Ryuhei Nakamura (Dr. Sci.)

Ryuhei Nakamura received his Dr. Degree in Science in 2005 from Osaka University, where he worked on in-situ spectroscopic monitoring of the catalysis at water-photoexcited TiO2 intererfaces under the supervision of Prof. Yoshihiro Nakato. After working as a JSPS postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Heinz Frei in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), he joined the University of Tokyo as an assistant professor in 2006 and worked on electromicrobiology and electrocatalysis with Prof. Kazuhito Hashimoto. In 2013, he was appointed to Team Leader (PI) in RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS). His group has been working on developing biologically inspired catalysts and their application to energy conversion and production systems. Specifically, the group attempts to exploit the nature's ingenuities for multi-electron catalytic reaction, metabolic regulation by external redox stimuli, as well as employ robust energy management in the deep sea environment to develop novel materials and systems necessary to effectively manage renewable energy sources. In 2017, he concurrently serves as a Professor of Earth Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology, which is assigned to the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). In ELSI, he has intended to integrate electrochemistry, microbiology, and geology to seek one of the vital questions of general science, the Origin of Life.

Based on his achievements, he was awarded “The first Honda-Fujishima Prize (2005)”, “The First NAGASE Prize (special prize) (2011)” and “The Young Scientist's Prize 2016" Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) in 2016. Also, in 2016, he was invited to “24th Solvay Conference on Chemistry: Catalysis in Chemistry and Biology” (Brussels, Belgium), as a speaker in the session of catalysis in extreme environments.