He is a professor of Biophysics at the Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University,[1] and shared the 2014 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award with Peter Walter for discoveries concerning the unfolded protein response — an intracellular quality control system that detects harmful misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum and signals the nucleus to carry out corrective measures.

In the elementary school era, he was good at mathematics and arithmetic, and learned from the newspaper about the existence of quarks.

[3] When Mori was in the first year of college, he did not understand the significant difference between the laws of physics and chemistry, but he learned about the new development of molecular biology from newspaper articles.

Soon after, Kyoto University alumnus Susumu Tonegawa made a breakthrough in immunology research (which earned Tonegawa the first Japanese Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine about a decade later), Mori read about it in the newspaper and was shocked, then he decided to transfer to the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and continue to pursue graduate studies.

The independent works of Mori and Peter Walter during the same period revealed the UPR pathway, which explains the mechanism by which cells generate signals due to stress and regulate.