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Kensō Soai (硤合 憲三) (born 1950) is a Japanese organic chemist. He is a university lecturer in the Applied Chemistry Department of Tokyo University of Science.

Soai studied at the University of Tokyo, where he received his Ph.D. in 1979 in organic synthesis under Teruaki Mukaiyama and was a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He conducted his postdoctoral studies with Ernest L. Eliel at the University of North Carolina. In 1981, he became a lecturer at his alma mater. In 1986 he became an associate professor and in 1991 he received a full professorship.

He is involved in asymmetric and enantioselective synthesis, asymmetric autocatalysis, origin of chirality, organometallic chemistry, biochemistry, and materials science.

One of his most notable contributions is the Soai reaction, which is named after him.

In 2000, he received the Inoue Prize. He received several prizes in synthetic organic chemistry in Japan, was lecturer at ETH Zurich in 2006, and at Stanford University in 2004. In 2007, he received the Science and Technology Prize from MEXT, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. In 2005, he received the Chirality Medal. In 2012 he received the Japanese Purple Ribbon Medal and in 2010 the Chemical Society of Japan Award. He has been a visiting professor at several Japanese universities, in Paris and Strasbourg, and at Jilin University.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.