Hiroki Tanimoto was born in 1981 in Nagano, Japan. He also spent his childhood in Rangoon, State of Burma (currently Yangon,  Myanmar) in 1988, and Jakarta, Indonesia from 1990 to 1997. He received his BS in 2004 and his Ph. D. in 2009 at Keio University in Japan (Professor Noritaka Chida). After a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Vanderbilt University in the United States (Professor Gary A. Sulikowski), he joined at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan as an assistant professor in 2010. In 2020, he was appointed as an associate professor of the University of Toyama (Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Academic Assembly). His research focuses on new synthetic methods utilizing nitrogen-containing reactive functional groups such as azido and nitroso groups for alkaloids synthesis, heterocycles synthesis, and click chemistry toward functional polymers or chemical probes. He also engages himself in main group chemistry, especially the synthesis and the characterization of new germanium and silicon materials.

His research focuses on new synthetic methods toward application to chemical biology research, utilizing nitrogen-containing reactive functional groups such as azido and diazo groups for heterocycles synthesis and chemical probes.