Saki Kashimura

Saki Kashimura is a first-year master's student at Institute of Science Tokyo, supervised by Genki Kanda, PhD. Her research targets non-routine manipulation, a remaining barrier to fully automated biological experimentation, for which no common framework exists to judge which robot foundation models are viable. She is building a real-world benchmark comparing imitation-learning policies on laboratory tube handling with a low-cost robot arm. She received her B.S. in Life Science from Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences in 2025, where she worked on molecular dynamics simulations for drug discovery. That work left her attentive to the gap between simulated and physical behavior, a concern she now brings to robot manipulation, where offline metrics and real-world performance diverge.