Ryohei Yasuda PhD

Dr. Ryohei Yasuda was named Scientific Director of the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience in 2012 and heads the Neuronal Signal Transduction Lab. The focus of Dr. Yasuda’s lab is to elucidate some of the molecular mechanisms underlying synaptic plasticity and ultimately learning and memory. Dr. Yasuda received his PhD in Physics in 1998 from Keio University Graduate School of Science and Technology in Yokohama, Japan. In his PhD studies, he demonstrated that the enzyme ATP synthase is a rotary motor made of single molecule and that its energy conversion efficiency is close to 100%. From 2000 to 2005, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where he built an imaging device to monitor protein interactions in living cells with high sensitivity and resolution.

From 2005 to 2012, he was an assistant professor of the Neurobiology department at the Duke University Medical Center where he developed a number of techniques to visualize signaling activity in single synapses. From 2009 to 2012, Dr. Yasuda served as an Early Career Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Yasuda has received a number of awards for his research accomplishments including the Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the New Investigator Award from the Alzheimer’s Association, and Research Award for Innovative Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience.