Dr. Hiroko Yamashita received her Ph.D. from DEALL in 1994, with a dissertation entitled “Processing of Japanese and Korean” under the guidance of Prof. Mineharu Nakayama. Now she is a full professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. She is also serving as the chairperson of her department. 
When in DEALL, Dr. Hiroko Yamashita studied Japanese linguistics with foci on psycholinguistics and syntax. She also took course and did research in Japanese literature, studied Korean for three years, and had an opportunity to learn Chinese as a student of individualized instruction. In addition, she received training in teaching Japanese through coursework and workshops offered by DEALL. She taught Japanese as a teaching assistant for several years when studying at DEALL.
At RIT, Dr. Hiroko Yamashita is teaching Japanese language and Japanese linguistics. Her research primarily deals with human sentence production in L1 and L2. She is also interested in pedagogy of teaching Japanese to deaf and hard-of-hearing students using technology. As the first full-time faculty in Japanese in her department, she built its Japanese curriculum, which is now one of the most popular languages in her department.
Dr. Hiroko Yamashita thinks highly of the education she received from DEALL. “There is nothing that is not utilized in my current work,” said Dr. Hiroko Yamashita. “Skills to research in linguistics, to present it at conferences, to publish it, and to network among colleagues, among others, all helped me develop into an independent researcher.” In recollection of her life in DEALL, Dr. Hiroko Yamashita also mentioned the solid training in teaching Japanese and curriculum development, which helped her to build a strong Japanese language program at RIT. Even the literature courses she took at DEALL, which were outside of her main areas of research, have helped her (especially as a chairperson) to “connect to and successfully interact with” her colleagues.