Shigekazu Nagata (長田 重一, Nagata Shigekazu, born 1949) is a Japanese biochemist, best known for research on apoptosis, the process of programmed cell death occurring in multi-cellular organisms.

[6] Nagata was born in Kanazawa, Japan, and completed his PhD under the supervision of Yoshito Kaziro at the University of Tokyo in 1977.

[7] Nagata served as a postdoctoral fellow under Charles Weissmann at University of Zurich, where he worked on sequencing the cDNA of Interferon gene between 1977 and 1981.

He was assistant professor at the Institute of Medical Science, the University of Tokyo between 1982 and 1987, and Head of Department of molecular biology at Osaka Bioscience Institute between 1987 and 1998, where Osamu Hayaishi served as president at that time.

Nagata became Professor of genetics at Osaka University Medical School between 1995 and 2007, before being appointed as Professor of medical chemistry at the Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University in 2007.