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Professor Dr. Yoshitaka Sakakura has studied marine fish larvae and juveniles for over 30 years. He received an MS and PhD from the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences at The University of Tokyo. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at The University of Tokyo and University of Guelph, Canada, and he became an Associate Professor at Nagasaki University in 2000. Yoshi is currently a Professor at the Institute of Integrated Science and Technology, Nagasaki University, where he serves as a mentor to many students. In 2023, he became the Dean of the Faculty of Fisheries at Nagasaki University.

Yoshi’s primary research focus is on the early life history and larviculture of marine fishes. He and his students combine field surveys on research vessels with rearing experiments in the laboratory. He is particularly interested in how environmental factors (e.g., interactions with conspecifics, food items, and flow field of the water column) can improve survival and growth of fish larvae, integrating a wide variety of scientific fields such as behavior, physiology, molecular biology, and toxicology to better understand fish early life history.

Yoshi joined the Editorial Board of Environmental Biology of Fishes in 2004. He is also on the Editorial Board of Ichthyological Research, an official journal of the Ichthyological Society of Japan, and he serves as a Program Officer of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.