Biochemical Journal Young Investigator Award winner

Kohta Oyama

Kohta Oyama was born in Kagoshima prefecture in Japan, 1980. She spent her teenage life (14-17 years old) in Auckland, New Zealand. She graduated at Long Bay College as a DUX (a title given to the top student for academic achievement) in 1997. Then she graduated at Saga Medical School, Japan, in 2003. To date, she has been working as a physician of internal medicine with a specialty in infectious diseases. She entered the Department of Microbiology, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kumamoto University, Japan, in April 2009 to study the pathogenesis of septic shock. Her current research interest is to elucidate the roles of nitric oxide (NO) in the pathogenesis of septic shock. In particular, she has studied the vascular regulatory functions of a nitrated cyclic nucleotide, 8-nitro-cGMP, which is recently identified as a novel derivative of cGMP (Nature Chem. Biol., 3, 727-735, 2007). Part of her research achievement was presented at The 5th Joint Meeting of The Societies For Free Radical Research Australasia and Japan held on 1-4th December 2009 in Sydney, Australia. She was very much encouraged by being awarded a prize from the Biochemical Journal for the Best Poster Presentation by a Young Investigator.