Chikashi Toyoshima

Chikashi Toyoshima is currently a University Professor at the Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, the University of Tokyo. He was born in Akita prefecture, Japan, in 1954, and received his PhD degree from the Physics Department at the University of Tokyo in 1983. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, before he assumed a position as Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1990. In 1994 he accepted full professorship at the University of Tokyo, Japan. In 2005 he was elected as Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and in 2007 he was awarded the Hitchcock Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He was also endowed with a Medal with Purple Ribbon from Japan in 2015, and the Gregori Aminoff Prize 2016 from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is an awardee of the Imperial Prize and the Japan Academy Prize 2018. His research focuses on the structural biology of membrane-bound ion pumps, especially the calcium pump of sarcoplasmic reticulum (SERCA) and Na+, K+-ATPase, using X-ray crystallography.