International Symposium

Haruhiko Bito is currently a Professor and Chair of Neurochemistry, and a Chair of the Neuroscience Division at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Medicine. Dr Bito graduated from the University of Tokyo with an MD and a PhD in Biochemistry in 1993. After a postdoctoral training at Stanford University as an HFSP long-term fellow, Dr Bito started his own laboratory in Pharmacology at Kyoto University in 1997, before moving to head the Department of Neurochemistry at the University of Tokyo in 2003. Dr Bito has deciphered many novel functions of a family of molecules called Ca2+-calmodulin kinases, and elucidated the bidirectional neuronal signaling between the synapses and the nucleus, both of which are essential for establishing long-term memory. Dr Bito is also known as a creator of powerful molecular tools (E-SARE synthetic enhancer and next-generation Ca2+ indicators XCaMPs) that help control and measure neuronal ensemble activity critical for cognition. Together, these achievements have received recognition such as Young Investigator Awards and Grant from HFSP (2002), Japanese Pharmacological Society (2003), Japanese Biochemical Society (2004), as well as the Nakaakira Tsukahara Memorial Award (Japan Neuroscience Society, 2011), AND Investigator Award (Molecular Brain, 2015), and the Setsuro Ebashi Award (Japanese Pharmacological Society, 2020).

Dr Victor Borrell is a senior group leader at the Institute of Neuroscience Alicante. He received his PhD from the University of Barcelona in 2001, after which he was a post-doc with Dr. E. Callaway at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. In 2004 he moved to the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain, as a young group leader, where he has conducted his research over the last 16 years. His work focuses on the expansion and folding of the cerebral cortex during development and in evolution, for which he pioneered using the ferret as a model. Through work in ferret and human he discovered basal Radial Glia Cells, demonstrated their key roles in cortex folding, and identified the existence of gene expression protomaps that instruct the patterning of cortex folds. His work on the regulation of cortical neural stem cells has extended to identify genetic mechanisms involved in the evolution of cortex size in amniotes, and in pediatric brain cancer. Since 2014 he is Executive Board Member of the Spanish Society for Developmental Biology, Spanish Society of Neuroscience, and became Deputy Director at the Institute of Neurosciences in Alicante in 2016. His excellence in research has been recognized by receiving the Young Investigator Award from Spanish Society of Neuroscience, European Research Council Grant, and Alberto Sols Award for the best scientific work, along with many other awards.

Gray performed his PhD work at UNC Chapel Hill, and postdoctoral research at Stanford University and the Max Planck Institute. His group uses stem cell-derived organoids and single-cell genomics to study how the differentiation of diverse cell fates is orchestrated in complex 3D microenvironments. His lab also explores uniquely human development through comparisons with our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and the other great apes.

Karl Deisseroth is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, his PhD from Stanford, and his MD from Stanford. He also completed postdoctoral training, medical internship, and adult psychiatry residency at Stanford, and he is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He continues as a practicing psychiatrist at Stanford with specialization in affective disorders and autism-spectrum disease, employing medications along with neural stimulation. Over the last sixteen years, his laboratory created and developed optogenetics, hydrogel-tissue chemistry (beginning with CLARITY), and a broad range of enabling methods. He also has employed his technologies to discover the neural cell types and connections that cause adaptive and maladaptive behaviors, and has disseminated the technologies to thousands of laboratories around the world.

Among other honors, Deisseroth was the sole recipient for optogenetics of the 2010 Koetser Prize, the 2010 Nakasone Prize, the 2011 Alden Spencer Prize, the 2013 Richard Lounsbery Prize, the 2014 Dickson Prize in Science, the 2015 Keio Prize, the 2015 Lurie Prize, the 2015 Albany Prize, the 2015 Dickson Prize in Medicine, the 2017 Redelsheimer Prize, the 2017 Fresenius Prize, the 2017 NOMIS Distinguished Scientist Award, the 2018 Eisenberg Prize, the 2018 Kyoto Prize, and the 2020 Heineken Prize in Medicine from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. For his discoveries, Deisseroth has also received the Perl Prize (2012), the BRAIN prize (2013), the Pasarow Prize (2013), the Breakthrough Prize (2015) the BBVA Award (2016), the Massry Prize (2016) and the Harvey Prize from the Technion/Israel (2017). He was selected a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2013, and was elected to the US National Academy of Medicine in 2010, to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2012, and to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

coming soon

Jonas Frisén received his MD (1991) and PhD (1993) degrees from the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Mariano Barbacid’s laboratory in Princeton, USA, 1995-7. He is the Tobias Foundation Professor of Stem Cell Research at the Karolinska Institute since 2001. A main interest of Jonas Frisén’s research group is cellular plasticity in the central nervous system, in both the healthy and pathological situation. Studies in experimental animals have delineated how neural stem cells, progenitor cells and differentiated cells collaborate to form scar tissue and contribute to repair mechanisms after brain and spinal cord injuries. Efforts to modulate these processes have pointed to the potential to improve functional recovery after nervous system injury. Other studies have revealed the distribution and extent of cell renewal in the human brain and other tissues.

Yukiko Gotoh studies neural stem/progenitor cells (NPCs) and their progeny in order to understand the mechanisms and logics of mammalian brain development and homeostasis. She received her PhD in 1992 from The University of Tokyo, where she contributed to identification of the mitogen activated protein (MAP) kinase signaling pathway in vertebrates. She performed her postdoctoral work with Jonathan A. Cooper at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and with Michael E. Greenberg at Harvard Medical School before starting her own laboratory back at The University of Tokyo. Her group revealed time dependent regulation of the neurogenic properties of NPCs during brain development, including that mediated by Polycomb group proteins, as well as identified the embryonic origin of adult subventricular neural stem cells. She has been awarded the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Prize, Japan Academy Medal, Tsukahara Prize, Inoue Prize for Science, Yasuda Memorial Foundation Prize for Medicine, and Kihara Memorial Foundation Academic Award, Medal with Purple Ribbon.

Magdalena Götz studied Biology at the university of Tubingen and did her Diploma and PhD work in the lab of Jurgen Bolz at the FMI in Tubingen on the mechanisms of how input connections to the cerebral cortex form during development as well as how specific neuronal subtypes are specified. She received the Otto-Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society for this work. She then moved to the National Institute for Medical Research in London to use retroviral vectors for clonal analysis in the lab of Jack Price and identified mechanisms delineating neighboring forebrain regions. She then started her own lab at the Max-Planck Institute for Neurobiology where she made the breakthrough discovery that radial glial cells are neural stem cells. This inspired her to attempt turning also adult mature glial cells into neurons already in 2002 in vitro and in 2005 in vivo. In order to determine which glial cells best to convert to neurons after traumatic brain injury she systematically examined the roles of distinct glial subtypes after traumatic brain injury when she was appointed Director of the Institute of Stem Cell Research at the Helmholtz Center Munich in 2004 and Chair of Physiological Genomics, now at the Biomedical Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Martinsried Munich. This led to the discovery of a novel role of reactive astrocytes and the in vivo direct neuronal reprogramming reaching a very high efficiency and maturity. Magdalena Götz became a member of EMBO in 2006, of The Leopoldina Academy in 2008 and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 2017. She received the Familie Hansen Price and the Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz Price of the DFG in 2007, followed by many other awards such as the Ernst Schering Price in 2015, the Roger de Spoelberch Prize in 2017, the Schellenberg Prize in 2018 and the Mendel Medal in 2019.

Carina Hanashima received her Ph.D. in 1999 from Waseda University, Graduate School of Science and Engineering. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Eseng Lai at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from 1999 where she was engaged in developmental neuroscience. She moved to the Developmental Genetics Program at New York University Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine in 2002 in the laboratory of Gordon Fishell, where she extended her research to address the molecular mechanisms of cell fate specification in the cerebral cortex. She returned to Japan in 2007 where she was appointed as a team leader at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology and established her own research group. In 2017 she moved to the Department of Biology at Waseda University as Associate Professor and was appointed as Professor in 2021. Her laboratory uses mouse models to decipher the process by which diverse types of neurons of the cerebral cortex are generated and integrated to form a functional cortical circuit.

Yasunori obtained MD and PhD from Kyoto University. After working in Tokyo University as a JSPS fellow, he moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he started working on the molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity. In 2000, he became independent as an assistant professor in RIKEN-MIT Neuroscience Research Center, the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in MIT. He then moved to RIKEN Brain Science Institute in 2009. From 2017, he is appointed as a professor of Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine. He was awarded with Young Investigator Award from Japan Pharmacology Society, JSPS Young Investigator Award, Japan Academy Medal, and Tokizane Award.

Zhigang He is Professor of Neurology and Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. He received PhD from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. His lab at Boston Children’s Hospital has been focusing on developing novel neural repair strategies for CNS injury. He has the honor of being named a Klingenstein Fellow in Neuroscience, a John Merck Scholar, a McKnight Scholar, a recipient of Irvine-Reeve Medal 2019 and Greenberg Prize for Ending blindness 2020.

Takeshi Imai completed his Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of Tokyo with Dr. Hitoshi Sakano. After spending 4 years as a postdoctoral fellow in the same lab, he started his own lab at RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe as a Team Leader. His lab developed tissue clearing techniques for high-resolution fluorescence imaging of neuronal circuits. He was appointed Professor at Kyushu University in 2017. His lab studies the functional development of neuronal circuits in the olfactory bulb and cerebral cortex.

Itaru Imayoshi received his PhD from Kyoto University, Japan in 2008 under the supervision of Ryoichiro Kageyama. After a postdoc at Institute for Virus Research of Kyoto University (Kyoto, Japan) in the laboratory of Dr. Ryoichiro Kageyama until 2010, he moved to the Hakubi Center and then to Graduate School of Biostudies of Kyoto University, to become a group leader. His group aims to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the growth and fate-determination of neural stem cells. His research is also focusing on the functional significance of neurogenesis in the postnatal and adult brain.

2015-present Professor at Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University
1996-2015 Professor at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki, Japan
1993-1995 Lecturer & associate professor at Gunma University, School of Medicine, Japan
1989-1993 Assistance professor at the Faculty of Medicine, the University of Tokyo
1988-1990 Visiting scientist at Department of Physiology, University of Goteborg, Sweden
1985-1989 PhD student at the Faculty of Medicine, the University of Tokyo
Specialized in neuroscience, especially on the motor control and cognition, functional recovery after the brain and spinal cord injury

Sebastian Jessberger is Director of the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland. He studied Medicine and carried out his medical thesis at the Center for Molecular Neurobiology (ZMNH) in Hamburg, Germany. In 2002 he started a joint residency in neurology at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) and the Dept. of Neurology of the Charite University Hospital in Berlin, Germany. As a postdoctoral fellow (2004-2007) in the laboratory of Fred H. Gage at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, USA he continued to work on neural stem cell biology and neurogenesis in the adult brain. From 2007 to 2012 he was Assistant Professor at the ETH Zurich before joining the Brain Research Institute of UZH. He is a fellow of the MaxnetAging network of the Max Planck Society, received several prizes (e.g., Friedrich Gotz prize 2013, Robert Bing prize 2016) and was awarded to join the EMBO Young Investigator program in 2012. He received an SNF Consolidator Grant in 2015 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016.

Ryoichiro Kageyama received M.D. in 1982 and Ph.D. in 1986 from Kyoto University. After spending 3.5 years as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute in the United States, he returned to Japan and was appointed Assistant Professor in 1989 and Associate Professor in 1991 in the Faculty of Medicine of Kyoto University. There, he began the research of bHLH genes, such as Hes1 and Math1, and analyzed their roles in neural development. He then moved to Kyoto University, Institute for Virus Research (now, Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences) to assume a full professorship in 1997, continuing his study on the roles of bHLH genes in neural development. In April 2006, he was appointed Director of the same institute (until March 2010). From February 2013 (until March 2019), he was appointed Deputy Director of Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences, Kyoto University. He is now appointed Director of RIKEN Center for Brain Science.

His current research involves studies on the dynamics of gene expression during cellular proliferation and differentiation. His group has developed a time-lapse imaging system for Hes expression and a light-controlled gene expression system. He is working on the role of oscillatory dynamics of gene expression in many biological events.

1981 Graduated from the University of Tokyo School of Medicine (MD)
1985 Graduated from the University of Tokyo School of Medicine (Ph.D.) (Prof. Masao Ito)
1988 Alexander Humboldt Fellow, Gottingen, Germany (Prof. Erwin Neher)
1990 Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, U Tokyo
1993 Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, U Tokyo
1999 Professor, Department of Cell Physiology, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki, Japan
2005-now Professor, Laboratory of Structural Physiology, CDBIM, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo.
2016-now Principal Investigator, International Research Center for Neurointelligence (WPI-IRCN), The University of Tokyo Institute of Advanced Study(UTIAS), The University of Tokyo, Japan

Mineko Kengaku is currently a Professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), Kyoto University. She graduated from the University of Tokyo (Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science) in 1989. She obtained her PhD in Basic Medicine from the University of Tokyo in 1995, working on the molecular mechanism underlying axis formation in the developing Xenopus brain, under the supervision of Professors Kunitaro Takahashi and Harumasa Okamoto. She performed post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Cliff Tabin at Harvard Medical School between 1995 and 1997. Her post-doctoral research focused on understanding the molecular signals regulating axis formation and morphogenesis in the chick limb bud. She then joined the laboratory of Professor Tomoo Hirano at Kyoto University as a junior faculty member, where she started her current studies on cell motility control of developing neurons in mouse brain. She moved to the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in 2004 to establish her first independent research group. She joined the current institute as an Associate Professor in 2008 and was promoted to full Professor in 2012. Her major research focus is on the polarity formation and motility control of differentiating neurons during cortex formation in the mammalian brain.

Ole Kiehn is a Danish/Swedish neuroscientist. Kiehn earned his medical degree from University of Copenhagen and his Doctorate of Science the same place in 1990. He did his postdoctoral work at Cornell University before he returned to University of Copenhagen to become a group leader at the Institute of Neurophysiology and later Department of Physiology. 2001 he was recruited to Karolinska Institutet where he became a Full professor in 2004. In 2017 he also became a Full professor at Department of Neuroscience at University of Copenhagen.

He studies the molecular, cellular, and network diversification of motor circuitries in mammals. His work has identified spinal circuits in mammals that control the ability to produce and set the tempo and coordination of locomotor movements as well as the organization of brainstem command pathways that control the episodic and context dependent expression of movement. Kiehn’s work has direct implications for how higher brain functions are expressed in the world. His work also has a focus on mechanisms for development and treatment of motor disorders.

Kiehn’s work has been recognized with the Schellenberg Prize, Torsten and Ragnar Soderberg’s Professorship, and two ERC advanced grants. He is elected member of EMBO, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, The Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Academia Europea and the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.

Juergen Knoblich’s laboratory is interested in the biology of neural stem cells. In the fruitfly, they have identified the molecular mechanism that allows neural stem cells to segregate protein determinants into only one daughter cell during mitosis and to divide asymmetrically. They have demonstrated that defects in this mechanism lead to brain tumor formation. More recently, they have extended their interest to analyzing mammalian neural progenitors and their contribution to brain development. To analyze those processes in humans, they have established a 3D culture system that recapitulates the early steps of human brain development in cell culture allowing brain pathologies and human specific developmental events to be studied in unprecedented detail. In particular, they have used this system for modelling microcephaly thereby demonstrating for the first time that human neurodevelopmental disorders can be studied in 3D culture. Jürgen Knoblich started his scientific career as a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen where he worked on cell cycle control in Drosophila under the guidance of Christian Lehner. In 1994 he moved to San Francisco to join the laboratory of Yuh Nung and Lily Jan where he discovered his interest in asymmetric cell division, a topic that has remained the main focus of his research ever since. In 1997, Jürgen Knoblich returned to Europe to become a group leader at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (I.M.P.) in Vienna, Austria. In 2004, he moved next door to the newly founded Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA). He became a senior scientist and was appointed deputy director of the institute in 2005 and director in 2018. Jürgen Knoblich has received several awards such as the Wittgenstein prize, the Schroedinger award, the FEBS anniversary award and the Hans Krebs medal. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Board of Directors of ISSCR (International Society for Stem Cell Research). He acts on the EMBO council and the editorial boards of Current Biology, Current Opinion in Cell Biology and the Journal of Cell Biology.

Dr. Kriegstein received a BS from Yale University (1971), and MD and PhD from New York University (1977). He completed Neurology Residency at the Brigham and Women’s, Children’s, and Beth Israel Hospitals, Boston, and is a board-certified clinical neurologist. He has held academic appointments at Stanford, Yale, and Columbia before joining UCSF in 2004. Dr. Kriegstein is currently the John Bowes Distinguished Professor in Stem Cell and Tissue Biology and Founding Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2008. He oversees one of the largest and most comprehensive stem cell programs in the US, encompassing over 80 laboratories focused on disorders ranging from heart disease and diabetes to cancer and diseases of the nervous system. Dr. Kriegstein’s research focuses on the stem cell niche and ways neural stem and progenitor cells produce neurons in the developing brain. He has illuminated the role of radial glia in neurogenesis and described the role of radial glia subtypes during human brain development. Currently, he is studying human cortical development and analyzing gene expression profiles of single cells to create a developmental atlas of the human cortex.

Chiaki Ohtaka-Maruyama is a project leader of Developmental Neuroscience Project in Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science.

She obtained her PhD from the University of Tokyo with a diploma in Biology. After postdoctoral training at NEI, NIH (Bethesda, MD, USA), and RIKEN(Wako), she became Research Scientist in 2006 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Neuroscience (the predecessor of Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science). She started her research in the neural development field. Since 2019, she has led her research group. She has received the Director’s Awards for excellent research, Bureau of Social and Public Health, Tokyo Metropolitan Government in 2018. She is a member of Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives since 2019.

Her research focuses on understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms of cortical development and evolution. In particular, she is interested in how mammalian six-layer structure was developed during evolution. Using time-lapse imaging and functional analyses of subplate neurons, which are first born and mature in the cerebral cortex, she found the novel function of this cell population in regulating radial neuronal migration. Her research interests are also about how subplate neurons are involved in constructing the neocortex and forming neural circuits. These studies are also intended to gain insight into mental disorders, including autism.

Fumio Matsuzaki got Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo. After a postdoctoral fellow at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute, then at the Rockefeller University, he began genetic research on Drosophila neurogenesis in 1989 when he started his own group at the National Institute of Neuroscience in Tokyo. In 1998, he was appointed professor at Tohoku University, and then as a founding member of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in 2002. He is currently a team leader of RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research. He has been continuously interested in the genetic programs and plastic mechanisms working for neural development, as well as in the cell polarity and asymmetric division of neural stem cells as fundamentals of brain formation since he found the asymmetric segregation of Prospero at Drosophila stem cell division. He is currently using Drosophila, mice, and ferrets as model systems to explore the fundamental principle for neural development as well as specific mechanisms underlying the expansion of the brain size and complexity during mammalian evolution.

Freda Miller is currently a Professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories at U.B.C. and an Adjunct Scientist and Professor (Status-only) at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto. She obtained her undergraduate degree at the University of Saskatchewan, her Ph.D. at the University of Calgary, and her postdoctoral training at the Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Miller held faculty positions at the University of Alberta, McGill and University of Toronto/Hospital for Sick Children prior to her recent move to Vancouver. She is best known for her studies of neural and dermal stem cells and for her work elucidating how growth factors regulate cell genesis, survival and growth in the nervous system. In recognition of this work, she is an elected fellow of the AAAS and the Royal Society of Canada, has won numerous awards including an HHMI Senior International Research Scholarship, and recently had an elementary school named for her in Calgary. Dr. Miller has also founded two biotechnology companies and has significant experience in scientific society leadership.

Adrian Moore studied Genetics at the University of Cambridge, where he first developed a deep interest in the genetic regulation of cellular and tissue organization. He then moved to do his PhD at the MRC Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh, studying heart formation with Nick Hastie. Taking up the key challenge of understanding the creation of the nervous system, he moved as a postdoc to work with Yuh-Nung Jan at UCSF. Presently he is team leader of the Laboratory for Neurodiversity at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science. His lab examines the formation and patterning of dendrite and axon arbors, developing and utilizing a range of in vivo imaging and cell profiling approaches to do this. At the granularity of a single differentiating neuron, he examines the generation of arbor complexity and neuron subtype pattern; beyond this, he is asking how the differentiation programs of each individual neuron are coordinated body-wide.

Masanori Murayama received his Ph.D. from the graduate school of life science at Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Science. Under the supervision of Dr. Yoshihisa Kudo and Dr. Hiroyoshi Miyakawa, he researched network dynamics of dentate granule cells in the hippocampus during spontaneous activity in vitro (EJN 2005). In 2006, he then joined the laboratory of Dr. Matthew Larkum at the University of Bern, where he studied dendritic physiology of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in vivo. By using an optical fiber bundle attached with a right-angle prism (JNP 2007, Nat. Protoc. 2009), he reviled that deep cortical interneurons control the dendrites to linearly respond to intensity of sensory inputs (Nature 2009), and that the activity of L5 pyramidal dendrites is a neural correlate of awake behavior (PNAS 2009). In 2010, he became a principal investigator at RIKEN Center for Brain Science, where he studies cortico-cortical interactions for sensory perception. Using a multidisciplinary approach in mice, his team demonstrated that top-down input is essential for accurate perception (Neuron 2015). They also found that top-down cortical information during NREM sleep is required for perceptual memory consolidation (Science 2016). He also contributed to elucidate cortical mechanisms of interhemispheric inhibition (Science 2012). His team has recently developed a fast-scanning wide field-of-view two-photon microscope and demonstrated that the cortex has small-world properties: a cost-effective information processing system (Neuron in press).

Dr. Kazunori Nakajima is Professor and Chair at Department of Anatomy, Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo, Japan. He graduated from Keio University School of Medicine in 1988, and subsequently completed residency training in Internal Medicine at Keio University Hospital. He then joined Prof. Katsuhiko Mikoshiba’s group as a PhD student in 1990 and received his PhD in 1994 from Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University. After postdoctoral training as a JSPS fellow, he became Research Scientist at RIKEN Tsukuba Center in 1995, and started his own lab in 1998 as Department Head and Assistant Professor at Institute of DNA Medicine, Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo. He then moved to Keio University in 2002 as Professor of Anatomy. Dr. Nakajima’s group developed the in utero electroporation technique and found several modes of neuronal migration such as multipolar migration, caudal migratory stream, climbing mode of hippocampal neurons, and 2-step migration of interneurons. His group focuses on the mechanisms underlying the development of layered structure of cerebral cortex.

After taking the MD from Tokyo University, Japan (1983), Hitoshi Okamoto was trained as the molecular geneticist using Drosophila and obtained PhD from Tokyo University (1988), and went abroad to Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. There, he studied the mechanisms for the axonal pathfinding by the spinal motor neurons toward the pectoral fin in the Japanese Medaka embryo. Back in Japan (1988) at the National Institute for Basic Biology and Keio University, he initiated the study using zebrafish, and elucidated that a family of transcription factors (Isl1 family) play important roles in the specification of spinal motor neurons. After moving to the Brain Science Institute (BSI) of RIKEN (1997), he performed the large-scale forward mutant screening, and elucidated the mechanisms for the differentiation of the hindbrain motor neurons by analyzing the isolated mutants. In the past 15 years, he has been interested in using zebrafish for the study of the neural circuit mechanisms for emotion and decision making by taking advantage of the evolutionary conservation of the brain structures between fish and mammals. Especially, he revealed the critical roles of the habenula in controlling fear behaviors and in the social conflict resolution for dominance or the submission by using various genetic or optogenetic manipulations.

Hideyuki Okano received M.D. in Physiology from Keio University in 1983. After he obtained Ph.D. degree on Molecular Biology of Myelin-related genes and myelin deficien mutant mice from Keio University in 1988, he held post doctoral position at Dr. Craig Montel’s Lab in Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has appointed full professors at Tsukuba University School of Medicine in 1994, Osaka University School of Medicine in 1997, and returned to Keio University Medical School in 2001 as a full professor of Physiology. Since 2007 to date, he has been a Dean of Keio University Graduate School of Medicine or a Dean of Keio University School of Medicine. He has been conducting basic research in the field of regenerative medicine including, neural stem cells and iPS cells, spinal cord injury, developmental genetics and RNA binding proteins. He has awarded numbers of awards and honors including the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2009, the first prize of the 51st Erwin von Bälz Prize in 2014 and the 18th Takamine Memorial Daiichi Sankyo Prize in 2020. He aims to establish and provide patients-specific iPS cells and genetically modified non-human primate models for neuroscience research and to explore the pathogenic mechanisms of neurological/psychiatric disorders. Currently, he is the leader of Brain Project in Japan (Brain/MINDS) and the President of The Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine and The Japanese Society for Neurochemistry.

Mu-ming Poo is the Scientific Director of Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Director of Shanghai Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Technology, and Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biology Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley. He received PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University and had served on the faculty of UC Irvine, Yale, Columbia, and UCSD, and UC Berkeley. He is the founding director of Institute of Neuroscience of CAS (1999-2019), a member of Chinese Academy of Science, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and Hong Kong Academy of Science, and an international member of US National Academy of Science. He had received Ameritec Prize, International Science & Technology Cooperation Award of P.R. China, Quishi Distinguished Scientist Award, and Gruber Neuroscience Prize. His research interest is to understand neural circuit development and plasticity, and has focused recently on the use non-human primates as animal models for studying higher cognitive functions and human brain disorders. He currently serves as member of many journals, including Neuron and Progress in Neurobiology, and is the Executive Editor-in-Chief of National Science Review. He is the leading organizer of China Brain Project（“Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Technology”）and Mesoscopic Connectome Project.

Kazunobu Sawamoto is Professor of Developmental and Regenerative Neurobiology at Nagoya City University Graduate School of Medical Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in 1996 under the supervision of Prof. Katsuhiko Mikoshiba from The University of Tokyo for his work on Drosophila neural development. He then worked as a Research Associate in Prof. Hideyuki Okano’s laboratory at University of Tsukuba (1996-1997) and Osaka University (1997-2003). In 2001-2003, he also worked as a visiting postdoc in Prof. Arturo Alvarez-Buylla’s laboratory at University of California San Francisco. He was appointed Assistant Professor at Keio University in 2003, Associate Professor at Keio University in 2005, Professor at Nagoya City University in 2007, Adjunct Professor at National Institute for Physiological Sciences in 2016, and Director of Institute of Brain Science, Nagoya City University in 2021. His work focuses on the mechanisms for neurogenesis and neuronal migration in the postnatal brain.

Martin E. Schwab is Professor of Neuroscience at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine of the University of Zurich, em.Prof. at the Dept. of Health Sciences and Technology of ETH Zurich, and founder and President of the UZH spin-off company Novago Therapeutics Inc. He studied biology in Basle and was postdoc at Harvard Medical School and the Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry (Munich). He joined the Brain Research Institute and the Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich as professor and co-director in 1985. His research focuses on the mechanisms of structural and functional plasticity and repair of the injured brain and spinal cord. He pioneered the concept of specific inhibitors of neurite growth as a cause of the absent regeneration of injured fiber tracts in the brain and spinal cord. With his group he isolated the membrane protein Nogo-A and showed that Nogo-A neutralization leads to fiber regeneration, enhanced plasticity and increased functional recovery after spinal cord or brain injuries in adult rats and monkeys. These results led to currently on-going clinical trials. Martin Schwab has served on many boards of research foundations and academies and received a large number of international prices and awards.

Hongjun Song, Ph.D. is the Perelman Professor of Neuroscience at Perelman School of Medicine of University of Pennsylvania. He is also a member of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the Epigenetics Institute. He received his. B.S from Peking University and M.A. from Columbia University. He completed his Ph.D. in Biology from University of California at San Diego with Dr. Mu-ming Poo working on axon guidance and plasticity, and postdoc training with Drs. Charles Stevens and Fred Gage at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies on neural stem cells. He became an Assistant Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in 2002. From 2010-2016, he served as the Director of the Stem Cell Program at Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering. He moved to University of Pennsylvania in 2017. The research in his laboratory focuses on neurodevelopment and plasticity in the mammalian nervous system, in particularly, adult neurogenesis and neuro-epigenetics/neuro-epitranscriptomics. His laboratory also uses patient-derived stem cells in 2D and 3D organoids to model human brain development and neurological disorders. He serves on a number of editorial boards and has won several awards, including Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience, and Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from National Institutes of Health. He is a fellow of American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Jun Takahashi is a professor and deputy director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. He graduated from the Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine in 1986 and thereafter started his career as a neurosurgeon at Kyoto University Hospital. After he earned his Ph.D. from the Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Salk Institute (Dr. Fred Gage), CA, U.S.A., where he started research work on neural stem cells. After returning to Kyoto University Hospital, he conducted functional neurosurgery, including deep brain stimulation and research work on stem cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease. In 2012, he became a full professor at CiRA, pursuing stem cell therapies for Parkinson’s disease patients. As a physician-scientist, he has laid the groundwork for the clinical application of iPS cells by developing effective differentiation protocols to dopaminergic neurons, selective sorting of the differentiated dopaminergic progenitor cells, and optimization of the host brain environment to maximize the survival and function of the transplanted cells in rodent and monkey brains. Based on these achievements, he started the world’s first clinical trial for Parkinson’s disease using iPS cells in 2018.

Mark Tuszynski is a physician-scientist exploring the topics of spinal cord injury, degenerative disorders of the nervous system, and fundamental mechanisms underlying motor learning and memory. Dr. Tuszynski obtained his bachelor of science and M.D. degrees at the University of Minnesota, and completed residency training in neurology at Cornell University Medical Center / The New York Hospital. He then earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of California ・San Diego. He has been a faculty member at the University of California ・San Diego since 1991, and is currently the Director of the Center for Neural Repair and Founding Director of the UCSD Translational Neuroscience Institute.ut Dr. Tuszynski has over 300 publications, including three books. The overarching goal of his research effort is to develop effective therapies for untreatable neurological disorders. Dr. Tuszynski performed the first human clinical trial of gene delivery in the adult central nervous system: Nerve Growth Factor gene therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. Additional clinical trials of growth factor gene therapy followed in Parkinson’s disease, and a current clinical trial in Alzheimer’s Disease. He has received 15 awards for his research. His research is supported by the NIH, the Veterans Administration and several foundations.

Pierre Vanderhaeghen is Professor at the VIB Center for Brain and Disease Research at KU Leuven, and IRIBHM, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His research is focused on the mechanisms of development of the cerebral cortex. His lab pioneered in vitro and in vivo models of corticogenesis that reveal the key influence of intrinsic properties of neural stem cells and neurons on human brain evolution.

Dr. Yazaki-Sugiyama received her PhD from Sophia University, Tokyo Japan where she studied the neuronal mechanism for vocal motor pattern generation in Japanese quail under the supervision from Dr. Kiyoshi Aoki. She then worked as a postdoc on the neuronal system for bird song learning at the Richard Mooney’s lab in Duke University, Durham USA. After that she moved to the Takao Hensch’s lab at RIKEN BSI, Wako Japan and worked on the plasticity of inhibitory neuronal system for mouse binocular vision. Since 2011 Dr. Yazaki-Sugiyama has an independent position at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Graduate University where she is currently an associate professor. Starting at 2018, she also started a position at the International Research Center for Neurointelligence (IRCN), the University of Tokyo as a project associate professor. Both at there, she is working on the neuronal mechanism of the auditory learning and the critical period in zebra finch song learning.

Yutaka Yoshida received his PhD degree with Dr. Tadashi Yamamoto at University of Tokyo in 1999. As a PhD student, he studied cancer biology. After he received his PhD degree, he joined Dr. Thomas Jessell lab at Columbia University as a postdoctoral fellow to study neural development. In Jessell lab, he focused on understanding molecular mechanisms underlying formation of monosynaptic sensory-motor circuits in the developing spinal cord. In 2008 he started his own lab in division of Developmental Biology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center where he continued to work on monosynaptic sensory-motor circuits. In addition, he started studying other motor circuits such as corticospinal circuits which are essential for skilled movements. He is also interested in promoting regeneration of motor circuits after spinal cord injury. In 2018 he moved to Burke Neurological Institute / Weill Cornell Medicine to further expand his motor circuit research. He is also an adjunct professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and technology Graduate University.

Dr. Michisuke Yuzaki graduated from Jichi Medical School, Japan in 1985. After working as a physician for 4 years, he entered Jichi Medical Graduate School and obtained a Ph.D. in 1993 under the supervision of Profs. Yasuo Kagawa and Katsuhiko Mikoshiba. He pursued postdoctoral research at Dr. John Connor’s laboratory in Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, NJ, USA. In 1995, he became an Assistant Professor at the Department of Developmental Neurobiology, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, TN, USA, and later promoted to Associate Professor. In 2003, he returned to Japan as a Professor at the Department of Neurophysiology, Keio University School of Medicine. His research goal is to understand molecular mechanisms that control synapse formation, elimination, and maintenance, focusing on new synaptic organizers, the complement family proteins, such as C1q, cerebellins, and C1q‐like proteins. He is also interested in how neuronal activities regulate functional synaptic plasticities, such as long‐term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) at excitatory synapses. They are developing optogenetic tools that can directly and reversibly regulate LTP/LTD at specific synapses to clarify their roles in vivo. Through these studies, he wishes to contribute to a better understanding of mechanisms underlying neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders, including Alzheimer’s diseases and autism.