatment, and the significance of other clinical factors.

In the session where I presented, about half of the presenters were from Asian countries. I was proud to see that the research being done by APSR member countries is leading the field of NTM and bronchiectasis. I hope that this trend continues, and look forward to seeing great works coming out of the Asia-Pacific region.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude once again to the APSR and especially to the APSR Research Committee for giving me this opportunity. I promise to continue to work hard and grow so that I live up to the expectations placed on me.

I will strive to conduct research that will improve the lives of patients. Thank you.

Joong-Yub Kim (Republic of Korea)