Takayuki NONOYAMA

Takayuki NONOYAMA received his Doctor of Engineering degree from the Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya Institute of Technology, in March 2013. He was appointed as a Specially Appointed Assistant Professor at the Laboratory of Soft & Wet Matter, Faculty of Advanced Life Science, Hokkaido University, in April 2013. He was promoted to Specially Appointed Associate Professor in April 2020, and has held a tenure-track Associate Professorship at the same faculty since June 2021. Since April 2025, he has also served as the Director of the Co-Creation Core for Soft Materials Aspiring Research & Translation, a new initiative at Hokkaido University aimed at advancing world-leading soft matter research through integration with medicine, engineering, agriculture, fisheries, and land–sea field sciences.

He has also held cross-appointment positions at Hokkaido University, including:

– the Global Station for Soft Matter, Global Institution for Collaborative Research and Education (GSS, GI-CoRE) from 2016 to 2020, and

– the Department of High Toughness Hydrogels for Cartilage Application, Center for Innovation and Business Promotion from 2017 to 2021.

Dr. NONOYAMA is actively engaged in the interdisciplinary field of polymers and bioceramics. His research has elucidated the mechanisms of bone formation and led to the development of materials incorporating bone-toughening strategies through materials science approaches. He has also contributed to the establishment of bone adhesion technologies. Notably, he discovered a class of soft materials that exhibit rapid and extreme hardening at elevated temperatures—behavior completely opposite to conventional polymers—advancing both fundamental understanding and applied developments in soft matter. More recently, he has been working on the development of real-space imaging techniques for polymer network structures by utilizing precision biomineralization technologies.