Kenji Satake is currently a professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, National Central University in Taiwan. He is also a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo.

He obtained a BS and MS from Hokkaido University and a PhD from the University of Tokyo. He has held research and teaching positions at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, the Geological Survey of Japan, and the University of Tokyo. At the University of Tokyo, he served as professor and director of Earthquake Research Institute.

His research interests are giant earthquakes and tsunamis in the world, for which he uses geophysical, geological, and historical approaches. In the geophysical approach, he developed a tsunami waveform inversion method that combines instrumentally recorded tsunami waveforms and computer simulation to estimate the tsunami generation and propagation processes. In geological and historical approaches, he uses sand deposits brought by past tsunamis or historical literature describing damage to infer the earthquakes and tsunamis in the past, such as the 1700 Cascadia earthquake.

He is a fellow of American Geophysical Union (class of 2010) and IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics). For AOGS, he served as the first Secretary-General (2004-2006), Solid Earth Section president (2006-2008), and President (2012-2014). In 2020, he received the Axford Medal. He has been the editor-in-chief of Geoscience Letters, the official journal of AOGS, since its beginning. Thanks to his efforts and leadership, Geoscience Letters is now a Q1 (top Quartile) journal in Geosciences with an impact factor of 4.0.