Mitsuo Tasumi (January 23, 1937 – November 24, 2021) was a Japanese physical chemist known for his vibrational spectroscopic works on synthetic and biological macromolecules.
(1961) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Tokyo in the laboratories of San-Ichiro Mizushima and of Takehiko Shimanouchi, where he reported the first phonon dispersion of polyethylene.
During this period, he spent a year (1965–66) at University of Michigan as a Fulbright scholar in the laboratory of Samuel Krimm and another year (1966–67) at Polytechnic University of Milan as a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Giuseppe Zerbi under Giulio Natta, a Nobel laureate.
He was among the earliest spectroscopists who saw the great utility of ab initio electronic structure calculations in understanding vibrational spectra.
He is a co-author of the Protein Data Bank[7] and the editor/author of "Introduction to Experimental Infrared Spectroscopy: Fundamentals and Practical Methods.