Tetsuji Kakutani

Tetsuji Kakutani obtained his Ph.D. in 1987 from Kyoto University, where he studied pattern formation in Dictyostelium. He then joined Yuzo Minobe’s laboratory at the National Institute of Agrobiological Resources (NIAR) in Tsukuba as a staff scientist working on genome structures of plants and plant viruses. After spending time in Eric Richard’s laboratory at Washington University as a postdoctoral fellow from 1992 to 1994, he returned to NIAR to organize his group and continued his work on epigenetics using Arabidopsis. In 2000, he moved to the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) in Mishima to take on a position as Associate Professor and was appointed as Professor in 2005. His group is interested in the control of DNA methylation in genes and transposons in Arabidopsis.