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Mana Short is a junior senior studying International Relations in the Department of Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. She is enrolled in [https://www.sophia.ac.jp/eng/spsf/ Sophia Program for Sustainable Futures], an interdisciplinary program that aims to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and ability to overcome today’s complex sustainability challenges.

Mana was trained as a University Innovation Fellow in Fall 20202021. Since then, she has worked closely together with her team to lead design thinking and youth empowerment workshops for high school and university students. In 2022, Mana’s team organized the SDGs x Innovation Sparker, which was a two-day bilingual event aimed at fostering student-faculty-staff collaborations and sparking solutions for a zero-waste campus. The event brought together approximately 90 students, faculty, and staff members from more than 15 departments at Sophia. Building on this event, Mana helped to create a design thinking workshop toolkit called “Innovation Sparker” that includes useful resources for leading design thinking workshops at the university level (learn more about UIF Sophia’s projects here: <nowiki>https://www.uifsophia.com/</nowiki>).