Hiroshi Kataoka

Hiroshi Kataoka (ja: 片岡 宏誌) is a Japanese entomologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, Japan.

He has conducted research on insect hormones and the prothoracic gland, which secretes ecdysteroids. His achievements garnered international attention, with several commentary articles published in leading journals like Science and several covers in prestigious journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His research has also been widely covered by both Japanese and international media.

He was exceptionally skilled in experimental techniques. Before joining the faculty at the University of Tokyo, he managed to purify and identify most of the insect peptide hormones known at the time, including prothoracicotropic hormone (PTTH), allatotropin, allatostatin, eclosion hormone, and diuretic hormone. Notably, his two mentors received the prestigious Japanese Academy Prize (日本学士院賞) for their work on the purification and identification of PTTH, a milestone that had eluded many predecessors.

Around October 2001, he established the Laboratory of Molecular Recognition at the University of Tokyo's new Kashiwa campus as a professor. He supported the young associate professor Kazushige Touhara while an article in Nature reviewed the hiring of young faculty members. As a result, he established a highly productive environment. Of the 20 initial members at the Kashiwa Campus start-up, three were awarded the Japan Academy Medal—Kazushige Touhara, Yuki Oka, and Naoki Yamanaka—Japan’s highest honor for young researchers to date. He also played a crucial role as a head of the graduate school system and in the establishment of the Kashiwa campus.

His research was conducted in collaboration with numerous researchers from Japanese and international institutions, including Nagoya University, the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Zhejiang University, the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Washington, and Paris Diderot University. Provided by Wikipedia