Accel Kitchen wins Tohoku University’s Sawayanagi Memorial DEI Award

Guided by the “open door” (monko kaiho) principle set out by its first president, Masataro Sawayanagi, Tohoku University admitted women to an imperial university ahead of the rest of the country in 1913. The Sawayanagi Memorial DEI Award takes its name from that first president. It honours individuals and groups, inside or outside Tohoku University, that have made a major contribution to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) — including gender equity — in academia and society, and aims to help that work grow further.

There are two categories: Award A (Sawayanagi Memorial DEI Award), for an individual or group with exceptionally outstanding results in DEI-related research or activities, and Award B (Sawayanagi Memorial DEI Encouragement Award), for a young individual (aged 42 or under) or a group that started its activity within the last five years. In the 13th round, Accel Kitchen received Award A, and Madoka Nakano, Associate Professor at the Center for Coproduction of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity (IncluDE) at The University of Tokyo, received Award B for editing the book Nihon de Josei Kenkyusha ga Fuenai Riyu (“Why the number of women researchers is not growing in Japan”) and for her contribution to IncluDE.

Tohoku University’s review comments highly rate Accel Kitchen for building, in a field of particle-physics research that has so far stayed within a limited number of universities and institutes and out of students’ reach, an environment where any student can take up genuine research, regardless of background. The foundation they point to is that the following five activities are run together as one.

The review comments single out the effort to open particle-physics research to blind, deaf and hard-of-hearing students as highly original even by world standards. They also cite a research community in which about 70% of participating students and mentors are women, rare in this field; genuine academic output, including a talk at JpGU 2024 and submissions to peer-reviewed journals; and a self-sustaining cycle in which students return as mentors for the next generation after moving on to university.

The ceremony and award lectures began at 10:00 on Thursday 1 October 2026 at Espace in Katahira North-Gate Hall on Tohoku University’s Katahira Campus, with online participation over Zoom. Tohoku University reports that 73 people took part, in person and online.

In the award lectures that followed the ceremony, Accel Kitchen’s founder Kazuo Tanaka spoke under the title “Opening the door to particle-physics inquiry for blind and visually impaired students and for junior- and senior-high girls.” Madoka Nakano, who received Award B, then gave her lecture.

The two go back a long way: during their university days, Nakano and Tanaka worked together on “Todai Guidance” (Todai Gaidansu), an initiative to close the information gap for high-school students hoping to enter the University of Tokyo. Years later, they were honoured side by side in the same round of the award.

We take this award as recognition of work carried out together with the students who take up inquiry, the university and graduate students who mentor them, parents and teachers, and the research institutes and organisations that collaborate with us on joint research and demonstration lessons. We are deeply grateful to every one of them.

Accel Kitchen will keep working so that the exploration of particles and the universe stays open to students of every background and circumstance. Among other things, we will take this recognition as encouragement to refine vibration output — which visually impaired visitors at Science Agora 2026 told us they could feel more easily than sound — and the wider design of how a detector conveys what it has measured. Read the exhibit report