[1] Working for 15 years in the School of Human Cultures at the University of Shiga Prefecture in Hikone,[2] he joined the Minpaku on April 1st in 2020.
Between April 2004 and September 2005 he was a research fellow at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, and between October 2011 and March 2012 he was a visiting scholar at Mongolia and Inner Asian Studies Unit in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
Returning to Japan after living in Mongolia for 6 years, Shimamura achieved his Ph.D. in March 2004 at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) in Hayama in Kanagawa Prefecture.
His dissertation research was later published as a book, first in Japanese (in 2011) and later in English under the title The Roots Seekers: Shamanism and Ethnicity Among the Mongol Buryats (2014).
In April 2016 he received the SOKENDAI Scientist Award from his alma mater, the Graduate University for Advanced Studies.