Atsushi Miyawaki received his M.D. in medicine from Keio University School of Medicine in 1987 and his Ph.D. in signal transduction from Osaka University School of Medicine in 1991. He served as a researcher, and then as an assistant professor, at the Institute of Medical Science, the University of Tokyo, from 1991 to 1998. His main research focused on calcium signaling. He was also at the Department of Pharmacology, the University of California, San Diego as an HFSP long-term fellow and research pharmacologist from 1995 to 1998, working on fluorescence imaging. After returning to Japan in 1999, he became head of the Laboratory for Cell Function Dynamics at the Brain Science Institute (BSI) of RIKEN. From 2004 he has been directing the Advanced Technology Development Group of BSI.