Professor Atami is a scientist in the anime Vampire, a 1968 television series based on the manga by Osamu Tezuka. He is first presented as a scholar who has devoted his entire career to the study of the Vampire tribe, a people who inherit the ability to transform into animals such as wolves. Within the story he is also an old friend of Osamu Tezuka, who appears as a character in the series.

Atami enters the story when the young protagonist Toppei seeks him out at a lecture. Their encounter ends in disaster when Toppei, transformed into a wolf and unable to control his power, accidentally pushes Atami from a cliff and apparently kills him. This event becomes a turning point in the series, because the villain Rock witnesses it and uses it to blackmail Toppei, threatening to expose his secret and report him as a murderer if he refuses to cooperate with criminal schemes.

Atami is later revealed to be alive. He resurfaces on a remote island, where he conducts cruel experiments and plays malicious games with the people he captures. He is responsible for a series of mysterious disappearances, using a drug called Mad PA that causes human beings to regress into primitive savages. Among his victims is Toppei's mother. He continues to refine his methods, abducting a professional wrestler to create a more powerful subject, a savage killing machine, and he eventually stages experiments that cause children to transform into primitive humans. He also becomes entangled with Rock, performing plastic surgery to give the fugitive criminal a new face. This alliance holds for a time, but in the final episodes the two fall out, and a cornered Rock shoots and kills Atami.

In personality, Atami is portrayed as a researcher whose total dedication to science has left no room for ethical limits. What initially looks like scholarly devotion is revealed as ruthless ambition. He treats people as material for his experiments, shows no concern for the suffering he causes, and is willing to cooperate with criminals when it advances his work. His motivation is the pursuit of his research and the fulfillment of his scientific ambitions, whatever the human cost. Through his experiments he seeks to understand transformation and to control it, and he is untroubled by the violent uses to which his discoveries are put.

His relationships define much of his role in the plot. With Toppei, his connection is marked by tragedy: Toppei causes his apparent death, and Atami later targets Toppei's family, kidnapping his mother. Despite this, Toppei at one point infiltrates Rock's hideout in an attempt to rescue Atami, reflecting the complicated bond between them. With Rock, his relationship is one of mutual convenience; Rock exploits Atami's creations for his crimes, and Atami uses the alliance to continue his work. The partnership ends when Rock murders him. His friendship with Osamu Tezuka, meanwhile, places him within the story's wider circle of acquaintances.

Atami's development over the series takes him from respected academic to outlaw scientist. His apparent death in the early episodes sets major events in motion, and his return reveals him as a hidden villain behind much of the harm done in the story. His arc concludes with his death, killed by the very ally he had chosen to support.

He possesses no supernatural abilities of his own. His noteworthy capabilities are scientific: deep knowledge of the Vampire tribe, the chemical expertise required to develop Mad PA, surgical skill that allows him to reshape a face, and the inventiveness to create powerful experimental subjects such as the wrestler turned savage. His survival of what appeared to be a fatal fall also suggests a measure of resilience.