Biography

Fumio Matsuzaki got Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo. After a postdoctoral fellow at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute, then at the Rockefeller University, he began genetic research on Drosophila neurogenesis in 1989 when he started his own group at the National Institute of Neuroscience in Tokyo. In 1998, he was appointed professor at Tohoku University, and then as a founding member of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in 2002. He is currently a team leader of RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, and also affiliated with Graduate School of Biostudies, Kyoto University. He has been continuously interested in the genetic programs and plastic mechanisms underlying neural development, and made key discoveries to understand the cell polarity and mechanism underlying the asymmetric division of Drosophila neural stem cells such as the asymmetric segregation of Prospero. He is currently using Drosophila, mice, and ferrets as model systems, and recently made discoveries that totally revised the conventional view on the division mode of neural stem cells, including a discovery of the division mode that generates translocating neural stem cells in the murine cortex, which provides deep insights into the expansion of the brain size and complexity during mammalian brain evolution.