Akira Otaka was born in 1960 in Osaka, Japan, and received his bachelor degree from Kyoto University (KU) in 1983. He obtained his PhD from KU in 1989 under the direction of Professor Haruaki Yajima. He obtained an assistant professor position in Professor Nobutaka Fujii’s group at KU in 1989. After a one-year visiting scientist position in NCI, NIH (1992–1993), he was promoted to associate professor in Fujii’s group at KU in 1995. He is currently a professor and a dean at Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tokushima University (since 2005) and a vice president of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan (since 2015). He has received The Japan Peptide Society Award for Young Scientists (1997), The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan Award for Young Scientists (1999), and The Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan, Astellas Award for Organic Chemistry in Life Sciences 2011 (2012). His research interests are in peptide/protein chemistry in chemical biology and in medicinal chemistry.