Hiroshi Kataoka (ja: 片岡 宏誌) is a Japanese entomologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, Japan.
He has conducted research on insect and the prothoracic gland, which secretes . His achievements garnered international attention, with several commentary articles published in leading journals like Science
He was exceptionally skilled in experimental techniques. Before joining the faculty at the University of Tokyo, he managed to purify and identify most of the insect peptide known at the time, including prothoracicotropic hormone (PTTH), allatotropin, allatostatin, eclosion hormone, and diuretic hormone. Notably, his two mentors received the prestigious Japanese Academy Prize (日本学士院賞) for their work on the purification and identification of PTTH, a milestone that had eluded many predecessors.
Around October 2001, he established the Laboratory of Molecular Recognition at the University of Tokyo's new Kashiwa campus as a professor. He supported the young associate professor Kazushige Touhara while an article in Nature reviewed the hiring of young faculty members.
His research was conducted in collaboration with numerous researchers from Japanese and international institutions, including Nagoya University, the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Zhejiang University, the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Washington, and Paris Diderot University.
Early life
Born in Mabi-cho, Kibi-gun (now
Kurashiki), Okayama,
Japan.
As a child, he was known as the insect boy. Hironori Ishizaki, one of his mentors, noted in his autobiography that Kataoka had both the temperament to embrace difficult challenges and a boldness.
Education
Kataoka graduated from the Department of Agricultural Chemistry, Faculty of Agriculture, The University of Tokyo, in March 1981. He earned his PhD from the Graduate School of Agricultural Chemistry at the same university in March 1986. He then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Zoecon Research Institute, Sandoz Crop Protection, in Palo Alto,
California, starting in April 1986. In July 1988, he joined the Faculty of Agriculture, The University of Tokyo, as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor at the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, in June 1994, and became a professor at the Department of Integrated Biosciences, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, in April 1999.
Mysterious Political Challenge
On January 15, 2025,
Shinji Ishimaru, the former mayor of
Akitakata, announced the formation of a regional political party, "Saisei no Michi" (Path to Revitalization), ahead of the 2025 Tokyo prefectural election. He stated that candidates would be selected through an open recruitment process. Kataoka, who had already retired, applied
and was chosen. During his election campaign, he spent a lot of time discussing insects. The election took place on June 22. Among a field of 11 candidates, Kataoka finished 10th and was defeated.
Notably, all 42 candidates fielded by Saisei no Michi in the election failed to win a seat. Yoichi Masuzoe, the former Governor of Tokyo, remarked that allowing candidates to freely develop their own policies without following a party platform—as a path to revitalization—means the group ceases to function as a legitimate political party.
Awards and honors
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1990 Award for Encouragement of Agricultural Chemistry
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2024 Japan Prize for Agricultural Science
Key papers
Other selected publications
