Nomura received his Ph.D. from University of Tokyo (supervisor Tsutomu Yanagida) in 2000 and became a Miller Research Fellow at University of California, Berkeley. In 2002-03 he was an associate scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In July 2003 he joined the Department of Physics at University of California, Berkeley. In 2017, Nomura was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for pioneering contributions to a variety of areas of particle theory, including gauge unification in extra dimensions, electroweak symmetry breaking, supersymmetric models, dark matter, the multiverse, foundations of quantum mechanics, and black holes."