Toshio Yanagida, Center Director, awarded Japan’s prestigious ‘Person of Cultural Merit’.

Dr. Toshio Yanagida, Center Director of Center for Information and Neural Network (CiNet), was named a Person of Cultural Merit of 2013.

He was awarded by his revolutionary achievements such as revealing muscle contraction mechanism with creative ideas as a pioneering researcher of “single molecule measurements techniques” in biophysics. He is promoting new research on neural network based on this idea.

Dr. Yanagida’s comment

I brought in an idea of moderateness, typical Japanese culture, into research and challenged to understand life with my professor Fumio Oosawa. I had been arguing for a long time with the researchers around the world with the concept of “yuragi”, which is not common in Europe and the United States. I am very happy to be rewarded.