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Shogo Shigeoka, born in 1967, is the president of Shigeoka Co., Ltd. He has been involved in the operation of the natural hot spring facility “Yunosato” since he was a student at Kinki University and was later appointed as president in 2015. Since 2011, he and his company have been collaborating with Kobe University to research the three types of waters, each with their own characteristics, that spring up at “Yunosato”; we call these waters “Gold Water,” “Silver Water,” and “Bronze Water.” Shigeoka has continued to collaborate and support the water molecule research and data analysis. After 10 years of revolutionary research progress with the university, in 2020 Shigeoka Co., Ltd. constructed the world’s first of it’s kind, research and development facility “Yunosato Aquaphotomics Lab.” Shigeoka built this facility to create a space where we can utilize the knowledge acquired through the joint research as well as further deepen our understanding and inspire product development. “Yunosato Aquaphotomics Lab” will continue to apply aquaphotomics to analyze biological systems. Currently, water extracted from plants and foods, which we call biofunctional water, is analyzed to reveal it’s characteristics and functionality as we also investigate it’s potential by blending the biofunctional waters with the “Yunosato” waters.

Christian Huck obtained his doctorate in chemistry in 1998 from the University in Innsbruck, Austria, where he continued to work as an assistant professor until the habilitation in 2006. In 2013, he received a call as a full professor to the University of Stuttgart, Germany and in 2015, another call back to the University of Innsbruck, where he is currently vice-head of the Institute of Analytical Chemistry and Radiochemistry and head of the spectroscopy unit. From 2014 until 2017 he was a visiting professor at Kwansei-Gakuin University in Sanda, Japan, in the laboratory of Professor Yukihiro Ozaki. Christian has published more than 300 peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting in an h-index of 52 based on more than 10000 citations. Beside several numerous awards he was also the receiver of 2018 Tomas Hirschfeld Award. In his research he is mainly focusing on vibrational spectroscopic technologies (NIR, MIR, Raman) for life and material science in combination with separation technologies. Currently, he is editor-in-chief for Spectrochimica Acta A (Elsevier) and NIR news (Sage) as well as associate editor for several analytical journals including JNIRS.

Jelena Muncan is currently working on development of aquaphotomics as a science and a technological platform for a multitude of measurement applications in various fields. She is based in Biomeasurement Technology Laboratory, Graduate School of Agricultural Science, Kobe University, Japan headed by the aquaphotomics founder – Prof. Dr Roumiana Tsenkova.

She received her Ph.D. diploma in Biomedical Engineering at Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade in 2014, where she also started her research and teaching career (2008), later being promoted to an assistant (2014) and assistant professor (2017). She spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow of Japanese Society for Promotion of Science, in Biomeasurement Technology Laboratory, Kobe University until 2019, when she decided aquaphotomics is to become her main field of work.

Her research is directed at reaching better understanding of structure of water in aqueous and biological systems and their resulting properties and functionality, thus providing a common platform for development of novel non-destructive, non-invasive measurement and monitoring technologies, advancing towards the development of  bio-photomodulation strategies based on water-light interaction.