Professor Takayoshi Sasaki was born in Fukui, Japan, in 1955. He received his B. S. (1978) and M. S. (1980) in Chemistry from the University of Tokyo. He started to work for National Institute for Research in Inorganic Materials (NIRIM) located in Tsukuba, Japan in 1980. After five years, he received Ph. D. in Chemistry from the University of Tokyo. He has been working for the same National Institute for over 35 years, although her name has been changed to National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS). He is now in a position of NIMS fellow.

He has been working on the synthesis and characterizations of a variety of layered host compounds. His particular interest has been directed at soft-chemical synthesis utilizing their chemical reactions, e. g., intercalation. He is one of pioneers for investigation on delamination since he found that a layered titanate undergoes total exfoliation into colloidal single layers for the first time. Since then, he succeeded in synthesizing a number of functional oxide and hydroxide nanosheets such as MnO2, Cs4W11O36, and Co(OH)2. He has demonstrated that these nanosheets show novel physicochemical properties associated with the extremely high 2D anisotropy having a molecular thickness. One of the highlights in the course of such study is the discovery of superconductivity in 2D CoO2 sheets, which ihas attracted great attention. Furthermore, he has demonstrated that nanosheets can be organized or assembled into various nanostructured materials such as nanofilms, nanotubes, nanoshells, and lamellar aggregates. Useful functionalities such as photocatalysis, dielectric and ferromagnetic properties have been achieved through this synthetic strategy by combining nanosheets with a range of materials (polyions, clusters, metal complexes) and controlling their nanoarchitectures. Some of the developments, for example, fabrication procedures TiO2 flaky particulates, have been transferred to industry.