Masaki OKANO, Ph. D.  

Masaki Okano received his baccalaureate and master's degrees from Kyoto University, and his doctorate in biochemistry from the Research Division in Agriculture at the same institution in 1994. He spent the period from 1994 to 1995 as a research fellow in cell biology at the Nagoya University Bio Science Center before moving to Massachusetts, where he worked as a research fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital from 1995 to 2002, serving as an instructor in medicine at Harvard for the last two years of that period. He was appointed team leader at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in 2001, and returned to work in Japan full-time in 2002.