Rate My Professor Takeshi Izawa

Takeshi Izawa is a Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Biology at the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, where he has served since April 2016. He holds a Doctor of Science (Ph.D.) from The University of Tokyo. His career includes positions as Director of the Organization for Ecological Harmonization and Conservation of Agricultural Functions at The University of Tokyo from April 2021 to March 2024, Senior Researcher and Chief Researcher at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba from October 2001 to March 2016, Assistant Professor at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology from April 1994 to September 2001, and Researcher at Plant Engineering Institute Co., Ltd. from April 1988 to March 1994. He also conducted research as a Visiting Researcher at Rockefeller University from April 1990 to March 1992. Earlier, he completed a master's course at The University of Tokyo from 1986 to 1988, studying actin genes in Drosophila melanogaster cells. Izawa leads the Laboratory of Plant Breeding and Genetics, which traces its origins to 1906, making him the eighth-generation professor in this lineage.

Izawa's research specializes in plant breeding and genetics, focusing on photoperiodic flower bud formation in rice as a model short-day plant, environmental responses of crops such as ambient temperature, drought stress, and fertilizer effects on yield, rice domestication processes using next-generation sequencing and pangenome studies, and genome editing for developing new rice varieties with improved yield and taste. His work emphasizes field conditions and natural environmental responses over laboratory settings. Key contributions include establishing the rice transformation system and synthetic control of flowering independent of cultivation environments. He has received the Japan Breeding Society Award in 2019, NAIST Bio-Academic Award in 2017, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Science and Technology in 2013, and Toyama Prize in 2009. Notable publications include 'A 65-kb deletion survey identifies a distal cis-regulatory region for red-light induction of Ghd7, a key rice floral repressor' (PNAS, 2025), 'Fertilization controls tiller numbers via transcriptional regulation of a MAX1-like gene in rice cultivation' (Nature Communications, 2023), 'Reloading DNA History in Rice Domestication' (Plant & Cell Physiology, 2022), 'What is going on with the hormonal control of flowering in plants?' (The Plant Journal, 2020), and 'Synthetic control of flowering in rice independent of the cultivation environment' (Nature Plants, 2017).