Takashi Gojobori

Takashi Gojobori is a Distinguished Professor of Bioscience at Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Until he moved to KAUST in 2013, he has been the Vice-Director and Professor of National Institute of Genetics (NIG), Mishima, Japan. He is Project Professor for NIG as well as a number of leading Universities such as the University of Tokyo, Waseda University, and Fukushima Prefecture College of Medicine. He has also been a Visiting Professor for Keio University, Nihon University, and National Cheng Kong University in Taiwan. After finishing his Ph.D.(1979) at Kyushu University, Japan, he has been Research Associate and Research Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Houston for 4 years (1979-1983). He has also experienced a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis (1985, 1986) and a Visiting Research Fellow at Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) in London (1989). 

He has been elected as an associate member of EMBO in 2015 and Fellow of the World Academy of Science for the Developing Countries (TWAS) in 2013 and Member of Academia Europaea in 2012. He has received The Medal with Purple Ribbon from the Government of Japan in 2009. He has been an Academician member of the Pontifical Academy of Science in Vatican (2007), a Foreign Honorary Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2006). He has received the Salvatore Gold Medal from Italy (2004). He is also recipients of the Society Awards of Genetics Society of Japan (2005) and that of Japanese Society of Evolutionary Studies (2004).

He is the Founding Editor of Genome Biology and Evolution, Editor-in- Chief of GENE, Editor of FEBS Letters, Section Advisor of BMC Genomics, and Associate Editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution and Associate Editor of PLoS Genetics. He has also served on the editorial boards of other international journals. He was an Editor of Journal of Molecular Evolution for 8 years (1995-2003).

He has more than 400 publications in the peer-reviewed international journals on comparative and evolutionary genomics, with Google H-index of 85. He has worked extensively on marine metagenomics in the Red Sea, evolution of viral genomes, the rates of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions, positive selection, horizontal gene transfer, genomic evolution, and comparative gene expressionics. He has also focused on evolution of the central nervous system and sensory organs, discovering a vast number of novel genes from planarian brain and hydra neural cells. He has high international reputation as a pioneer of evolutionary genomics, in which he started from 1980s using viral and bacterial complete genomes. He has also contributed to the DDBJ/GenBank/EMBL database construction as well as the H-Invitational human gene database.