Dr. Osamu Ito has been a member of the IFDC Board of Directors since 2008. He serves on the board's Program Committee.
Ito is a senior research fellow for the Institute for Sustainability and Peace, United Nations University. He served as the director of the Crop Production and Environment Division for the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS) from 2000 to 2011. Before joining JIRCAS, Ito was a plant physiologist and head of the Division of Agronomy, Plant Physiology and Agroecology at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. He has also held positions with the National Institute of Agro-Environmental Sciences (Japanese Ministry of Agriculture) and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), where he is also a board member.
Ito has been published extensively. Topics of his research include nitrogen metabolism in green leaves; management and physiology of rice; the physiological mechanism of the effects of air pollutants on plants; nitrogen dynamics in intercropping systems in the semi-arid tropics; and biological nitrification inhibition.
Ito was a postdoctoral fellow for the C.F. Kettering Research Laboratory (United States) and for IRRI’s Department of Soil Microbiology. He received a doctorate and master’s degree in agricultural chemistry from the University of Tokyo and a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.