Takashi Gojobori


Takashi Gojobori, is a Japanese molecular biologist, Vice-Director of the National Institute of Genetics and Distinguished Professor at Center for Information Biology and DNA Data Bank of Japan in NIG, Mishima, Japan. He has also been co-appointed as the Special Research Consultant of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, as a Visiting Professor of Keio University, University of Tokyo, and Tokyo Institute of Technology and as a Visiting Research Director of RIKEN.

Education

After finishing his Ph.D. at Kyushu University, Japan, he was Research Associate and Research Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston for 4 years. He was also Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and Visiting Research Fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London.

Research

He is the Founding Editor of the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, the Executive Editor of the journal Gene, Academic Editor of FEBS Letters, Associate Editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution and PLOS Genetics, and Section Editor of Computer Genomics in BMC Genomics. He has served on the editorial boards of 6 international journals including GigaScience. Previously he was the Editor of Journal of Molecular Evolution for 8 years. He is leader of the Japanese team of the H-Invitational international consortium who was tasked with creating a database linking the 21,037 validated human genes to their biological function.
Gojobori has worked extensively on the rates of synonymous and non-synonymous substitutions, positive selection, horizontal gene transfer, viral evolution, genome evolution, and comparative gene expression. In recent years, he has focused on the evolution of the brain and Central nervous system.
Gojobori has served as the Program Director of the Council for Science and Technology Policy of the Government of Japan and is the Science Officer of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, Culture, and Technology. He has contributed to the DDBJ/GenBank/EMBL database construction as well as the H-Invitational human gene database.

Honors

Prof. Gojobori is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI appointed Prof. Gojobori as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He has received the Gaetano Salvatore Gold Medal from Italy. He was awarded the Kihara Memorial Foundation Academic Award in 1995 and the Purple Ribbon Medal and the Medal of Honor of Japan in 2009 for a series of his researches to pioneer the early age of “Molecular Evolutionary Studies using Genome Information”.