Masataka Ohkubo received the M.S. degree in 1983 and the Ph.D. degree in 1991 in electrical and electronic engineering from Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi, Japan.

He worked with Toyota Central R&D Labs., Inc., Nagoya, Japan, from 1983 to 1993. In the middle of that period, high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) was discovered. HTS thin film synthesis and structural analysis were issues for superconductor electronics in those days. He used techniques of co-evaporation and pulsed laser deposition to make YBCO epitaxial thin films, and ion beam analysis. In 1993, he joined a group of radiometry with superconductivity at Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL). Between 1995 to 1997, he was a guest researcher at Karlsruhe Research Center, Germany. He pursued a possibility of using BSCCO intrinsic Josephson effect for making superconductor X-ray detectors, and used ion channeling and other analyzing techniques.

After he returned to ETL, X-ray detection with Nb-based superconductor tunnel junction (STJ) and transition edge sensor (TES) was his research topic together with performance evaluation with synchrotron radiation. ETL was merged into AIST in 2001. After that, he was pursuing innovative analytical instruments with superconductivity: X-ray absorption fine structure, X-ray emission spectroscopy nano-imaging, and mass spectrometry.

In 2013, he established a clean room facility called CRAVITY that is for analog and digital superconductor electronics. He also works for IEEE-IEC international standardization, serving the convener of IEC-TC90/WG 14 superconductor electronics devices. Now he is employing superconductivity to analyze functional and structural materials for aerospace field. His current position is the research director of the nanometoronics lab in AIST.