Okayama prefecture is located about 600km west of Tokyo, beyond Kyoto and Osaka. It is adjacent to Hiroshima prefecture, which sits further west.

With Nishina’s legacy in mind, Okayama prefectural government established an institute dedicated to quantum physics, Okayama Institute for Quantum Physics. It is very rare for a prefectural government to directly fund and manage such research institute for purely fundamental science. Prof. Masao Ninomiya, former president of the Physical Society of Japan (JPS), is the founding director of the institute.

Hi, I am Takashi Okada, a new postdoc researcher of Theoretical Biology Laboratory from this spring.

I have been researching mainly in superstring theory (or quantum gravity), and high energy physics. Especially, I have been interested in "generalized geometries" such as matrix geometry, which naturally appears in the context of superstring theory. Superstring theory strongly suggests that the concept of geometries should be modified and generalized in a theory of quantum gravity, and the matrix geometry is one of the candidates.

My main recent interest is on theoretical approaches to life science. Although theoretical physics apparently seems to have nothing to do with biology, the techniques and philosophies in physics are sometimes very useful and powerful in biology, and I think that it is very interesting to apply them to life science. I hope that I could interact with many researchers in different fields and learn a lot through ITHES project.

I received my B.S. and M.S from the University of Tokyo and, then received my Ph.D in Physics from Kyoto University in 2013. After that, I worked in the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California for one year.