Shizuo Akira received his M.D. from Osaka University in 1977, and after three years' clinical training as physician, he entered the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University in 1980, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1984. He spent two years from 1985 to 1987 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of California at Berkeley. He was a research associate from 1987 through 1995 at the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Osaka University in the laboratory of Dr. Tadamitsu Kishimoto, where he cloned two transcription factors, NF-IL6(C/EBPbeta) and STAT3.

In 1996 he became a professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Hyogo College of Medicine. In 1999 he was appointed as a professor of the Research Institute of Microbial Diseases, Osaka University. Since 2007, he is a Director of WPI Immunology Frontier Research Center, Osaka University.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the European Molecular Biology Organization. He has received a number of prestigious awards including Robert Koch Prize, William B. Coley Award, and Keio International Medical Science Prize. On 2006 and 2007, he was selected by Thomson Scientific as "hottest researcher" based on the numbers of highly cited papers within two years, in two year low.