Mitinori Saitou graduatedfrom the Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine in 1995, and was awarded an M. D. in 1999 for his study of the structure and function of mammalian tight junctions under Prof. Shoichiro Tsukita in the Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine. After a brief fellowship in the same department, he moved to the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Institute in 2000, where worked as a postdoctoral research associate in Azim Surani’s laboratory, focusing on the origin and properties of the germ line in the mouse. He remained there until 2003, when he returned to Japan to take up his current position as head of the CDB Laboratory for Mammalian Germ Cell Biology. He received a three-year grant from the Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST) PRESTO program that same year.