Tomoko Ohta

Tomoko Ohta (太田朋子 (Ōta Tomoko); born 7 September 1933) is a Japanese scientist working on molecular evolution. In 1956, she graduated from the University of Tokyo. After working on the neutral theory of evolution with her mentor, Motoo Kimura, she became convinced of the importance of the mutations that were nearly neutral. She developed the slightly deleterious model (Ohta, 1973), then a more general form, the nearly neutral theory of evolution. She is currently at the Japanese National Institute of Genetics and, in 2002, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences as a foreign associate in evolutionary biology.

List of Books available in English

 * Theoretical aspects of population genetics /Motoo Kimura and Tomoko Ohta (1971)
 * Evolution and variation of multigene families /Tomoko Ohta (1980)
 * Population genetics and molecular evolution : papers marking the sixtieth birthday of Motoo Kimura /edited by Tomoko Ohta and Kenichi Aoki (1985)
 * Tomoko Ohta and the Nearly Neutral Theries: The rule of a female geneticist in the neutralist-selectionist controversy/Tomoko Y. Steen (1996) Ph.D. Dissertation. (CORNELL UNIVERSITY)