Tomoko Ohta

Who is Tomoko Ohta?

Tomoko Ohta is a Japanese scientist working on molecular evolution. She graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956. After working on the neutral theory of evolution with her mentor, Motoo Kimura, she became convinced of the importance of the mutations that were nearly neutral. She developed the slightly deleterious model, then a more general form, the nearly neutral theory of evolution. She worked at the Japanese National Institute of Genetics from 1969 to 1996, and, in 2002, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences as a foreign associate in evolutionary biology.