International Symposium
of Brain Projects,
Brain/MINDS and
Brain/MINDS Beyond

Dr. Shigeo Okabe is Professor and Dean at the Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo, Japan. He obtained M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo. His first job appointment was as an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. From 1993 to 1996, he stayed in the U.S. and worked as a Visiting Associate in NINDS/NIH. In 1996, Dr. Okabe came back to Japan and became Principal Investigator of the National Institute of Bioscience and Human-Technology in Tsukuba. In 1999, he was appointed as Professor of the Department of Cell Biology, Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Dr. Okabe moved back to the School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo, in 2007 as a full professor.

1978.4 Tokyo University Graduate School of Medicine Ph. D.
1978.5 Jichi Medical School, Research Associate
1982-1983 Visiting Fellow at Laboratory of Neurophysiology, NIMH(US)
1992-2000 Professor, Health Science Center, Osaka University
2000-2010 Professor, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine
2010-2017 Director and Professor, Tamagawa University
2001 Tokizane Award, Japan Neuroscience Society

John J. Ngai, Ph.D., is the Director of the NIH’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative, where he oversees the long-term strategy and day-to-day operations of this ground-breaking enterprise. Dr. Ngai earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from Pomona College, Claremont, California, and Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Prior to joining NIH, as a UC Berkeley faculty member for over 25 years Dr. Ngai trained 20 undergraduate students, 24 graduate students and 15 postdoctoral fellows in addition to teaching well over 1,000 students in the classroom. His work has led to the publication of more than 75 scientific articles in some of the field’s most prestigious journals and 10 U.S. and international patents.

Katrin Amunts is a German neuroscientist, and well known for her work in human brain mapping. In order to better understand the organizational principles of the human brain, she and her team have created the cytoarchitectonic Julich-Brain atlas. Katrin Amunts is a full professor for Brain Research, and director of the C. and O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf (since 2013), and director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Center Juelich. Since 2016, she is the Scientific research director of the European flagship, the Human Brain Project.

She did a postdoctoral fellowship at the C. and O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research at Duesseldorf University, Germany, and the set up a new research unit for Brain Mapping at the Research Center Juelich, Germany. In 2004, she became professor for Structural-Functional Brain Mapping, and in 2008 a full professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at the RWTH Aachen University as well as director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at the Research Center Juelich.

Katrin Amunts is speaker of the Helmholtz Joint Lab Supercomputing and Modelling for the Human Brain (SMBH) and coordinates the topic Decoding Brain Organization and Dysfunction of the Helmholtz Association, Germany. Since 2017 Katrin Amunts is co-speaker of the graduate school Max-Planck School of Cognition. Since 2018 she is a member of the International Advisory Council Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives, Canada. In 2016, she became a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering, Acatech and in 2017, of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences.

Katrin Amunts received the prestigious 2021 Hector Science Award as well as the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Cross of Merit 1st Class.

Mu-ming Poo is the Scientific Director of Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biology Emeritus at U.C. Berkeley. He received PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 1974 and served on the faculty of UC Irvine, Yale, Columbia, and UCSD, and UC Berkeley during 1976-2012. He is a member of CAS and an international member of US National Academy of Science. He had received Ameritec Prize, P. R. China International Science & Technology Cooperation Award, and Gruber Neuroscience Prize. He is one of the main organizers of China Brain Project.

Jeff Lichtman is Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard. He received an AB from Bowdoin (1973), and an M.D. and Ph.D. from Washington University (1980) where he worked for 30 years before moving to Cambridge in 2004. He is a member of the Center for Brain Science. Lichtman’s research interest revolves around the question of how mammalian brain circuits are physically altered by experiences, especially in early life. He has focused on the dramatic re-wiring of neural connections that takes place in early postnatal development when animals are doing most of their learning. This work has required development of techniques such as “Brainbow” transgenic mice to visualize neural connections and monitor how they are altered over time. Recently his efforts have focused on developing new electron microscopy methods to map the entire wiring diagram of the developing and adult brain. This "connectomics" approach has as one of its aims uncovering the ways information is stored in neural networks.

Professor Li-Huei Tsai is the Director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Picower Professor of Neuroscience, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and completed her postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories and Massachusetts General Hospital. Tsai became Assistant Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and was promoted to tenured Professor at Harvard in 2002. She relocated to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. She was an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1997 to 2013. Tsai is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a Member of the National Academy of Medicine, an Academician of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tsai is interested in elucidating the pathogenic mechanisms underlying neurological disorders that impact learning and memory. She is a recipient of the Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2018 Hans Wigzell Research Foundation Science Prize for her research on Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Feng is the Poitras Chair Professor of Neuroscience and Associate Director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the Director of Model Systems and Neurobiology at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute. Dr. Feng’s research is devoted to understanding the mechanisms regulating the development and function of synapses in the brain and how synaptic dysfunction may contribute to brain disorders. Using genetically engineered animal models, Dr. Feng’s laboratory combines cutting-edge technologies and multidisciplinary approaches to unravel the neurobiological mechanisms of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders.

Hideyuki Okano received M.D. in Physiology from Keio University in 1983. After he obtained Ph.D. degree on Molecular Biology of Myelin-related genes and myelin deficien mutant mice from Keio University in 1988, he held post-doctoral position at Dr. Craig Montell’s Lab in Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has appointed full professors at Tsukuba University School of Medicine in 1994, Osaka University School of Medicine in 1997, and returned to Keio University Medical School in 2001 as a full professor of Physiology. Since 2007 to date, he has been a Dean of Keio University Graduate School of Medicine or a Dean of Keio University School of Medicine. He has been conducting basic research in the field of regenerative medicine including, neural stem cells and iPS cells, spinal cord injury, developmental genetics and RNA binding proteins. He has awarded numbers of awards and honors including the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2009 and the first prize of the 51st Erwin von Bälz Prize in 2014. He aims to establish and provide patients-specific iPS cells and genetically modified non-human primate models for neuroscience research and to explore the pathogenic mechanisms of neurological/psychiatric disorders. Currently, he is the leader of Brain Project in Japan (Brain/MINDS) and a Vice President of Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine.

Conor Liston, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. The long-term goals of his research program are to define basic mechanisms by which prefrontal cortical brain circuits support learning, memory, and motivation, and to understand how these functions are disrupted in depression, OCD, and other neuropsychiatric disorders. His team is also developing novel neuroimaging tools for informing psychiatric diagnosis in human populations and predicting treatment response to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and other neurostimulatory antidepressant interventions.

Dr. Liston graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 2002, and received his PhD and MD from The Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medicine in 2007 and 2008, respectively. He subsequently completed his residency in psychiatry at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital and postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He returned to Weill Cornell as an Assistant Professor in 2014. His research has been recognized with awards from the Klingenstein-Simons Foundation Fund, the Rita Allen Foundation, the Dana Foundation, the One Mind Institute, the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Consortium, and the Hope for Depression Research Foundation. He is also a clinically active psychiatrist specializing in the management of treatment-resistant mood disorders.

1987-1993 Tohoku University School of Medicine
1993-1997 Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine
1999-2002 Assistant Professor, Department of Geriatric Medicine, Tohoku University Sch. Med.
1999-2003 Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
2003-2005 Staff Scientist, Laboratory for Proteolytic Neuroscience, RIKEN Brain Science Institute
2005-2019 Team Leader, National Institute of Radiological Sciences
2019-present Department Head, Department of Functional Brain Imaging, Institute for Quantum Medical Science, National Institute for Quantum Science and Technology

1995- M.D., Clinical training in psychiatry at UTokyo Hospital and National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Japan
2000-2002, Visiting Instructor, Harvard Medical School
2002-2008, Instructor, Lecturer at Dept. Psychiatry, UTokyo
2008-present, Professor, Dept. Psychiatry, UTokyo
2017-present, Principal Investigator, International Research Center for Neurointelligence, UTokyo

Dr. Kawato received a B.S. degree in physics from Tokyo University in 1976, with M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in biophysical engineering from Osaka University in 1978 and 1981, respectively. In 1988, he moved to ATR, and in 2010, he was appointed Director of the ATR Brain Information Communication Research Laboratory Group. He has been working in computational neuroscience and neural network modeling, with publishing about 300 papers, reviews and books. For last 10 years, He has been involved in research and development of neuroscience applications for diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders in national scientific projects and have been developing new medical technology combining AI technology and brain science.

Matthew Rushworth is the Watts Professor at the Department of Experimental Psychology (2019) and a member of the management board of WIN at Oxford (since 2001). His research focusses on cognitive neuroscience and the neural mechanisms of motivation and reward-guided decision making. He uses fMRI and non-invasive brain stimulation with humans and macaques.

Trygve Bakken co-leads an effort to characterize and target cell types in the mammalian brain using high-throughput single cell genomic sequencing. He develops computational approaches to understand how evolution has shaped cellular diversity, particularly in the human brain, and to identify highly conserved molecular features that we share with model organisms. Leveraging transcriptomic and epigenomic data from adult and developmental brain tissue, he aims to uncover gene regulatory changes driving species innovations. Previously, he completed an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego where he identified genomic variation shaping human brain morphology and a scaling rule governing retinal ganglion cell development in the fish visual system under the co-mentorship of Charles Stevens and Nicholas Schork. Prior to that, he completed an M.Sc. in Philosophy and History of Science at the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Physics and Philosophy at Yale University.

Dr. Tian holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry, molecular and cell biology from Northwestern University. She completed postdoctoral training at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, where she developed a toolbox of ultrasensitive neural activity sensors that have been widely utilized. She established her own lab at UC davis in 2012. Her current work is a combination of neural activity sensor development and applications in health and disease. Recently, Dr. Tian’s lab developed a suite of fluorescence sensors for dopamine and other monoamines to enable ultrafast neuronal imaging of neuromodulator dynamics in vivo and receptor activation, which opened new doors for imaging beyond spikes and evaluation of addictive chemical scaffolds at scale at the early stage of drug disocvery. Tian has received the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator Awards, Hartwell Foundation Individual Biomedical Research Award, M.W. Keck Award and NIH BRAIN Initiative grants.

Anne Churchland is a Professor in Neurobiology and the Arnold Scheibel Chair of Neuroscience at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Her training included undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, a PhD from UCSF, and postdoctoral training at the University of Washington. She began her independent research career at Cold Spring Harbor in 2010 and remained there until coming to UCLA in 2020. The focus of her laboratory is understanding how auditory and visual stimuli are processed by the brain and used to guide decision-making. She combines experimental work with analysis and theoretical modeling to understand the neural circuits that perform the necessary computations for these decisions. She is also co-founder and executive board member of the International Brain Laboratory, served on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (2017 – 2022), was a member of the BRAIN2.0 Working Group for the BRAIN Initiative and is on the executive committee for Neurodata Without Borders.

Education
1991 Ph.D. Osaka University School of Medicine, Japan
1987 M.D. Keio University School of Medicine, Japan
Positions
2013- Team Leader, Biotechnological Optics Research Team, RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics
2008-2018 Deputy Director, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan
2006-2013 Research Director, ERATO MIYAWAKI Life Function Dynamics Project, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Japan
2004-2009 Group Director, Advanced Technology Development Group, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan
1999- Laboratory Head, Lab for Cell Function Dynamics, RIKEN Center for Brain Science (previously named RIKEN Brain Science Institute), Japan
1997-1998 Research Pharmacologist, The University of California, San Diego, USA
1995-1997 HFSP, Long-term Fellowship, The University of California, San Diego, USA
1993-1998 Assistant Professor, The Institute of Medicine Science, The University of Tokyo, Japan
1991-1993 Researcher, The Institute of Medicine Science, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Major Honors/Awards
2021 Japan Academy Prize
2021 Keio Medical Science Prize
2020 Takeda Medicine Prize
2017 Uehara Prize
2017 Medal with Purple Ribbon