Rate My Professor Takeshi Izawa

Izawa's research specializes in plant breeding and genetics, focusing on photoperiodic flower bud formation in rice as a model short-day plant, environmental responses of crops such as ambient temperature, drought stress, and fertilizer effects on yield, rice domestication processes using next-generation sequencing and pangenome studies, and genome editing for developing new rice varieties with improved yield and taste. His work emphasizes field conditions and natural environmental responses over laboratory settings. Key contributions include establishing the rice transformation system and synthetic control of flowering independent of cultivation environments. He has received the Japan Breeding Society Award in 2019, NAIST Bio-Academic Award in 2017, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Science and Technology in 2013, and Toyama Prize in 2009. Notable publications include 'A 65-kb deletion survey identifies a distal cis-regulatory region for red-light induction of Ghd7, a key rice floral repressor' (PNAS, 2025), 'Fertilization controls tiller numbers via transcriptional regulation of a MAX1-like gene in rice cultivation' (Nature Communications, 2023), 'Reloading DNA History in Rice Domestication' (Plant & Cell Physiology, 2022), 'What is going on with the hormonal control of flowering in plants?' (The Plant Journal, 2020), and 'Synthetic control of flowering in rice independent of the cultivation environment' (Nature Plants, 2017).