Hiroki Ueda


Hiroki R. Ueda is a Japanese professor of biology at the University of Tokyo and the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center. He is known for his studies on the circadian clock.

Career

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 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 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, an affiliate professor in Graduate School of Information Science and Technology and a principal investigator in IRCN in the University of Tokyo, an invited professor in Osaka University, and a visiting professor in Tokushima universities.

Research

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. He also focused on long-standing and unsolved questions in chronobiology and found that a singularity behavior is caused by desynchronization of multiple cellular circadian oscillators, and that temperature-insensitive biochemical reactions underlie temperature compensation of mammalian circadian clocks. He also invented molecular-timetable methods to detect the circadian time of the body by measuring a snapshot information of circadian clocks. For sleep/wake cycles, he found that Ca2+ and CaMKII-dependent hyperpolarization pathways underlie sleep homeostasis, and that muscarinic receptors, M1 and M3, as essential genes for REM sleep. 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, ES-mice and SSS methods for one-step production and analysis of KO and KI mice without crossing.

Awards

He received awards, including Tokyo Techno Forum 21, Gold Medal, Young Investigator Awards and IBM Science Award, a Young Investigator Promotion Awards. He also received Tsukahara Award, Japan Innovator Awards, Teiichi Yamazaki Award, Innovator of the Year and The Ichimura Prize in Science for Excellent Achievement.