Hutan Ashrafian
Hutan Ashrafian is a surgeon and scientist at Imperial College London, and a martial artist of forty years' standing. This project is his vision and follows on from his book Warrior Origins.
The martial artist
He has trained for four decades and across many styles of karate, and holds a sixth dan in Okinawan Gōjū-ryū.
Karate evolution through the appraisal of kata
He is the author of Warrior Origins, in which he applied network theory to better understand the evolution of karate through the similarities and differences in kata performance, taken as a measure of the differences between styles, thereby creating a phylogenetic tree of styles through kata phenotypes.
Why this site exists
He created this lineage map of karate, kobudō and the Korean arts to offer transparency and understanding of the journey of karate over time through its luminaries, and created this website for all those interested in the martial arts and in the evolution and practice of karate in all its forms.
The clinician and the scientist
He is a clinician, a surgeon, and a scientist at Imperial College London, with more than seven hundred peer-reviewed publications, an h-index above eighty, and more than seventy PhD students supervised. He is lead for artificial intelligence at the Institute of Global Health Innovation, and has operations and clinical signs eponymously named after him.
His Imperial College profile is here.