Shigetada Nakanishi

In the spring of 2012, Nakanishi announced that the city of Osaka was planning to cut off funding to the Osaka Bioscience Institute as part of a city renewal plan. Nakanishi said that he had not received any communication from the city before the plan was announced. The institute was expected to close within four years.

Nakanishi won the Asahi Prize in 1983. He was named a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. The next year, he received the Keio Medical Science Prize. In 1997, Nakanishi won the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy. He was named a Person of Cultural Merit in Japan in 2006, and he won the 2007 Gruber Prize in Neuroscience. He has also been named a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and has received the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Neuroscience. He chairs the executive committee of the Kyoto Prize.

Nakanishi came to the U.S. in 1971 and was a visiting associate at National Cancer Institute Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In 1974, Nakanishi joined the faculty at Kyoto University. He said that early in his career, there was growing interest in the impact of various enzymes on metabolic processes in cells, but he said that he saw an opportunity in that the underlying protein chemistry of enzymes still was not very well understood. In 2005, Nakanishi was named an emeritus professor at Kyoto and he became director of the Osaka Bioscience Institute.

Shigetada Nakanishi (born January 7, 1942) is a Japanese biochemist and neuroscientist. Both a medical doctor and biomedical researcher by training, Nakanishi is the director of the Osaka Bioscience Institute and professor emeritus at Kyoto University. He has received several scientific awards for his research in neuroscience, having characterized the molecular structure or function of several protein receptors.