Dr. Ito recieved his M.D. (1984) and Ph.D. (1990) from Kyushu University, Japan. After his postdoctoral training at UC Berkely, he joined the Human Genome Center at the University of Tokyo as an assistant professor in 1992. Dr. Ito was promoted to be a professor of the Cancer Research Institure at Kanazawa University in 1999. He moved to the Department of Computational Biology (2003) and the Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry (2009) at the University of Tokyo. Dr. Ito performed a first comprehensive two-hybrid analysis of the yeast proteome as a pioneer of interactome analysis. Another significant contribution of his group is a large-scale full-length cDNA analysis that revealed unexpected complexity of the yeast transcriptome. He has also been interested in epigenomics to develop unique methods for allelic methylation analysis, one-hybrid screening for methylated DNA-binding proteins, and highly efficient whole-genome bisulfite sequencing.
Professor Ito has published many important papers on epigenetics and other biological phenomenon. He is a wet-lab researcher with an outstanding appreciation of the role computation can play in biology, and experience advising graduate students in a multi-disciplinary department. In short, a perfect speaker to foster new collaborations between experimental and computational scientists.