Yujiro Kawamata (born 1952) is a Japanese mathematician working in algebraic geometry.

The program aims to show that every algebraic variety is birational to one of an especially simple type: either a minimal model or a Fano fiber space.

[1] After Mori proved the existence of minimal models in dimension 3 in 1988, Kawamata and Miyaoka clarified the structure of minimal models by proving the abundance conjecture in dimension 3.

[2] Kawamata used analytic methods in Hodge theory to prove the Iitaka conjecture over a base of dimension 1.

[3] More recently, a series of papers by Kawamata related the derived category of coherent sheaves on an algebraic variety to geometric properties in the spirit of minimal model theory.