I was born on 23 July in 1968 in Kyoto, where my father was studying isonitrile chemistry.
I grew up in my hometown and graduated Rakusei High School in 1987.
Then I spent the next 9 years at
Kyoto University. In between playing
a viola made by Antonio Venturini (Cremona) at Kyoto University Symphony Orchestra,
I worked on my PhD in the group headed by the late Prof. Hidemasa Takaya where I learned chemistry from
Prof. Tstsuo Ohta, Prof. Kyoko Nozaki and
Prof. Eiji Shirakawa,
doing research on organosilicon compounds as reagents for organic chemistry.
I finished this work in the Spring of 1996 and left Kyoto to do some Post-doctoral
research work at the ETH in Zurich with
Prof.
Francois Diederich.
In the spring of 1997, I joined the faculty of
Tokyo Tech as an assistant professor
and started in the Prof. Takao Ikariya's group
to design new noble-metal protic amine complexes with a half-sandwich structure, aiming
at developing unprecedented catalytic reduction of polarized C-O bonds with molecular
dihydrogen. As a result, a number of environmentally benign and straightforward catalytic
hydrogenation of carboxylic acid derivatives as well as many oxidative transformations
of alcohols have been developed by talented graduate students at Tokyo Tech, whose
enthusiasm for chemistry and cordial contribution promoted me as an associate professor at IMCE, Kyushu University in the summer of 2009.
