List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Tokyo

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As of October 2020, 17 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the University of Tokyo. The building pictured is Yasuda Auditorium.

This list of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Tokyo comprehensively shows the alumni, faculty members as well as researchers of the University of Tokyo who were awarded the Nobel Prize or the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Nobel Prizes, established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, are awarded to individuals who make outstanding contributions in the fields of Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine.[1] An associated prize, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics), was instituted by Sweden's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, in 1968 and first awarded in 1969.[2]

As of October 2020, 17 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the University of Tokyo, and 10 of them are officially listed as "UTokyo's Nobel Laureates" by the university.[3] Among the 17 laureates, 11 are UTokyo degree holders (not all graduates, Tomonaga and Ōmura are not alumni), and 4 have been long-term academic members of the university faculty. Subject-wise, 8 laureates have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, more than any other subject.

Inclusion criteria[]

University of Tokyo

The university affiliations in this list are all official academic affiliations such as degree programs and official academic employment. Non-academic affiliations such as advisory committee and administrative staff are generally excluded. The official academic affiliations fall into three categories: 1) Alumni (graduates and attendees), 2) Long-term Academic Staff, and 3) Short-term Academic Staff. Graduates are defined as those who hold Bachelor's, Master's, Doctorate, or equivalent degrees from the University of Tokyo, while attendees are those who formally enrolled in a degree program at UTokyo but did not complete the program; thus, honorary degrees, posthumous degrees, summer attendees, exchange students, and auditing students are excluded. The category of "Long-term Academic Staff" consists of tenure/tenure-track and equivalent academic positions, while that of "Short-term Academic Staff" consists of lecturers (without tenure), postdoctoral researchers (postdocs), visiting professors/scholars (visitors), and equivalent academic positions. At University of Tokyo, the specific academic title solely determines the type of affiliation, regardless of the actual time the position was held by a laureate.

Further explanations on "visitors" under "Short-term Academic Staff" are presented as follows. 1) All informal or personal visits are excluded from the list; 2) all employment-based visiting positions, which carry teaching/research duties, are included as affiliations in the list; 3) as for award/honor-based visiting positions, to minimize controversy this list takes a conservative view and includes the positions as affiliations only if the laureates were required to assume employment-level duty (teaching/research) or the laureates specifically classified the visiting positions as "affiliation" or similar in reliable sources such as their curriculum vita. In particular, attending meetings and giving public lectures, talks or non-curricular seminars at University of Tokyo is not a form of employment-level duty. Finally, summer visitors are generally excluded from the list unless summer work yielded significant end products such as research publications and components of Nobel-winning work, since summer terms are not part of formal academic years.

Some attendees and visitors not qualified as official academic affiliates
Name Nobel Prize Year Role in the University of Tokyo
Wolfgang Paul Physics 1989 Guest lecturer in 1978 (non-employment)[4]

Nobel laureates by category[]

Nobel laureates in Physics[]

Year Image Laureate Relation Rationale
1964 Charles Townes.jpg Charles H. Townes Visiting Scholar[5] "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser–laser principle" – shared with Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov and Alexander Prokhorov.[6]
1965 Tomonaga.jpg Sin-Itiro Tomonaga Dissertation Ph.D. "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles" – shared with Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman.[7]
1973 Leo Esaki 1959.jpg Leo Esaki Alumnus
Dissertation Ph.D. 		"for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively" – shared with Ivar Giaever and Brian Josephson.[8]
2002 Masatoshi Koshiba 2002.jpg Masatoshi Koshiba Alumnus
Dissertation Ph.D.
Faculty (1963-2020) 		"for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos" – shared with Raymond Davis Jr. and Riccardo Giacconi.[9]
2003 Nobel Laureate Sir Anthony James Leggett in 2007.jpg Anthony James Leggett Visiting Professor[10] "for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids" – shared with Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov and Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg.[11]
2008 YoichiroNambu.jpg Yoichiro Nambu Alumnus; Ph.D. graduate "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" – shared with Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa.[12]
2015 Takaaki Kajita 5171-2015.jpg Takaaki Kajita Ph.D. graduate
Faculty (1988-) 		"for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass" – shared with Arthur B. McDonald.[13]
2018 Gérard Mourou, 2014.jpg Gérard Mourou Visiting Professor (1994)[14] "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics", in particular "for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses" – shared with Arthur Ashkin and Donna Strickland.[15]

Nobel laureates in Chemistry[]

Year Image Laureate Relation Rationale
2010 Nobel Prize 2010-Press Conference KVA-DSC 7398.jpg Ei-ichi Negishi Alumnus "for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis" – shared with Richard F. Heck and Akira Suzuki.[16]

Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine[]

Year Image Laureate Relation Rationale
2015 Satoshi Ōmura 5040-2015.jpg Satoshi Ōmura Dissertation Ph.D. "for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasitess" – shared with William C. Campbell and Youyou Tu.[17]
2016 Nobel Laureates 1042 (30647248184).jpg Yoshinori Ohsumi Alumnus; Ph.D. graduate
Faculty (1977-1996) 		"for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy".[18]
2018 Tasuku Honjo 201311.jpg Tasuku Honjo Assistant Professor (1974-1979) "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation" – shared with James P. Allison.[19]

Nobel Peace Prize laureates[]

Year Image Laureate Relation Rationale
1974 Eisaku Sato 1960.jpg Eisaku Satō Alumnus "Prime Minister of Japan,"[20] "for his renunciation of the nuclear option for Japan and his efforts to further regional reconciliation" – shared with Seán MacBride.[21]

Nobel laureates in Literature[]

Year Image Laureate Relation Rationale
1968 Yasunari Kawabata 1938.jpg Yasunari Kawabata Alumnus "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind".[22]
1994 Paris - Salon du livre 2012 - Kenzaburō Ōe - 003.jpg Kenzaburō Ōe Alumnus "who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today".[23]

Nobel Memorial Prize laureates in Economics[]

Year Image Laureate Relation Rationale
1990 Harry Markowitz Visiting Professor[24] "for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics"– shared with Merton Miller and William F. Sharpe[25]
2007 Leonid Hurwicz.jpg Leonid Hurwicz Visiting Professor[26] "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory" – shared with Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson.[27]

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ "Alfred Nobel – The Man Behind the Nobel Prize". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 18 May 2017.
  2. ^ "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 18 May 2017.
  3. ^ "The University of Tokyo". The University of Tokyo. Retrieved 2019-07-12.
  4. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1989". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 2021-05-21.
  5. ^ "Townes, Charles H." history.aip.org. Retrieved 2019-07-12.
  6. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1964". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 9 October 2008.
  7. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1965". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 19 December 2009.
  8. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1973". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  9. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2002". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  10. ^ "Leggett, A. J. (Anthony J.)". history.aip.org. Retrieved 2019-07-12.
  11. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2003". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 1 October 2018.
  12. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2008". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  13. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  14. ^ "CV (Gérard Albert Mourou)" (PDF).
  15. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  16. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2010". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  17. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  18. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  19. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 2018-10-01.
  20. ^ "Eisaku Sato - Facts". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  21. ^ Lundestad, Geir (2001-03-15). "The Nobel Peace Prize, 1901–2000". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 2011-10-06.
  22. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1981". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  23. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1994". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 24 January 2017.
  24. ^ "Curriculum Vitae - Harry Markowitz". Harry Markowitz. Retrieved 2017-12-13.
  25. ^ "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1991". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 2008-10-14.
  26. ^ "Biography (Leonid Hurwicz)" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-10-25.
  27. ^ "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 2008-10-14.

External links[]

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