Hiroyuki Takeda

Hiroyuki Takeda earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 1987. Just prior to receiving his Ph.D. he worked for one year as a visiting scholar at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England, and then in 1989, spent another year as a visiting scholar in the Urological Department of Chicago University to study androgen-dependent organogenesis such as the prostate in rodent embryos. He returned to Japan in 1990 to work as a Research Associate at RIKEN and later moved to Nagoya University to take a position of Assistant Professor in 1993. During this period, he introduced zebrafish for the first time in Japan as a model to study axis formation and organogenesis in vertebrate embryos. In 1999, he was appointed Professor at the National Institute of Genetics, where he remained until 2001. In 2000, he started using medaka, a Japanese killifish for genetic analysis in addition to zebrafish. Since 2001, he has served as Professor in the Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo. His group was one of the core laboratories involved in the medaka genome project which was successfully complete in 2007.

Dr. Takeda’s group has addressed how the segmentation clock functions and which tissues are responsible for mesoderm induction and neural patterning in zebrafish. His group currently works with both medaka and zebrafish to study the mechanisms underlying vertebrate axis formation and organogenesis, and also goes into the epigenetic regulation of key developmental genes in medaka.

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