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Shinichi Morishita, Ph.D, is a Professor in the Department of Computational Biology, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo as well as a Professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Tokyo. He received his B.S and M.S. in Department of Information Science, University of Tokyo in 1983 and 1985. He joined IBM Research in 1985 and studied artificial intelligence, logic programming, and data mining until 1997. He was a visiting scholar in the Department of Computer Science, Stanford University during 1990-2, where he studied database theory and database system optimization with Professor Jeffrey D. Ullman. In 1997, he moved to the University of Tokyo and has been working on bioinformatics.
His primary interest is to develop fundamental theory, algorithm, and software for analyzing large-scale biological and medical data. He and his colleagues have been developing a genome assembler from scratch to sequence the medaka and silkworm genomes. They also confirmed the two whole genome duplication events in early vertebrates (postulated by Susumu Ohno in 1970) through the comparison among variety of vertebrate genomes, and reconstructed vertebrate ancestral genomes. His current interest is to study if DNA sequence variation reflects germline genetic activity and underlying chromatin structure. A positive result is reported in 2009 through the analysis of a large volume of next-generation sequencer data obtained from three medaka genomes.
In addition to the genome science research, he and his colleagues have been developing image processing software for quantifying morphological changes in mutants of a variety of model species such as budding yeast, fruitfly, and mouse. Precise quantification of morphological changes in mutants that lost some specific genes has been proved to be useful in estimating functions of the disrupted genes.
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