Koichi Mikami

Koichi Mikami received his PhD in 1982 under the supervision of Professors Takeshi Nakai and Nobuo Ishikawa, and subsequently moved to the United States to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University with Professor Frederick E. Ziegler. He was Assistant Professor, Associate Professor (1987) before being appointed as full Professor (2003) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech). He is now Emeritus Professor of TITech and Affiliate Professor of the Open University of Japan (OUJ).

Professor Mikami’s major research interests include the developments of new methods and strategies for organic synthesis, the asymmetric catalysis of synthetic organic reactions, and their application to natural product synthesis. He is also interested in photochemistry and fluorine chemistry. He has received numerous awards, the Shinpo-Sho award from the Chemical Society of Japan (1986), an IBM Science award (1995), the Asahi-Kasei award from the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry Japan (1988), the Ichimura Academic Award (2000) and the Tokyo Tech Innovative Research Engineering award (2009). Koichi Mikami has been a Bristol-Myers-Squibb Lecturer (Colorado State University, US) and a visiting professor at the universities of Paris-Sud and Strasbourg (France), and in Taiwan.

In the framework of the USIAS short visit programme, Koichi Mikami has travelled to Strasbourg several times (2019, 2020), to exchange and collaborate with Dr. Frédéric Leroux at the Laboratory of Molecular Innovation and Applications (LIMA).