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Division Awards

Division of Biological Science acknowledges excellent achievements of students and researchers by offering following awards.

• Bioscience Division Award
• Umesono Prize
• Outstanding Student Award
• Yano Award
• NAIST Bioscience Award (from FY1999 to FY2018)

Bioscience Division Award (from FY2019)

The Bioscience Division Award honors outstanding research done by young faculty members in the Bioscience Division. In principle, the Award Selection Committee will select one winner every year. Those eligible for the award are Associate Professors (except for Independent Associate Professors) and Assistant Professors, and the award is based on their research achievements over the past five to ten years. It is possible for faculty members who have won the Umesono Prize in the past to receive the Bioscience Division Award based on accumulated research achievements.

Award Recipient List

Umesono Prize

The Umesono Prize has been awarded annually since 2004 to young researchers in Graduate School (Division) of Biological Sciences at NAIST who significantly contributed to biological sciences during his/her years at the institute.

The prize was established to commemorate the achievements of Dr. Kazuhiko Umesono who was an up-and-coming associate professor in the early years of NAIST. He was a true scientist, brilliant and creative. In 1990s, virtually any molecular biologist knew and respected him. When steroid hormone receptors were mentioned in a lecture, everyone referred to his achievements.

Before joining NAIST in 1994, he published 10 Nature and Cell papers and a total of 24 manuscripts during seven years in the laboratory of Professor Ronald M. Evans at the Salk Institute in the United States. He first recognized and proved that many hormone response elements are comprised of direct repeats (DRs) and then established that specificity could be achieved by unique spacing of common half-sites. A vitamin D3 response element was a DR-3 (direct repeat spaced by 3 nucleotides), a DR-4 for a thyroid hormone, and a DR-5 for retinoic acid. The spacing paradigm was termed the 3-4-5 rule. In 1997, he became a Professor at Kyoto University.

Regretfully, he passed away in April 1999 at the age of forty. In the short time from his return to Japan, he published 16 papers, and had achievements including the cloning of a novel eye-specific orphan receptor and the discovery of a unique role for TLX, another receptor, in eye development.

With his family's donation, we established Umesono Prize to promote his enthusiasm for scientific research. The prize is awarded to young researchers with a bright future to follow in the footprints of Dr. Umesono, who enriched us with his personal and intellectual generosity. His spirit continues to inspire us and light our way.

The award is mainly based on the originality and academic value of a paper which the awardee wrote as a first author.

Award Recipient List

Outstanding Student Award

Outstanding newly graduating students of the master and doctoral courses are given NAIST Outstanding Student Award from the chief director of NAIST Foundation and Outstanding Student Award from the president of NAIST.

Graduating students of the master course (excluding the 5-year integrated course) and those of the doctoral course are eligible for this award. At graduation, the degree thesis, educational record and other research achievements of candidates are evaluated, and two most excellent students are selected from each course.

Award Recipient List (Doctoral course)

Award Recipient List (Master’s course)

Yano Award

The Yano Award was established in the memory of Mr. Daisuke Yano, who passed away by a traffic accident at his 3rd year of the doctor course, from funds of the surviving family. Late Yano was a highly motivated and devoting student; he had already published his research results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (PNAS) as the first author, and was awarded the Research Fellowship (doctoral course) of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

Graduating NAIST master course students who will proceed to our doctoral course are evaluated on their research achievements, and the motivation and originality of their research plans for the doctoral course by all attending professors and associate professors at their thesis presentations. One or two outstanding students are awarded this every year.

Award Recipient List

NAIST Bioscience Award (from FY1999 to FY2018)

The Division of Biological Science honors our staff scientists by awarding the NAIST Bioscience Award, in principal one awardee per year, for their outstanding research achievements at NAIST. Starting from 2008, the award is open to current and also former staff scientists to improve the recognition of this prize and the awardees.

Award Recipient List