Toyoshima and Poul Nissen were awarded the Gregori Aminoff Prize in 2016 by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their fundamental contributions to understanding the structural basis for ATP-driven translocation of ions across membranes.
For his master’s and doctoral research, Toyoshima focused on the microscopy of thin muscle filaments and myosin heads under the supervision of Setsuro Ebashi.
Under Unwin, Toyoshima worked to develop mathematical methods for disentangling the superimposed information from a projection image or electron micrograph of a tubular structure.
In 1988, Toyoshima followed Unwin to the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he met and collaborated with biophysicist David Stokes, who was also studying the Ca2+ ATPase.
In 1994, Toyoshima was offered a faculty position at the University of Tokyo, where he is currently a professor at the Center for Structural Biology of Challenging Proteins within the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Bio-sciences.
[1][3][4] Early in his research career, Toyoshima worked on "3 dimensional image analysis of muscle thin filaments decorated by Myosin heads" as an electron microscopist in the Department of Physics at the University of Tokyo.