Prof. Umeki was born in Nagoya and graduated from Kyoto University in 1992 (Ph.D thesis: "Evaluation of morphological plasticity in crown display and its effects on spatial pattern and competitive interaction in populations"). After graduation, he worked for Hokkaido Forestry Research Institute as a researcher. He has been at Chiba University since 2003. His research areas are tree ecology and forest ecology. His research approaches include field measurements, modeling, and simulation. His recent interest is in functional-structural tree models and simulation of the size-structure dynamics of natural forests on GIS.