List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Tokyo

As of October 2018, 16 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the University of Tokyo. The building pictured is Yasuda Auditorium.

This list of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Tokyo comprehensively shows the alumni, faculty members as well as researchers of the University of Tokyo who were awarded the Nobel Prize or the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Nobel Prizes, established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, are awarded to individuals who make outstanding contributions in the fields of Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine. An associated prize, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics), was instituted by Sweden's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, in 1968 and first awarded in 1969.

As of October 2018, 16 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the University of Tokyo, and 10 of them are officially listed as "Tokyo's Nobel Laureates" by the university. Among the 16 laureates, 11 are Tokyo alumni (graduates and attendees), and 4 have been long-term academic members of the university faculty. Subject-wise, 7 laureates have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, more than any other subject.

Inclusion criteria

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University of Tokyo

The university affiliations in this list are all official academic affiliations such as degree programs and official academic employment. Non-academic affiliations such as advisory committee and administrative staff are generally excluded. The official academic affiliations fall into three categories: 1) Alumni (graduates and attendees), 2) Long-term Academic Staff, and 3) Short-term Academic Staff. Graduates are defined as those who hold Bachelor's, Master's, Doctorate, or equivalent degrees from the University of Tokyo, while attendees are those who formally enrolled in a degree program at Tokyo but did not complete the program; thus, honorary degrees, posthumous degrees, summer attendees, exchange students, and auditing students are excluded. The category of "Long-term Academic Staff" consists of tenure/tenure-track and equivalent academic positions, while that of "Short-term Academic Staff" consists of lecturers (without tenure), postdoctoral researchers (postdocs), visiting professors/scholars (visitors), and equivalent academic positions. At University of Tokyo, the specific academic title solely determines the type of affiliation, regardless of the actual time the position was held by a laureate.

Further explanations on "visitors" under "Short-term Academic Staff" are presented as follows. 1) All informal or personal visits are excluded from the list; 2) all employment-based visiting positions, which carry teaching/research duties, are included as affiliations in the list; 3) as for award/honor-based visiting positions, to minimize controversy this list takes a conservative view and includes the positions as affiliations only if the laureates were required to assume employment-level duty (teaching/research) or the laureates specifically classified the visiting positions as "affiliation" or similar in reliable sources such as their curriculum vita. In particular, attending meetings and giving public lectures, talks or non-curricular seminars at University of Tokyo is not a form of employment-level duty. Finally, summer visitors are generally excluded from the list unless summer work yielded significant end products such as research publications and components of Nobel-winning work, since summer terms are not part of formal academic years.

Nobel laureates by category

Nobel laureates in Physics

Year	Image	Laureate	Relation	Rationale
1964		Charles H. Townes	Visiting Scholar	"for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser–laser principle" – shared with Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov and Alexander Prokhorov.
1965		Sin-Itiro Tomonaga	Dissertation Ph.D.	"for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles" – shared with Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman.
1973		Leo Esaki	Alumnus; Ph.D.	"for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively" – shared with Ivar Giaever and Brian Josephson.
2002	75px	Masatoshi Koshiba	Alumnus; Ph.D. graduate Faculty (1963-); honorary professor	"for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos" – shared with Raymond Davis Jr. and Riccardo Giacconi.
2003		Anthony James Leggett	Visiting Professor	"for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids" – shared with Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov and Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg.
2008		Yoichiro Nambu	Alumnus; Ph.D.	"for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" – shared with Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa.
2015		Takaaki Kajita	Ph.D. graduate Faculty (1988-); honorary professor	"for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass" – shared with Arthur B. McDonald.

Nobel laureates in Chemistry

Year	Image	Laureate	Relation	Rationale
2010	75px	Ei-ichi Negishi	Alumnus	"for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis" – shared with Richard F. Heck and Akira Suzuki.

Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine

Year	Image	Laureate	Relation	Rationale
2015		Satoshi Ōmura	Dissertation Ph.D.	"for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasitess" – shared with William C. Campbell and Youyou Tu.
2016	75px	Yoshinori Ohsumi	Alumnus; Ph.D. graduate Faculty (1977-1996)	"for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy".
2018	75px	Tasuku Honjo	Assistant Professor (1974-1979)	"for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation" – shared with James P. Allison.

Nobel Peace Prize laureates

Year	Image	Laureate	Relation	Rationale
1974		Eisaku Satō	Alumnus	"Prime Minister of Japan," "for his renunciation of the nuclear option for Japan and his efforts to further regional reconciliation" – shared with Seán MacBride.

Nobel laureates in Literature

Year	Image	Laureate	Relation	Rationale
1968		Yasunari Kawabata	Alumnus	"for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind".
1994		Kenzaburō Ōe	Alumnus	"who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today".

Nobel Memorial Prize laureates in Economics

Year	Image	Laureate	Relation	Rationale
1990		Harry Markowitz	Visiting Professor	"for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics"– shared with Merton Miller and William F. Sharpe
2007		Leonid Hurwicz	Visiting Professor	"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory" – shared with Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson.

See also

• List of University of Tokyo people
• List of Japanese Nobel laureates
• List of Japanese people
• List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation

External links

• Official website of Todai
• UTokyo by the Numbers | The University of Tokyo
• Official website of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
• Official website of the Nobel Foundation