Ken'ichi Nomoto

Ken Nomoto was born in Tokyo in 1946. His father was a high-school teacher specializing in classic Japanese literature, a subject that inspired Nomoto’s own appreciation of history and evolution in the broadest sense—including, ultimately, the birth-to-death lifespans of stars and the evolution of the Universe itself.

Nomoto received his Ph.D. in astronomy under Daiichiro Sugimoto from the University of Tokyo in 1974. From 1974 to 1975 he was a postdoc at the University of Tokyo, and then, from 1976 to 1981, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Ibaraki University. He then returned to the University of Tokyo, where he has remained ever since, first serving as an assistant and an associate professor of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1982 to 1988, then as a professor in the Department of Astronomy of the Graduate School of Science from 1989 to 2007, and then as a Project Professor and Principal Investigator at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) from 2008 to 2017.  From 2014 to 2017, he was the Hamamatsu Professor in the endowed research unit Dark Side of the Universe.

Since 2010 he has been a professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo, and since 2017 he has been the Senior Scientist at the Kavli IPMU. Nomoto has also been: a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut for Astrophysik, Germany, working with Friedrich-Karl Thielemann and Wolfgang Hillebrandt; a visiting associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana; a visiting researcher at the University of Texas, Austin; a visiting physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory & SUNY at Stony Brook; a visiting researcher at the Stockholm Observatory; a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam; a visiting scholar at the Institute of Nuclear Theory of the University of Washington; and a Simons Distinguished Visiting Scholar at KITP/UCSB.

Nomoto’s numerous professional accolades include the 1989 Nishina Memorial Prize, the 1995 Japan Academy Prize, the 2010 Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris Medal, the 2015 Marcel Grossmann Award, the 2019 American Physical Society’s Hans A. Bethe Prize, and the 2020 Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese Government.