Bio:
Yuka W. Iwasaki is a Team Director at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Yokohama, Japan, where she leads the Laboratory for Functional Non-coding Genomics. Her research focuses on the roles of non-coding RNAs and transposable elements in genome regulation and maintenance. She received her Ph.D. in computational biology from Keio University, where she studied under Professor Masaru Tomita. During her doctoral studies, she conducted research as a visiting Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, combining computational and experimental approaches to investigate microRNA function. She subsequently joined the laboratory of Haruhiko Siomi as a postdoctoral researcher, where she studied piRNA-mediated transposon silencing. She later established her independent laboratory at RIKEN in 2023.