Biography

Kazuo Shinozaki was born and grew up in Utsunomiya city, Tochigi prefecture, Japan in 1949. He graduated from Osaka University in 1972. He entered the Graduate Course of Nagoya University and took a Ph.D. under the supervision of Profs Reiji and Tsuneko Okazaki in Nagoya University in 1979. His thesis is on discontinuous DNA replication of T7 bacteriophage. He became Research Associate at National Institute of Genetics, Mishima Japan in 1978. Kazuo Shinozaki married Kazuko Yamaguchi in 1982. Then he became Assistant Professor of Department of Biology, Nagoya University in 1983, and promoted to be Associate Professor of Center for Gene Research, Nagoya University in 1986. He determined whole genome sequence of tobacco chloroplast with Prof. Masahiro Sugiura in 1986. He worked as a Visiting Scientist in Prof. Nam-Hai Chua laboratory, Rockefeller University, USA from 1987 to 1989. He was promoted to be Chief Scientist of Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory of Tsukuba Life Science Center of RIKEN in 1989. He became Director of Plant Science Center (PSC) of RIKEN in 2005, and then Director of Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) of RIKEN in 2013. From 2020, he became Senior Advisor of RIKEN CSRS. He was also Group Director of Gene Discovery Research Group of CSRS. He was president of Japan Society of Plant Physiologists (JSPP) in 2010-2011.
He was awarded with the Tsukuba Prize in 2002. He was awarded with JSPP Award in 2009. He received as Person of Merit for the Contribution to Culture and Medal with Purple Ribbon for the Contribution to Science Japan in 2016. He was selected as a corresponding member of American Society of Plant Biologist in 2015. He was selected as an international member of the National Academy of Sciences of USA in 2020. He was awarded with the International Prize for Biology in 2020 and was awarded with the Kalifa International Award for Date Palm and Agricultural Innovation of UAE in 2021. From 2014 to 2021, he was selected as a Highly Cited Researcher.
Kazuo Shinozaki has been studying plant regulatory gene network in abiotic environmental stresses, especially drought stress. He is known for his studies on transcriptional regulation of drought stress-inducible plant genes, signal transduction in drought stress responses and tolerance, regulatory network in phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) responses. Kazuo Shinozaki and Kazuko Yamaguchi-Shinozaki have been collaborating on these research topics since 1989. Kazuo Shinozaki also contributed to Arabidopsis functional genomics project based on the collection of full-length cDNAs and tagged mutant lines for reverse genetics. He is working on phenotyping of plant growth under various environmental stress conditions.