Akira Kawamura is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry.
See Contact DetailsDr. Akira Kawamura received a BS and MS from the University of Tokyo and a PhD from Columbia University. He did his postdoc at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. At Hunter College, he teaches courses in organic chemistry, bioorganic chemistry and computational drug discovery, and conducts research on ways of deciphering chemical communications in nature. Dr. Kawamura’s work has been widely published in research journals.
Research Focus
Research Statement
Deciphering chemical communications in nature: Chemistry is the common language used in nature.
Various communications in nature, such as animal-microbe interactions, plant-microbe interactions, and microbe-microbe interactions, are mediated by a wide variety of chemical messages or “molecular words.”
The current focus of this research program is to characterize the structures and biological activities of molecular words for microbe-microbe interactions. Molecular mechanism of immune-boosting plants: Many medicinal plants are known to stimulate innate immune cells, such as monocytes and macrophages. However, the molecular mechanism by which these plants exhibit the immunostimulatory effects remains to be clarified.
Our study revealed that the immunostimulatory factor in some medicinal plants is not produced by plants but by plant-associated bacteria. Our current focus is to characterize the interactions between bacterial and plant factors, which collectively give rise to safe and effective immunostimulatory effects.
