Fumio Inagaki

Inagaki studied microbiology and molecular genetics at Kyushu University, Japan, where he obtained his BS, MS, and PhD. He completed his doctorate in 2000 in the lab of Seiya Ogata, and then joined JAMSTEC as a research scientist in the Deep-Sea Frontier Research Program. From 2005–2006, he was a guest scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany where he worked with Bo Barker Jørgensen. Inagaki continued his work at JAMSTEC, and is now the group leader of the Geomicrobiology Group at the Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research and the Geobiotechnology Group at the Research and Development Center for Submarine Resources. Inagaki is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Geochemical Society, the International Society of Extremophiles, the International Society for Microbial Ecology, the Japanese Association for Petroleum Technology, the Japan Geoscience Union, the Japan Society for Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Agrochemistry, the Japanese Society for Extremophiles, and the Japanese Society for Microbial Ecology. Since 2005, he has served on the editorial board of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, and in 2017 he became a senior editor for The ISME Journal. Inagaki was an editor of the book Earth and Life Processes Discovered from Subseafloor Environments: A Decade of Science Achieved by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP). He is a member of the Deep Life Community Scientific Steering Committee for the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). In 2015, Inagaki won the Asahiko Taira International Scientific Ocean Drilling Research Prize, awarded by the American Geophysical Union, in recognition of his interdisciplinary work to understand the limits of microbial life on Earth through ocean drilling.