Rate My Professor Norikazu Ichihashi

Norikazu Ichihashi is a Professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at The University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at The University of Tokyo in 2006. He subsequently conducted research in in vitro synthetic biology at Osaka University, serving as a postdoctoral fellow and later as an associate professor until 2018, before assuming his current position at The University of Tokyo in 2019.

His research focuses on evolutionary synthetic biology, with an emphasis on understanding how complex biological phenomena emerge from molecular assemblies through processes of design and evolution. His laboratory constructs self-reproducible molecular systems in test tubes, aiming to develop controllable and designable systems for bioproduction. This work contributes to insights into the origins of life and the development of artificial biological systems, including studies on RNA replication and evolutionary transitions in molecular networks.