Speakers

Minoru Takasato is Team Leader of the Laboratory for Human Organogenesis at the RIKEN CDB, where he heads the kidney regeneration project. He received his BSc. in anthropology from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 2002, and completed his Ph.D. focusing on the study of mouse kidney development in the same university in 2008 before joining Professor Little’s laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow at Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland, Australia, in 2009. He is an expert in the directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells to kidney with his most recent work being published in Nature Cell Biology (2014) and Nature (2015). His most recent studies describe the generation of mini-kidneys from induced pluripotent stem cells for use in drug screening and disease modelling. His work has drawn a great deal of international interest in kidney development and stem cell research fields.