Tatsuo Kaneko received a B.S. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1993, and a Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry from the same university under Junji Watanabe in 1998. One year before receiving his Ph.D., he joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Hokkaido University and moved to Kagoshima University. After serving as Assistant Professor at Kagoshima University between 2001-2004 and at Osaka University between 2004-2006, he joined the School of Materials Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006, and to full professor in 2016. In 2023, he joined Jiangnan University as Chair Professor. He also joined the Bioengineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles as a Visiting Associate Professor in 2012. His current research interests include high-performance soft matters such as bioplastics, gels, liquid crystals, films, and biomedical materials, for which he has received awards for young scientists from the Chemical Society of Japan, won The Young Scientists’ Prize by MEXT, Japan, a distinguished award in IUPAC, the “APSMR award” at the APSMR 2019 Annual Meeting, the “Gottfried Wagener prize” German Innovation Award, and honorary professor as Changjiang Scholar.