Mitsuo Tasumi earned his B.Sc, M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tokyo in 1959, 1961, and 1964. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan from 1965-1966 and at the Politecnico di Milano from 1966-1967. He spent the majority of his career at the University of Tokyo and Saitama University, holding many high-level professorships and administrative roles.

Tasumi has received the Prize of the Society of Polymer Science, the Prize of the Chemical Society of Japan, the Prize of the Spectroscopical Society of Japan, the Purple Ribbon Medal, and the REVS Award. He is a Fellow of OSA and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, and is an honorary member of SAS, the Spectroscopical Society of Japan, the Japan Society for Molecular Science, and the Protein Science Society of Japan. He has served on the editorial boards for a number of science journals, and is a published author himself. He received OSA’s Ellis R. Lippincott Award “for outstanding contributions to vibrational spectroscopy in studying the structures and dynamics of synthetic polymers, proteins, photosynthetic systems, and a number of related small molecules.”