Aiko is from Yokohama, Japan. She holds a BA English Literature from Meiji Gakuin University (Japan) and an MA in Applied Linguistics and Language Pedagogy from SOAS University of London. She is also qualified with the Japanese Language Teaching Competency Test and holds a Japanese - Japanese Sign Language interpreter licence. She has been teaching Japanese across all levels in the Higher Education sector in the UK since 2015. She taught Japanese at the University of Manchester and SOAS University of London, before she joined King’s College London in 2019.

Her research interests lie in pragmatics, speech acts realisation, second language users’ linguistic identities, and second language teaching and learning.