Mitsuo Tasumi

In 2004-08, Tasumi was the President of Saitama University after serving as Professor of Chemistry (1996-2002) of Saitama University and as Visiting Professor (2002–03) at University of California, Berkeley (stayed at the laboratory of Herbert Strauss).

In 1987-89, Tasumi was a member of the Board of Directors of the Chemical Society of Japan. In 1994-2000, he was an Executive Committee Member of CODATA. In 1997-99, he was the president of the Spectroscopical Society of Japan.

Tasumi earned his B.Sc. (1959), M.Sc. (1961) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Tokyo in the laboratories of San-Ichiro Mizushima and of Takehiko Shimanouchi, where he reported the first phonon dispersion of polyethylene. He spent the subsequent 33 years (1964–97) as a faculty member initially in the Department of Biochemistry and then in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Tokyo. During this period, he spent a year (1965–66) at University of Michigan as a Fulbright scholar in the laboratory of Samuel Krimm and another year (1966–67) at Polytechnic University of Milan as a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Giuseppe Zerbi under Giulio Natta, a Nobel laureate.

Mitsuo Tasumi (January 23, 1937 – November 24, 2021) was a Japanese physical chemist known for his vibrational spectroscopic works on synthetic and biological macromolecules. He was Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, and a former president of Saitama University, having trained a number of physical chemists active in academia and industry. Moto-o Tasumi, a zoologist at Kyoto University, was his brother.