Kazuaki Taira is a part-time professor at Waseda University, Japan. He previously worked as a professor of mathematics at Hiroshima University from 1995 until 1998 and at the University of Tsukuba from 1998 until 2009. Taira has authored many books, the most recent being the second edition of Semigroups, Boundary Value Problems and Markov Processes (2014).