KO SHIMAMOTO
Dr. Ko Shimamoto received his BS degree in 1974 from Kyoto University and his Ph.D. degree in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980.
In 1980, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institut in Basel, Switzerland. In 1983 he joined a newly founded Plantech Research Institute in Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation and became a senior scientist in 1988. In 1994 he became a professor in Graduate School of Biological Sciences, Nara Institute of Science and Technology and a head of Laboratory of Plant Molecular Genetics.
Dr. Shimamoto has been working in the area of plant molecular genetics. In Madison, he studied somatic cell genetics of maize and during his postdoctoral time in Basel, he worked on maize cell genetics and auxotrophic mutants of plants. Since he returned to Japan in 1983, he started working on rice and developed methods for rice transformation in 1989. Ever since he returned to Japan, he has been working in various areas of rice molecular biology including disease resistance, flower development, functional genomics, gene silencing, and pre-mRNA splicing.
Dr. Shimamoto has served as an Editor for "Plant Cell Reports" (1992-1995) and "The Plant Journal" (1995-1998) and is currently an Editor of "Plant and Cell Physiology" (2000-) and "Plant Physiology" (2000-) and a member of the Advisory Editorial Board of "Trends in Plant Sciences". Dr. Shimamoto received the Distinguished Research Award from the Genetics Society of Japan (1990), the Society Award from Japanese Society of Breeding (1993), and Kihara Memorial Foundation Prize (2000).