DATE2024.01.30 #Awards & Prizes

Mr. Naoki Konno, Department of Biological Sciences, received the JSPS Ikushi Prize

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

Mr. Naoki Konno

Mr. Naoki Konno, a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Biological Sciences, has received the JSPS Ikushi Prize.

The earth is home to a great diversity of living organisms, which together form an ecosystem that fundamentally sustains our existence. To understand how this diversity of life was created and how it will develop in the future, it is important to understand the rules behind its evolution. Against this backdrop, Dr. Konno has achieved outstanding research results in the field of bioinformatics, which is the elucidation of the rules of life evolution based on large-scale data. In particular, it has been difficult to predict evolution at the level of living systems over long time scales, but Dr. Konno has developed Evodictor, a machine learning method that learns patterns of past evolutionary processes and predicts future evolution, and has actually analyzed the evolution of the metabolic systems of several thousand species of bacteria. He discovered that evolution can be predicted by analyzing the evolution of the metabolic systems of thousands of species of bacteria. This is an important achievement that will lead to future applications not only within the framework of basic biology, but also to future predictions of species that are likely to acquire drug resistance genes in the medical field and species that can introduce specific genes in the field of bioengineering.
The award was presented to Dr. Konno for his achievements, including these research results, under the theme of "Bioinformatics for Elucidating Past Evolution and Predicting Future Evolution. We sincerely wish Dr. Konno continued success in his future endeavors.

The 14th (FY2023) JSPS Ikushi Prize
https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-ikushi-prize/

(Responsibility: Professor Wataru Iwasaki, Department of Biological Sciences)