Jun-Ichi Sakagami was born in Osaka, Japan in 1963. Currently, he is a Professor of Tropical Crop Science at the Kagoshima University, Kagoshima since 2013. He obtained his Ph.D from the Chiba University, in 1999. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, France (1999-2000). In 2002, Sakagami worked the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS), as a Senior Scientist and the Project Leader of its Crop Livestock and Environment division. During his work at JIRCAS, he has presided over collaborative research for sustainable crop production at the Guinean Institute for Agricultural Research, Conakry, Guinea (2004-2007) and the Savannah Agricultural Research Institute, Tamale, Ghana (2009-2013). Sakagami is the secretary of the Asian Crop Science Association starting in 2021.
Sakagami’s research interests focus on physiological mechanism of abiotic stresses in plants. Among them, he worked especially on the physiological and morphological responses to excess water, the so-called hypoxic stress. He was also involved in the development of seed priming memory under poor environmental conditions. Recently, he has been working on the effective utilization and sustainable production system of perennial crops.Mikio Nakazono was born in Miyazaki, Japan in 1967. Currently, he is a Professor of Plant Genetic and Breeding Science at Nagoya University (Nagoya U.), Aichi. After completion of his Ph.D at the University of Tokyo (U. Tokyo) in 1995, he started working as an Assistant Professor at U. Tokyo. When he was the Assistant Professor, he conducted research as a visiting scientist at Iowa State University, USA for 1 year (2001-2002). He was promoted to an Associate Professor at U. Tokyo in 2003, and moved to Nagoya U. as a Professor in 2010. He has also been an Adjunct Professor of School of Agriculture and Environment, the University of Western Australia,since July 2016.
He has studied molecular mechanisms of plant response and adaptation to abiotic stresses (especially flooding stress) for ~25 years. He was also one of the scientists who established the method of Laser Microdissection (LM) in plant biology. He has contributed to the wider adoption of this technology in the world, and thus he has collaborations with many plant biologists on cell-type or tissue-type specific gene expression analyses using LM.