Professor Taiji Sakamoto graduated from Kyushu University, Japan. He worked as a visiting research lecturer at Doheny Eye Institute, USC, CA, USA till 1995 under Steve Ryan. He studied gene therapy and molecular pathology and returned Japan and became the professor and chair of Kagoshima University, Japan from 2002. He is now the director of Kagoshima University General Hospital and the vice president of Kagoshima University..

    He is an executive committee member of Japanese Ophthalmological Society, Japanese Vitreous Retina Society, and others. He is also a member of Club Jules Gonin and a faculty of ARVO. He serves to the Japanese Government as a collaborative member Science Council. He is the president of J-CREST clinical research group.

He is now acting Editor-in-Chief of Graefes Archives of Ophthalmology from 2019.

He received many awards from scientific societies including, RPB foreign scholarship award, Pfizer Ophthalmic Awards, Rhoto Award, Japan Ophthalmic Society Committee Award, Gold Medal of ARVO Fellow and others.

    His research and clinical interests involve diabetic retinopathy, retinal surgery, ocular angiogenesis, drug delivery, and gene therapy.

He published more than 370 peer reviewed papers as of August 2020, which included mechanism of retinal detachment, which was feature in cover story of American Journal of Ophthalmology, development of triamcinolone-vitrectomy, and development of automated segmentation software of OCT-machine, which will be installed in next TOPCON machine. .  

He is now in charge of the National project of artificial intelligence and big data, supported by the Japanese Government.