Dr. Toru Sato graduated from the School of Electrical Engineering II in the Faculty of Engineering at Kyoto University in 1976, withdrew from the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Engineering with Research Guidance Approval in 1978, and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Engineering from Kyoto University in 1981. From 1983, he was an assistant at the Radio Atmospheric Science Center at Kyoto University. In 1998, he became a professor at the Department of Communications and Computer Engineering at the Graduate School of Informatics, and in 2019, he retired and was awarded the title of professor emeritus. He continued to serve as a program-specific professor and vice director of the Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences at Kyoto University until 2023.

During this time at Kyoto University, he served as Department Head of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and Dean of the Graduate School of Informatics, contributing to university management. Outside Japan, he served as General Organizer of the International Workshop on Technical and Scientific Aspects of MST Radar and as a member of many other international conferences, contributing to advancing radar technology. In Japan, he has served as Chair of the IEICE Electronics Society Conference, Chair of the Electromagnetic Field Theory and Technology Committee of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, and an associate member of the Science Council of Japan. He also served as President of the Radiation Science Society of Japan from 2011 to 2018.

He was engaged in the development of observation and signal processing technologies for measuring various targets such as the middle and upper atmosphere, space debris, indoor environments, and the human body using radar, and contributed significantly to the development of high precision and high resolution radar technology and to the expansion of its fields of application. In particular, his achievements in high-resolution observations of atmospheric turbulence were pioneering and had a significant impact on the design of atmospheric radar systems worldwide, including the Kyoto University MU radar and the Equatorial Atmospheric Radar. He also contributed to the technological development, design, and construction of the PANSY radar, the first and only large-scale atmospheric radar in the Antarctic region.

In recent years, in the field of indoor environmental measurement using ultra-wideband (UWB) radar, he has developed technologies for object image reconstruction and precision measurement of the human body combining ultra-high resolution and high-speed processing that exceed the limits of conventional aperture synthesis technology. In particular, in the field of remote measurement of vital information, he was the first in the world to realize the simultaneous measurement of heartbeats of multiple persons in close proximity using millimeter-wave radar. He succeeded in measuring heartbeats with the world's highest accuracy at the time of announcement. This technology has been commercialized by a company participating in the Kyoto University COI.

For these achievements, he received the 2006 IEICE Communications Society Excellent Paper Award, the 2014 Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (development category), and the 2015 IEICE Communications Society Excellent Paper Award. He received the 8th Distinguished Service Award for the Promotion of a Maritime Nation (Prime Minister's Award) and was designated a Fellow of the IEICE in 2006.

As mentioned above, his contributions to the field of electronics and telecommunications have been outstanding, and we are confident that he is a worthy recipient of the Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award from the IEICE.