Prof Hirokazu Tamamura graduated from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto University in 1988. He became an Assistant Professor of Kyoto University in 1989, and then a Visiting Fellow at the National Cancer Institute/NIH, USA in 1999-2000 before becoming an Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto University in 2005. He became a Full Professor at Tokyo Medical and Dental University in 2005. In October 2024, he became the Vice President of Institute of Science Tokyo that is the new university based on the merge with Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is also a director of Japanese Peptide Society (JPS). His research fields extend to peptide & protein chemistry, chemical biology, medicinal chemistry and organic chemistry. His main target is infectious diseases including HIV infection/AIDS and COVID-19 and cancer. He developed one peptide drug, which was approved by FDA in 2023: APHEXDA/motixafortide (4F-benzoyl-TN14003).