Rate My Professor Keitaro Yoshimoto

Keitaro Yoshimoto is an Associate Professor in the Department of Life Sciences at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Molecular Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, Tohoku University in 1998, followed by a Master’s degree from the Department of Applied Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Science from the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, Tohoku University in 2004.

Following his doctorate, Yoshimoto served as a Special Postdoctoral Researcher at RIKEN from 2004 to 2006 and as a Lecturer at the University of Tsukuba from 2006 to 2010 before joining The University of Tokyo as Associate Professor and Principal Investigator in 2010. His research specializes in polymer chemistry, analytical chemistry, molecular recognition chemistry, biopolymer chemistry, nucleic acid chemistry, and cell engineering, with a focus on the development of nucleic acid aptamers for biomedical and diagnostic applications. He has held part-time lecturing positions at Tokyo University of Science and Toyo University and served as a JST-PRESTO researcher. Yoshimoto has received multiple awards, including the Tohoku Branch Encouragement Award from the Japan Society for Analytical Chemistry in 2004, the Polymer Society of Japan Research Encouragement Award in 2010, and the Japan Society for Analytical Chemistry Encouragement Award in 2010. He has contributed to editorial roles with journals such as BUNSEKI and Analytical Sciences and holds positions including Permanent Director of the Nano-Biomedical Society of Japan. Key publications include early work on abasic site-containing DNA for nucleobase recognition published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2003 and recent studies on thrombin-binding DNA aptamers in Molecular Therapy–Nucleic Acids in 2019.