Masaru Tomita

Masaru Tomita (Japanese: 冨田 勝, Hepburn: Tomita Masaru, born December 28, 1957) is a Japanese molecular biologist and computer scientist, best known as the director of the E-Cell simulation environment software[1] and/or the inventor of GLR parser algorithm.[2] He is a professor of Keio University, president of the Institute for Advanced Biosciences, and the founder and board member of Human Metabolome Technologies, Inc. He is also the co-founder and on the board of directors of The Metabolomics Society. His father is composer Isao Tomita.

From Oct. 2005 to Sep. 2007, he served as Dean of Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University.

He received an M.S. (1983) and a Ph.D. (1985) in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) under Jaime Carbonell, and two other doctoral degrees in electronic engineering and molecular biology from Kyoto University (1994) and Keio University (1998).

At CMU, starting in 1985, Dr. Tomita achieved a series of academic promotions from assistant professor to associate professor of computer science and from 1986 he became an associate director of the Center for Machine Translation.

In 1990, he returned to Keio University, Japan, and served as associate professor until 1997. At Keio University, he shifted his research emphasis to the studies of molecular biology and systems biology.

Dr. Tomita is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation of the USA (1988), an IBM Japan Science Prize (2002), an IBM Shared University Research Award (2003), a Minister of Science and Technology Policy Award (2004), and The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (2007).