Fumio Matsuzaki

Fumio Matsuzaki received his B.Sc. from the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Tokyo in 1979, and his doctorate from the same institution in 1984, for his work on the characterization of the erythrocyte cytoskeletal structure. He spent the period from 1984 to 1988 as a postdoctoral fellow, first in the Department of Cell Biology at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, then in the laboratory of Gerald Edelman at the Rockefeller University. He returned to Japan in 1988 to take a position as a section chief in the Department of Molecular Genetics in the National Institute of Neuroscience. In 1998, he was appointed professor in the Department of Developmental Neurobiology at Tohoku University and remained there until taking his current position as group director at the RIKEN CDB. He has been studying genetic programs that create cellular diversity during development, and is currently focusing on neurogenesis and neural stem cells, using Drosophila and mouse as model systems.