Akimichi Morita

Prof. Akimichi Morita is the Vice Director of Nagoya City University Hospital and, since 2003 he has been Professor and Chairman of the Department of Geriatric and Environmental Dermatology at Nagoya City University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Nagoya Japan.

He held the position of Program Officer for the Research Center of Science Systems at the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (2016-2020). His areas of interest are phototherapy, cutaneous immunology, and skin aging. Dr. Morita was the President of the Japanese Society of Investigative Dermatology (2017-2020) and has been involved in many other societies. In 2004, Prof. Morita was an international honorary member of Deutsche Dermatologische Gesellschaft. He has been a key member in many medicals publications especially the Journal of Dermatological Sciences (JDS) of which he was the Editor in Chief from 2008 to 2013.

Professor Akimichi Morita graduated from Nagoya City University and received his MD degree in 1989. He received his PhD in basic immunology at Aichi Cancer Center. He studied photobiology and photoimmunology under the supervision of Professor Jean Krutmann at Duesseldorf University as a Humboldt Foundation fellow where he discovered UVA1-mediated human T helper cell apoptosis as a fundamental mechanism of UVA1 phototherapy. He also trained under the supervision of Professor Akira Takashima at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and developed a Langerhans cell-targeted vaccination. He has introduced numerous standard phototherapies to Japan.

In 2015, Professor Morita was the President of the 30th Annual Meeting of the JSPR 2015, Nagoya, JAPAN. In 2018 he was the President of the 5th Eastern Asia Dermatology Congress (EADC) held in Kumming, CHINA. He is the Director of the Japanese Society for Psoriasis Research and a member of the Japanese Society of Dermatology, Japanese Society for Photomedicine and Photobiology, and American Society for Photobiology.