Mary Nishikawa is a Board Certified Editor in the Life Sciences and works as an academic trainer for Cactus Communications, in Japan.

After receiving her MA degree in Biochemistry from City College, City University of New York, Ms. Nishikawa taught undergraduate chemistry for a community colleague and advanced placement chemistry for the New York City Board of Education. After that, she was a protein biochemist at Hoffmann-La Roche, where she worked in the early stages of AIDS research. This led to the commercialization of the protease inhibitor, Invirase. While at Roche, Ms. Nishikawa met her husband and moved to Japan, transferring to Nippon Roche Research Center as document reviewer and editor. She became president of a virtual company that trained researchers at the center. Her review and editing of papers helped researchers publish in journals, such as Science and Cell. After Nippon Roche, she worked at the technology center of Schlumberger, in Japan. There, Ms. Nishikawa was a technical editor, webmaster, and end-user developer of a documentation management system. She facilitated an XML user's group and co-led a web technologies community of practice for 1,500 members in Schlumberger worldwide. Ms. Nishikawa wrote and presented papers on information management at Extreme Markup Language Conferences, still read by specialists today. At that time, she was an ISO project editor for the IEC JTC 1/SC 34 Document Description and Processing Languages Committee.

For the past eight years, Ms. Nishikawa worked at the Medical Tribune, Inc. in Tokyo, as project manager, editor, writer, and foreign news analyst, where she reviewed published research articles and wrote over 50 articles for the newspaper. She has reviewed and edited research reports of professors in Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.  She wrote a newsletter and facilitated advisory board meetings for Japanese pharmaceutical companies. She was also an English journal editor of Medical Tribune academic publications. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Here are some topics prepared and presented by her. 

• How to write a high-quality research paper
• Writing to publish
• Strategy and tips for writing a research paper
• Peer reviewer training