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At the beginning of the press conference, President Nakamura introduced Nao Kodaira and said, "I would like to inform you that this selection as a specially appointed professor was made possible with the deep understanding of Aizawa Hospital, which sponsored her athletic career. I have highly expectations for her ability to overcome difficulties and skills to communicate.” Kodaira has represented Japan in the last four Winter Olympics, which were held in Vancouver (2010), Sochi (2014), PyeongChang (2018), and Beijing (2022) and won a gold medal at PyeongChang. She received the prestigious awards, including the Medal with Purple Ribbon and the Nagano Honor Award.

Trustee and Executive Vice President Hirano, explained that he had begun to get in contact with Kodaira through Professor Yuki to ask to engage in education at Shinshu University, where she graduated, following her announcement at a press conference in Nagano on April 12, 2022, that she would retire from athlete career after racing at the National Single-Distance Championships in October of the same year. Hirano said that in addition to her brilliant athletic career, she has had the opportunity to interact with athletes overseas and study abroad, and also is a person with influence and committed to society through her various social activities such as the support of the disaster area after Typhoon No. 19 in Nagano Prefecture in 2019. He expects that she will take advantage of this ability in education.

Professor Yuki, who was Kodaira’s Student Advisor and Coach for 18 years, looked back on the past and said, "When I returned to Japan after she won the gold medal in PyeongChang, what public attention paid was the scene that Kodaira and Sang Hwa LEE of Korea embraced after winning medals. I have received a lot of inquiries about how to nurture such great humanity at younger ages. She said that it owed to the education at the University in many terms, and looking back to her words now, I think that winning the gold medal was her achievement, but it could be said also that of the Faculty of Education as a whole. It’s getting to be known that her words have power. She has learned how to create things and to eat with ingenuity and experienced that learning a foreign language expands the world and allows her to interact with people from different cultures. Above all, she has been dedicated to sport, where is a world of tough competition. Even in such a tough situation, she expressed that connecting with others can create values other than just winning or losing. I hope that she will teach and tell the things to the students, looking back on student life by herself, she reflects on what she learned at the university, or more specifically, what she could learn only at university and how it has helped her to make great strides afterwards.”

In the greeting speech as Professor, Kodaira said, "I am very excited to be appointed as a specially appointed professor at Shinshu University, which is an honored and important position that requires huge responsibility. I was born and raised in Shinshu, and I think that my four years at Shinshu University was very valuable for me to expand my world of learning beyond just skating. In my first year, I studied in Matsumoto, and in my second year, I moved to Nagano to study education in a specialized field. Although skating was just an extracurricular activity at that time, I was able to work hard on skating while studying because M-Wave Ice Arena was located in Shinshu and the university was located also in Shinshu. When I was a student, I studied Biomechanics related to sports in Professor Yuki's laboratory in addition to the field of Education. The various perspectives I’ve learned, which were not limited to just doing my best in sports, are making of who I am today. In the practice of skating, we sometimes had a technical debate, it was a time to deepen our thinking through words. I believe that these experiences of deepening my thinking through words and interacting with my teammates and friends from the same department at the university will be put to good use in front of students as a specially appointed professor. I’m inexperienced as a teacher yet, but I try my best to look students straight in the eyes and focus to build up learning together with them as always.”

Professor Kodaira is going to teach some of the general education courses related to career development and health science from next January.