Professor Matsuura was born in Shizuoka, Japan, in 1936. He received his B.Sc. (1961) and M.Sc. (1963) degrees from the Department of Applied Chemistry at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo. He went to Germany to pursue his doctoral studies at the Institute of Chemical Technology of the Technical University of Berlin and received Doktor-Ingenieur in 1965.
After working at the Department of Synthetic Chemistry of University of Tokyo as a staff assistant and at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the University of California as a postdoctorate research associate, he joined the National Research Council of Canada in 1969. He came to the University of Ottawa in 1992 as a professor and the chairholder of British (Consumers) Gas/ NSERC Industrial Research Chair. Currently, he is professor of the Department of Chemical Engineering and the director of the Industrial Membrane Research Institute (IMRI).