Kumiko is a research scientist at Fisheries and Oceans, Canada, Bedford Institute of Oceanography, where she leads a carbon and tracer group. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Oceanography at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
Her research interests include climate change and ocean carbon cycles and ocean acidification in the North Atlantic and the Arctic. She also investigates air-sea interactions, water mass formation and ventilation ages and freshwater composition and fluxes using multiple chemical tracers.
She studied Mathematics (BSc. Tsuda College) and Environmental Chemistry (MSc. Ehime University) in Japan, and Statistics (University of California, Riverside) in the USA. She moved to Canada and majored in Oceanography at Dalhousie University (Ph.D.). She is a lead author of the report on the Arctic Ocean Acidification to the Arctic Council (Arctic Monitoring Assessment Programme-AMAP), a member of Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network (GOA-ON), and Canadian representative for Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program (GO-SHIP) and Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER).