Dr. Nishizaka is a professor in the Physics Department of the historically celebrated Gakushuin University, the oldest private university in Japan, located in Tokyo. Gakushuin ranks first of the Japanese universities in quality of research in the Natural Sciences, and his research in Biophysics has strongly contributed to the high score (see the article Nature 555, S73 (2018)).
His early career focused on the study of eukaryotic linear motor proteins. This included the development of advanced optical microscopes to study biomolecules at the single molecule level. Later, Nishizaka expanded his interests to motors of organisms in the Bacteria and Archaea Domains, which culminated in landmark publications outlining mechanisms for how these molecular machines function. He is the only researcher who has embarked on understanding the molecular mechanisms of not only all representative motor families in eukaryotes (myosin, kinesin and dynein), but also bacterial machineries (those in mycoplasma, cyanobacteria and spiroplasma) and archaeal flagella motor. In addition, he contributed to the visualization of the mechanics and chemical reaction of the world’s smallest rotary motor, F1-ATPase, for the first time and deciphered its sophisticated working with technical tour de force. His work is published in top journals as the first or corresponding author in Nature and the Nature family journals, and four in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.