Dr. Kohei Oda obtained M.S. degree from the University of Osaka Prefecture (UOP) in 1969, and Ph.D. in 1975. He worked at UOP as an Assistant, and an Associate Professor. In 1992 he moved to the Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT) as a Professor. His scientific fields of interest are Applied Microbiology and Applied Biochemistry. In 2007, KIT awarded him the status of Professor Emeritus. He worked as a Visiting Professor at the Universidad Federal de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2007), and at Khon Kaen University, Thailand (2009). In 1997, he received an Award from Nikkei Business Publications, Inc. Since 2016, he has become is now Fellow of the Japan Society for Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Agrochemistry. His main contributions are discoveries of novel families of peptidases, sedolisins and eqolisins. His ongoing interests are not only sedolisins and eqolisins, but also microbial hydrolytic enzymes involved in degradation of poly (ethylene terephthalate) (PET).