Seiji Ogawa

In 2020, Ogawa was appointed as Osaka University Distinguished Honorary Professor. He is the second scholar to receive this title after Nobel Prize winner Yoichiro Nambu.

Seiji Ogawa trained as an applied physicist in the University of Tokyo and got a Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford. He worked for 33 years in Biophysics research at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and was a Distinguished Member of the technical staff. In 2001, he became Director of the Ogawa Laboratories for Brain Function Research in Tokyo. Professor Ogawa joined NRI (Neuroscience Research Institute, Gachon University of Medicine and Science, Korea) in 2008 as a Distinguished Professor and leading the fMRI research in conjunction with the new 7.0T MRI system. He has received several awards for his magnetic resonance work, is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and has been awarded the Japan Prize.

Seiji Ogawa (小川 誠二 Ogawa Seiji, born January 19, 1934) is a Japanese biophysicist and neuroscientist known for discovering the technique that underlies Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). He is regarded as the father of modern functional brain imaging. He determined that the changes in blood oxygen levels cause its magnetic resonance imaging properties to change, allowing a map of blood, and hence, functional, activity in the brain to be created. This map reflected which neurons of the brain responded with electrochemical signals to mental processes. He was the first scientist who demonstrated that the functional brain imaging is dependent on the oxygenation status of the blood, the BOLD effect. The technique was therefore called blood oxygenation level-dependent or BOLD contrast. Functional MRI (fMRI) has been used to map the visual, auditory, and sensory regions and moving toward higher brain functions such as cognitive functions in the brain.