Biography

He is currently a Deputy Director for the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) and a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Aida has made pioneering contributions to the initiation, fundamental progress, and conceptual expansion of supramolecular polymerization. He has been a leader in the development of dynamic, responsive, healable, reorganizable, and adaptive supramolecular polymers and related soft materials and an advocate for addressing critical environmental issues caused by plastic waste.

Aida received his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Colloidal Science from Yokohama National University in 1979, and his Master of Engineering (1981) and Doctor of Engineering (1984) degrees in Polymer Chemistry from the University of Tokyo. He was awarded the Inoue Research Award for Young Scientists for his doctoral work, with the thesis titled "Controlled Polymerization by Metalloporphyrins", under the supervision of Professor Shohei Inoue. After his doctoral studies, Aida was directly appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Synthetic Chemistry at the University of Tokyo. In 1986, he was a visiting scholar at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Aida was promoted to Lecturer in 1989 and to Associate Professor in 1991, before joining the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology at the University of Tokyo as a full professor in 1996. In 2022 he was appointed as a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Tokyo. Aida was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. He was elected into the US National Academy of Engineering in 2021 for contributions to the engineering of smart and adaptive molecular materials using physical perturbation of multivalent interactions.