Kimitaka Kawamura

Kimitaka Kawamura was born in 1951 in Minokamo, Gifu, Japan. He graduated from Shizuoka University in 1974 and received a Ph. D. degree from the Department of Chemistry, Tokyo Metropolitan University in 1981 with the title “Geochemical studies of fatty acids and their related compounds in recent sediments”. After taking the postdoctoral position at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), he moved to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1981 to work with Prof. Ian R. Kaplan as a postdoc and then Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts in 1985 to work with Dr. Robert B. Gagosian as a visiting investigator. In 1987 he was appointed as an Associate Professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University. He moved to the Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University in 1996 as a Professor. In 2016, he moved to Chubu University. He is currently an Emeritus Professor at Hokkaido University and Visiting Professor at Chubu University. He served as a President of Japanese Association of Organic Geochemists from 2011–2015 and a Committee Member and Vice President of the International Committee of Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Pollution (iCACGP) from 1998–2010. He has received several awards/prizes from academic societies including The Japanese Association of Organic Geochemists, Meteorological Society of Japan, Geochemical Society of Japan, Nissan Science Foundation, Geochemistry Research Association (Miyake Award), Elsevier Atmospheric Environment (Haagen-Smit Prize), and Doctor Honoris Causa of Aix-Marseille University. He was elected as a Fellow of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (2001–2004), Geochemical Society and European Association of Geochemists (2017), American Geophysical Union (2018), and Japan Geoscience Union (2022).