Shigeru Kondo received his doctorate from the Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine in 1988. He spent the period from 1989 to 1990 as a postdoctoral fellow in Masami Muramatsu's lab at the University of Tokyo, before taking an overseas fellowship at the Basel University Biocenter under Walter Gehring. He returned to Kyoto University in 1994 as assistant professor, where he remained until 1998, when he was appointed professor in the Tokushima University Faculty of Integrated Arts and Sciences. Dr. Kondo was appointed CDB team leader in 2001, where he remained until 2005. He left the CDB in April 2005 to take a position as professor in the Group of Pattern Formation Principles at Nagoya University. His research focuses on demonstrating the mathematical basis of pattern formation in development, and using mathematical models as predictive tools to aid in the identification of genes and molecules involved in the generation of spatial structures.