Naotsugu “Nao” Tsuchiya was awarded a PhD at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2006. Upon postdoctoral training at Caltech until 2010, he received a PRESTO grant from Japan Science and Technology (JST) agency and returned to Japan in 2010. In Jan 2012, he joined the School of Psychological Sciences at Monash University as an Associate Professor (Professor from 2020).
From 2013 to 2017, he was an ARC Future Fellow. His main research interest is to uncover the neuronal basis of consciousness. Recently, he focuses on the novel Qualia Structure approach on consciousness, which advocates to characterize the structure of qualia by measuring the similarity between qualia on a large scale, and to reveal their neural correlates and their causal information structure. The Qualia Structure project will further employ various research methods, including phenomenology, development, and constructivism, in order to estimate structures of qualia from perceptual to emotional domains.
The outcome of this field is the creation of a new interdisciplinary research program that will have impacts to the general society, such as understanding the consciousness of others and the consciousness of animals and artificial intelligence.