Ueda Hiroki
Directly under the President
Professor

• Profile

  Dr. Hiroki R. Ueda was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1975. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, the University of Tokyo in 2000, and obtained his Ph.D in 2004 from the same university. He was appointed as a team leader in RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) from 2003 and promoted to be a project leader at RIKEN CDB in 2009, and to be a group director at RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC) in 2011. He became a professor of Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo in 2013. He is currently appointed as a team leader in RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR), an affiliate professor in Graduate School of Information Science and Technology and an principle investigator in IRCN (International Research Center for Neurointelligence) in the University of Tokyo, an invited professor in Osaka University, and a visiting professor in Tokushima University.
  
  He has an expertise in systems biology and focus on chronobiology by investigating mammalian circadian clocks and sleep/wake cycles. He determined a basic structure of a transcriptional circuit of mammalian circadian clocks and identified multiple delayed negative feedback motifs (Ueda et al, 2002, Ueda et al, 2005, Ukai-Tadenuma et al, 2008, Ukai-Tadenuma 2011). He also focused on long-standing and unsolved questions in chronobiology and found that a singularity behavior (i.e. temporal stopping of circadian clocks) is caused by desynchronization of multiple cellular circadian oscillators (Ukai et al, 2007), and that temperature-insensitive biochemical reactions underlie temperature compensation of mammalian circadian clocks (Isojima et al, 2009, Shinohara et al, 2017). He also invented molecular-timetable methods to detect the circadian time of the body by measuring a snapshot information of circadian clocks (Ueda et al, 2004, Minami eet al, 2009, Kasukawa et al, 2012, Narumi et al, 2016). For sleep/wake cycles, he found that Ca2+ and CaMKII-dependent hyperpolarization pathways underlie sleep homeostasis and proposed phosphorylation hypothesis of sleep (Tatsuki et al, 2016, Sunagawa et al, 2016, Tatsuki et al, 2017, Ode et al, 2017, Shi et al, 2017) and that muscarinic receptors, M1 and M3, as essential genes for REM sleep (Niwa et al, 2018). To accelerate these studies, he also invented whole-brain and whole-body clearing and imaging methods called CUBIC (Susaki et al, 2014, Tainaka et al, 2014, Susaki et al, 2015, Susaki et al, 2016, Tainaka et al, 2016, Kubota et al, 2017, Nojima et al, 2017, Murakami et al, 2018, Tainaka et al, 2018), as well as the next-generation mammalian genetics (Susaki et al, 2017) such as Triple-CRISPR(Sunagawa et al, 2016), ES-mice (Ode et al, 2017, Ukai et al, 2017) and SSS methods (Sunagawa et al, 2016) for one-step production and analysis of KO and KI mice without crossing.
  
  He received awards, including Tokyo Techno Forum 21, Gold Medal (Tokyo Techno Forum 21, 2005), Young Investigator Awards (MEXT, 2006) and IBM Science Award (IBM, 2009), a Young Investigator Promotion Awards (Japanese Society for Chronobiology, 2007). He also received Tsukahara Award (Brain Science Foundation, 2012), Japan Innovator Awards (Nikkei Business Publications Inc. 2004), Yamazaki-Teiichi Prize (Foundation for Promotion of Material Science and Technology of Japan, 2015), Innovator of the Year (2017) and The Ichimura Prize in Science for Excellent Achievement (Ichimura Foundation for New Technology, 2018).