Tomonari Tanaka is a professor at the Department of Biobased Materials Science, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Kyoto Institute of Technology. He received his master’s degree in engineering in 2002 and his Ph.D. in 2009 from Tohoku University. He was a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from 2009 to 2010 and worked as a visiting researcher at the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford, from 2005 to 2006. He is a member of the Chemical Society of Japan; the Society of Polymer Science, Japan; the Japanese Society of Carbohydrate Research; the Japanese Society of Applied Glycoscience; the Cellulose Society of Japan; the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan; the Japan Society for Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Agrochemistry; and the Japanese Society for Chemical Biology. His research fields include carbohydrate chemistry, synthetic organic chemistry, and polymer chemistry, and he focuses on the synthesis of glycopolymer materials, the chemo-enzymatic synthesis of oligosaccharides, and the synthesis of biomaterials.