Hitoshi Niwa

Hitoshi Niwa received his M.D. from Nara Medical University in 1989, and his Ph.D. in medical physiology in 1993 from the Kumamoto University Graduate School of Medicine for his work in gene trap methods. From 1993 to 1994, he worked as a research associate in the Department of Developmental Genetics at the same university, before taking a postdoctoral fellowship with Austin Smith at the University of Edinburgh Centre for Genome Research. He returned to Japan in 1996 as a research associate in the Department of Nutrition and Physiological Chemistry at the Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, where he remained until taking his current position as Team Leader at the RIKEN CDB. He was appointed Project Leader of the Laboratory for Pluripotent Stem Cell Studies in October 2009.