Takashi Gojobori (五條堀 孝 Gojōbori Takashi, born October 24, 1951) 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 Institute 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).
Prof. Gojobori is a 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). 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 (2004). In 2009 he was awarded the Purple Ribbon Medal and the Medal of Honor of Japan for a series of his researches to develop the early age of “Molecular Evolutionary Studies using genome information”.
He is the Founding Editor of Genome Biology and Evolution, the Editor of Gene and FEBS Letters, Associate Editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution and PLoS Genetics, and he has served on the editorial boards of 6 international journals including Genome Research and BMC Genomics. Previously he was the Editor of Journal of Molecular Evolution for 8 years (1995–2003). 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.[1]
Prof. Gojobori 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, genome evolution, and comparative gene expression. In recent years, he has focused on the evolution of the brain and CNS.
Prof. Gojobori has served as the Program Director of the Council for Science and Technology Policy (CSTP) of the Government of Japan and is the Science Officer of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, Culture, and Technology (MEXT). He has contributed to the DDBJ/GenBank/EMBL database construction as well as the H-Invitational human gene database.