Rate My Professor Hiroki R. Ueda

Hiroki R. Ueda is a Professor at the Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo. He earned his medical degree from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tokyo in 2000 and his Ph.D. from the same institution in 2004. His academic career includes appointments as a team leader at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology starting in 2003, progressing to project leader in 2009 and group director at the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center in 2011. He has held the position of Professor at the Graduate School of Medicine since 2013, with additional roles as an affiliate professor in the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at The University of Tokyo, principal investigator at the International Research Center for Neurointelligence, invited professor at Osaka University, and visiting professor at Tokushima University. He also served as laboratory head at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research until 2025.

Ueda specializes in systems biology, with research focused on chronobiology, synthetic biology, genome biology, and sleep science, particularly the mammalian circadian clock and sleep/wake cycles. His contributions include identifying transcriptional circuits and delayed negative feedback motifs in circadian clocks, discovering mechanisms of temperature compensation and singularity behavior in oscillators, developing molecular-timetable methods for circadian time detection, and advancing understanding of sleep homeostasis through calcium-dependent pathways and muscarinic receptors. He invented whole-brain and whole-body clearing and imaging techniques known as CUBIC, as well as next-generation mammalian genetics methods including Triple-CRISPR and SSS for efficient gene knockout and knock-in studies. Ueda has received numerous honors, including the Tokyo Techno Forum 21 Gold Medal in 2005, MEXT Young Investigator Award in 2006, IBM Science Award in 2009, Tsukahara Award in 2012, Yamazaki-Teiichi Prize in 2015, and The Ichimura Prize in Science for Excellent Achievement in 2018. He maintains active involvement in research projects and symposia at The University of Tokyo.