(photographs by Itaru Hirama)
Daisuke Kihara is a full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 1994 and a Ph.D. degree from Kyoto University, Japan in 1999. After studying as a postdoctoral researcher for about three years he joined Purdue University in 2003 and was promoted to full professor in 2014. He has been working on algorithm and software development in broad topics in protein bioinformatics including molecular structure modeling from cryo-electron microscopy maps, protein-protein docking, protein tertiary structure prediction, protein function prediction, and computational drug design. His research projects have been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and industry. He has published over 240 research articles. He has served in numerous review panels of federal funding agencies of the USA and other countries, editorial boards of journals, and major bioinformatics conferences. He was named a University Faculty Scholar by Purdue University in 2013. In 2021, he was elected as a AIMBE (The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering) Fellow. He is a regular member of program committees of major bioinformatics conferences, including ISMB, RECOMB, and PSB. From 2023, he serves on the Board of Directors for International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). He also serves on Publication Committee of ISCB and the Liaison for the Great Lakes Bioinformatics Consortium for ICSB.