He did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at Nagoya University, earning a doctorate in 1974.
He then worked for Fujitsu until 1997, when he became a professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
[1][2] In the 1990s, Sugiyama also served as one of the directors of the Information Processing Society of Japan.
[2][3] Sugiyama also wrote highly cited papers on other topics in graph drawing including maintenance of the "mental map" when a drawing is modified,[4] drawings that simultaneously display both the adjacencies between vertices in a graph and a hierarchical structure on the same vertices,[5] and the control of edge orientations in force-based algorithms.
[2] His book Knowledge Science (with Atsushi Shimojima and Akiya Nagata) was also translated into Korean (BADA Publishing, 2005).