Mitsuo Tasumi


Mitsuo Tasumi was a Japanese physical chemist known for his vibrational spectroscopic works on synthetic and biological macromolecules. He was Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, and a former president of Saitama University, having trained
a number of physical chemists active in academia and industry. Moto-o Tasumi, a zoologist at Kyoto University, was his brother.

Career

Tasumi earned his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo
in the laboratories of San-Ichiro Mizushima and of
Takehiko Shimanouchi, where he reported the first phonon dispersion
of polyethylene. He spent the subsequent 33 years as a faculty member initially in
the Department of Biochemistry and then in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Tokyo. During this period,
he spent a year at University of Michigan
as a Fulbright scholar in the laboratory of Samuel Krimm and another year
at Polytechnic University of Milan as a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Giuseppe Zerbi under Giulio Natta, a Nobel laureate.
At the University of Tokyo, Tasumi led a large group of spectroscopists, developing new
experimental and computational techniques of
infrared spectroscopy and Raman scattering spectroscopy. He is known
for establishing the theoretical basis for interpreting the spectra of synthetic
polymers,
proteins, and photosynthetic systems to elucidate their relationship with the structural,
thermal, mechanical, transport, and response properties. He published several papers with Hideki Shirakawa, who was awarded a Nobel Prize jointly with Alan MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger.
He was among the earliest spectroscopists
who saw the great utility of ab initio electronic structure calculations in
understanding vibrational spectra. In particular, he established a steady-state spectroscopic method
that can determine the structures and dynamics of electronic excited states by resonance Raman excitation
profile, and applied it to polyenes including carotenoids. At the same time, he made important contributions
to the development and applications of time-resolved vibrational spectroscopies.
He is a co-author of the Protein Data Bank and the editor/author of "Introduction to Experimental Infrared Spectroscopy: Fundamentals and Practical Methods."
In 2004–08, Tasumi was the President of Saitama University after serving as Professor of Chemistry of Saitama University and as Visiting Professor at University of California, Berkeley.
In 1987–89, Tasumi was a member of the Board of Directors of the Chemical Society of Japan.
In 1994–2000, he was an Executive Committee Member of CODATA.
In 1997–99, he was the president of the Spectroscopical Society of Japan.

Honors and awards