Yukio Masumoto is a professor at Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, Japan. He obtained his M.S. in maritime engineering from Kyushu University and his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in physical oceanography, and worked as an associate professor at the University of Tokyo and a program director at Research Institute for Global Change, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology before joining the University of Tokyo as a professor in climate dynamics. He has been working on low-latitude climate/ocean variations, such as El Niño/Southern Oscillation, Indian Ocean Dipole, tropical ocean current systems, and Indonesian throughflow, focusing mainly on their mechanisms and their impacts on global climate system through teleconnections. Major tools for his research are numerical models with various complexities.
He is also involved in observational research in the Indian Ocean and implementation of Indian Ocean Observing System (IndOOS) since its planning stage. He was a member of the Climate and Ocean – Variability, Predictability, and Change (CLIVAR)/ Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) Indian Ocean Panel (IOP) from 2004 to 2013, and served as a co-chair of IOP during 2008-2011, promoting biophysical research interactions between IOP and the Sustained Indian Ocean Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (SIBER), which is a research project under the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER), leading to successful launch of currently operating International Indian Ocean Expedition-2 (IIOE-2) program. He has also been involved in the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO) as an executive committee member since 2019.