Kenji Watanabe

Prof., Head of Disaster and Safety Management Division, Nagoya Institute of Technology

Kenji Watanabe is a professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, and also the head of Disaster & Safety Management Division of the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Nagoya, Japan. Based on his 20 years business and professional experiences in structured finance, risk management, system & operation design at the Mizuho Bank, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and IBM Business Consulting Services, he is recognized as a SME (Subject Matter Expert) in operational risk management, business continuity management (BCM), and critical infrastructure protection (CIP). In those professional fields, he has been assigned as a chair of several governmental committees in Japan at the Cabinet Secretariat, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), Small and Medium Enterprise Agency, several local governments, and industry associations. He also provides professional advisory in risk management and disaster management to major corporations in automotive manufacturing industry and energy (electricity & gas) industry. He has also been a national expert in the ISO/TC292 (Security & resilience) for the last 15 years and mainly contributed in developing ISO22398 (Societal security – Guidelines for exercises) and ISO22397 (Societal security – Guidelines for establishing partnering arrangements) as the responsible WG Convenor. He has BA (Kyoto University) in Forestry-Erosion Control, MBA (Southern Methodist University) and PhD (Waseda University) in Information, Production and Systems. He is also assigned as a Visiting Researcher of the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience and a Senior Researcher of the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution.