Professor Hiroki R. Ueda

Hiroki Ueda 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 in 2003. He became a full professor in the Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo in 2013. He is also currently appointed as a team leader in RIKEN Centre for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR), an affiliate professor in Graduate School of Information Science and Technology in the University of Tokyo and Osaka and Tokushima University.

In 2016, he found the first sleep-promoting kinases, CaMKIIalpha and CaMKIIbeta and proposed phosphorylation hypothesis of sleep that phosphorylation-dependent regulation of Ca2+-dependent hyperpolarization pathway underlies the regulation of sleep homeostasis in mammals. In 2018, he also found the first essential genes of REM sleep, muscarinic receptors M1 and M3. To accelerate these studies, he also invented whole-brain and whole-body clearing and imaging methods called CUBIC as well as the next-generation mammalian genetics such as Triple-CRISPR and ES-mice methods for one-step production and analysis of KO and KI mice without crossing.