Dr. Kiminobu Sugaya
Dr. Kiminobu Sugaya has been a Professor and Head of Neuroscience in Burnett School of Biomedical Science, College of Medicine, University of Central Florida (UCF) since 2004. He is also the Chair of the Multidisciplinary Neuroscience Alliance of UCF, an Honorary Professor at INDICASAT, Panama, and a visiting professor at Tohoku University.
He moved from Japan to the US as a post-doctoral fellow for Mayo Clinic in 1992 when he was a lecturer at the Science University of Tokyo. He was promoted to an associate consultant in 1994. Then he became an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1997 and was promoted to an associate professor with tenure in 2002.
He invented iPS cells in 2004, a year before the Japanese group filed their invention, using overexpression of embryonic stem cell gene, Nanog, from adult stem cells. He received the National Honor Plaque of Panama for exceptional contribution to neuroscience based on his study on stem cell therapies for neurodegenerative diseases.
His research has been reported Washington Post, BBC, NBC, ABC, and other media worldwide.
Dr. Sugaya co-founded Progenicyte Japan with Neung Suh, a biotech UCF spin-off company in Kobe, in January 2020.
He is married to his wife of 12 years, Ayako Yonetani, who is an internationally recognized violinist and professor of music at UCF. Her educational credentials are also impressive and include; BA, MA and DMA from the Juilliard school, in New York. Together they have been teaching a course, Music and the brain for 18 years.
Comments