For his post-doctoral fellowship, he was a visiting research lecturer under Steve Ryan at the Doheny Eye Institute, University of Southern California, CA, USA where he studied gene therapy and molecular pathology. In 1995 Professor Sakamoto returned to Japan and in 2002 became professor and chair of Ophthalmology at Kagoshima University. He is now the director of Kagoshima University Hospital and the vice president of Kagoshima University.

On a national level, Professor Sakamoto is an executive committee member of Japanese Ophthalmological Society, and the president of the Japan Vitreous Retina Society. He serves to the Japanese Government as a collaborative member Science Council and is currently president of J-CREST clinical research group. He is currently in charge of the National project of artificial intelligence and big data, supported by the Japanese Government.

Internationally, Professor Sakamoto has served as the member of Academia Ophthalmologica Internationalis (AOI) and is executive member of the International Council of Ophthalmology (ICO). He is also a member of Club Jules Gonin and a gold-level fellow of ARVO, the world’s premier eye research organization. Since 2019 Professor Sakamoto has served as Editor-in-Chief of Graefe’s Archives of Ophthalmology.

Professor Sakamoto has received many awards from scientific societies including, Research to Prevent Blindness foreign scholarship award, Pfizer Ophthalmic Awards, Rhoto Award, Japan Ophthalmic Society Committee Award, and others.

His research and clinical interests involve diabetic retinopathy, vitrectomy, ocular angiogenesis, drug delivery, and gene therapy; he has published more than 350 peer reviewed papers. Holder of multiple patents on ophthalmic devices, Professor Sakamoto’s recent development of automated segmentation software will be installed in the next version of Topcon’s Optical Coherence Tomography machine.