Tooru Ooya is Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Engineering at Kobe University, where he has been since 2008. He received a B.S. in Food and Nutritional Science from the University of Shizuoka, Japan (1993), and his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) (1997). He spent eight years as a Research Assistant Professor at JAIST, then moved to Toyama Prefectural University (Japan) as Associate Professor in 2006. From 2001 to 2002, he worked at Purdue University (USA) as a Visiting Research Scholar. Selected honors include the Award for Young Investigator of the Japanese Society for Biomaterials (2008). He is the author or coauthor of more than 150 peer-reviewed journal papers, 24 book chapters, and 29 patents, with an h-index of 44. His research interests are: biomaterials, design of biofunctional materials for cancer therapy, food-based materials for biomedical applications, polysaccharide-based hydrogels for medicine, and dendrimers and hyperbranched polymers as biocompatible materials.