Ken-Ichi Honma (born November 10, 1946) is a Japanese chronobiologist who researches the biological mechanisms underlying circadian rhythms. After graduating from Hokkaido University School of Medicine, he practiced clinical psychiatry before beginning his research. His recent research efforts are centered around photic and non-photic entrainment, the structure of circadian clocks, and the ontogeny of circadian clocks. He often collaborates with his wife, Sato Honma, in work involving the mammalian suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), its components, and associated topics.
He was born in Sapporo City, Hokkaido, Japan, and currently lives with his wife Sato Honma in Japan with their only daughter.
Honma serves as the chairman for the Keiaikai Sapporo Hanazono Hospital and is a professor emeritus at Hokkaido University.
Education and career
In 1971, Honma received his Doctorate of Medicine and then his Ph.D. in Medicine in 1977 from the Hokkaido University School of Medicine. He worked as an assistant professor at Hokkaido University until 1978, when he left to perform research at the Max-Planck Institute in Andechs, Germany as a postdoctoral fellow. He first worked under Professor Wolfgang Wuttke in Göttingen, then under Jürgen Aschoff. By 1983, Honma was promoted to associate professor and began to perform experiments involving the human circadian clock in temporal isolation. In 1992, he became a full-time professor at the Hokkaido University School of Medicine.
Honma was the former vice-president of the Japanese Society of Sleep Research (2007-2021), the former council-chair of the Japanese Society for Chronobiology (2005–2011).
He is the vice-president of the Asian Society of Sleep Research (ASRS), the prior Editor-in-Chief of Sleep and Biological Rhythms, an English Journal of the Japanese Society of Sleep Research and the Asian Society of Sleep Research, and an associate member of the Science Council of Japan. Since 2016, Honma has also been a member of “The Committee of ChronoHistory,” which is responsible for promoting and reviewing initiatives to maintain and preserve the history of the field of chronobiology.
Honma is the chairman of the Sapporo Symposium on Biological Rhythms (1995–present), which holds an international symposium centered around chronobiology biannually. He served as the head of a Japan-U.S.A. joint project on Biological Timing, where he was responsible for sending many Japanese scientists to the United States (1993–1995).
While he was the president-elect of the Japanese Society of Chronobiology (2005 to 2010), he co-organized the biannual meetings of the European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS) and held the first World Congress of Chronobiology in 2003 at Sapporo as the founding president of the World Federation for Societies of Chronobiology (2001–2011). Recently, he has been devoted to establishing a forum for exchanging information and ideas among Chronobiologists in Asia as the council chief of the Asian Forum on Chronobiology (2015).
Awards and honors
In 2020, Honma received the SRBR Director’s Award for mentoring. The SRBR Award honors and thanks members of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms for their large-scale contributions to the field of Chronobiology.
Scientific contributions
Honma has authored over 200 scholarly articles and has published several edited volumes which summarize and expand on award-winning papers and lectures by leading scientists in the field of Chronobiology.
Initially, his research revolved around understanding photic and non-photic entrainment of circadian rhythms and raised hypotheses about the role of feeding in the entrainment of the circadian clock, as well as the ways in which endogenous rhythms can entrain to artificial bright light before later focusing on uncovering the structure of the circadian clock. Earlier in his career, Honma made a key discovery that body temperature, locomotor activity, and plasma levels of corticosterone - all circadian processes - are likely coupled to one common internal oscillator in rats. However, his current research is centered around the ontogeny of circadian rhythms as well as understanding and uncovering the physiological aspects that underlie chronobiology.