bachelor (2009), master (2011) and PhD degrees (2014). He joined the group of Prof. T. Hayashi, an expert on hemoprotein engineering, but started up functional analysis and alteration of “non”-heme diiron protein from 2009 to 2014. Throughout his project, he actively participated in many collaborations to learn various techniques from the experts, including the groups of Prof. Y. Shiro (Riken, Japan) for protein X-ray crystallography, Prof. S. Hirota (NAIST, Japan), Prof. K. Ishimori (Hokkaido Univ., Japan) for resonance Raman spectroscopy, Prof. Y. Takano (Osaka Univ., Japan) for DFT calculation. He also joined the group of Prof. D. M. Kurtz Jr (Univ. Texas San Antonio, US), who is a well-known chemist of the diiron protein, as a visiting researcher in 2011. His project on the iron protein made him interested in the molecular mechanism of metal acquisition/homeostasis in a living system, thus, he also worked with Prof. S. Aono (IMS, Japan), who is an expert on metalloprotein regulating metal homeostasis, during and after his Ph.D. course. 

Fascinated by the pioneering work merging a natural reaction by a biocatalyst and an unnatural reaction by a synthetic catalyst, he participated in the group of Prof. T. R. Ward as a postdoctoral researcher to pursue the systems catalysis comprised of natural and artificial enzyme. He worked on the natural/artificial enzymatic cascades in the collaboration with Prof. F. Hollmann (TU Delft, Netherlands) and off-equilibrium system comprised of a natural/artificial enzymatic reaction network.

Prof. Ward is also a director of the National Center in Competence in Research, where researchers in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology and neuroscience are intensively collaborating. Thanks to this occasion, he could meet researchers from various research fields and work on several collaborations including, Prof. S. Matile (Univ. Geneva, Switzerland) for a cell-penetrating cargo, Prof. M. Fussenegger (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) for synthetic biology of mammalian cells, Prof. O. Wenger (Univ. Basel, Switzerland) for photocatalysis and so on. Those collaboration brought him to the field of intracellular catalysis enabled by an artificial metalloenzyme.

In 2019, he returned to Japan as an assistant professor at the Tohoku University (Japan). His current research interests are (1) development of artificial metalloenzymes, (2) development of cellular delivery of an artificial metalloenzyme, (3) systems catalysis comprised of an artificial metalloenzyme and other class of catalysts.