Biography

I grew up in Okayama, in the countryside of Japan. Since childhood, I have been fascinated by microscopes, especially by watching microorganisms move beneath the lens. Driven by a desire to understand these familiar microbes more deeply, I joined Hisao Moriya’s lab in my second year as an undergraduate. There, I became deeply engaged in yeast genetics, particularly gene overexpression, and spent the next seven years studying yeast. For me, the joy of biology lies not only in observing cells, but also in perturbing them and uncovering how they respond. Over the course of my doctoral research, I overexpressed a wide range of proteins in yeast and investigated the resulting phenotypes. I came to see these phenotypes as direct manifestations of the fundamental constraints of the cell itself. The amount of protein a cell can tolerate is determined by multiple cellular limitations, including the intracellular resources available and the limited capacity of cellular compartments to properly accommodate proteins. Reflecting on these constraints gradually led me to a broader question: how was the proteome of modern cells shaped through evolution? In 2026, I joined Christian’s lab to study protein evolution. Working in this new environment, I have been enjoying the challenges that come with entering a new field and expanding my perspective.

Research interests

My current research interest is in understanding how cellular proteomes are shaped. In the Christian lab, I aim to combine overexpression-based approaches with deep mutational scanning to ask why genes have their current expression levels and amino acid sequences, and how these properties have been established through evolution.