Takashi Gojobori

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

After finishing his Ph.D. (1979) at Kyushu University, Japan, he was Research Associate and Research Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Houston for 4 years (1979-1983). He was also Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis (1985, 1986) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) in London (1989).

He has been elected Academician member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican (2007) and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2006). He has received the Gaetano Salvatore Gold Medal from Italy (2004) and some of the major Japanese awards.

He is the Editor of Gene and FEBS Letters, and Associate Editor of MBE and PLoS Genetics. He has also served on the editorial boards of 6 international journals including Genome Research and BMC Genomics. He was the Editor of JME for 8 years (1995-2003).

He has 321 publications in peer-reviewed international journals, as of October 31, 2007. He has worked extensively on the rates of synonymous and non synonymous substitutions, positive selection, horizontal gene transfer, viral evolution, genomic evolution, and comparative gene expressionics. In recent years, he has focused on the evolution of the brain and CNS.

He has contributed to the DDBJ/GenBank/EMBL database construction as well as the H-Invitational human gene database.

He has been served as the Program Director of the Council for Science and Technology Policy (CSTP) of the Government of Japan. He is also the Science Officer of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, Culture, and Technology (MEXT).

Prof. Gojobori is a Honorary Foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the AAAS. Pope Benedict XVI appointed Prof. Gojobori as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2006).