DATE2023.04.10 #Awards & Prizes

Professor Hirokazu Tsukaya of Department of Biological Sciences Receives the 33rd Minakata Kumagusu Prize

Professor Hirokazu Tsukaya

Professor Hirokazu Tsukaya of Department of Biological Sciences has been awarded the 33rd Minakata Kumagusu Prize. We would like to express our sincere congratulations on receiving this award.

The Minakata Kumagusu Prize is awarded to researchers who have made outstanding achievements in the field of natural history in honor of Minakata Kumagusu, a world-renowned naturalist from the Meiji to Showa periods. Professor Tsukaya is a world authority in the field of leaf morphogenesis and is well known in the academic community as a developmental biologist, but he has also made notable achievements in the field of natural history, naming many new plant taxa and writing many fascinating essays on plant subjects. Based on his fieldwork in Southeast Asia, he named 44 new plant taxa, including one new genus and 30 new species, mainly of fungal heterotrophs, which live by depriving fungi of nutrients. His achievements in shedding light on fungal heterotrophs, which appear unnoticed on the forest floor of tropical rainforests, are similar to those of Kumagusu Minakata, who pursued various cryptic organisms such as fungi and slime molds in the thick forests. We are very pleased that Professor Tsukaya's research style, which is not bound by the boundaries of specialty but pursues the wonders of the natural world out of curiosity, has been recognized in the form of the Minakata Kumagusu Award.

For these outstanding achievements, Professor Tsukaya was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon in the fall of 2021, and has received numerous other awards. We would like to congratulate him on this award and wish him continued success in his future endeavors.

The Minakata Kumagusu Prize
https://www.minakata.org/33minakatakumagusuprize/ (Japanese)

(Written by Professor Atsushi Kawakita, Department of Biological Sciences)

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