Mitsuhiro Yanagida


Mitsuhiro Yanagida Fellow of the Royal Society is a Japanese molecular biologist known for research on cell cycle and chromosome structure using the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. He was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society on 11 May 2000.

Education and early life

Yanagida was born in Tokyo, and received his doctorate in science from the University of Tokyo in 1970.

Career and research

He was Professor of Biophysics at Kyoto University from 1977 to 2004, where he served as Dean of Graduate School of Biostudies from 2001 to 2003. After retiring from Kyoto University and becoming Professor Emeritus, he has been Professor of the G0 Cell Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.

Awards and honors

Yanagida is an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Biology since 2010 and foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, USA since 2012.
He received many awards including the Order of Culture and the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy.