Takashi Gojobori
Takashi Gojobori is a Japanese molecular biologist who is vice director of the National Institute of Genetics and the DNA Data Bank of Japan at NIG in Mishima, Japan. Gojobori is a distinguished professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. He is a professor of bioscience and acting director at the Computational Bioscience Research Center at KAUST.
He has also been co-appointed as the special research consultant of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and acts as a visiting professor at Keio University, University of Tokyo, and Tokyo Institute of Technology.
He is an associate member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, a member of Academia Europea and an academician member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Vatican.
Education
Gojobori finished his Ph.D. in theoretical population genetics at Kyushu University, Japan. He was a research associate and research assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston for 4 years. He was also visiting assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis and visiting research fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London.Research
He is the founding editor of the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, the executive editor of the journal Gene, academic editor of FEBS Letters, associate editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution and PLOS Genetics, and section editor of computer genomics in BMC Genomics. He has served on the editorial boards of six international journals including GigaScience. Previously he was the editor of Journal of Molecular Evolution for eight years. 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.Gojobori 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 central nervous system, and COVID-19 or virus transmissions.
Gojobori has served as the Program Director of the Council for Science and Technology Policy of the Government of Japan and is the Science Officer of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, Culture, and Technology. He has contributed to databases such as DDBJ/GenBank/EMBL and the H-Invitational human gene database.
He has had more than 400 publications in peer-reviewed international journals on comparative and evolutionary genomics. Gojobori has also contributed to the GenBank database construction as well as the H-Invitational human gene database.