The RIKEN BDR welcomes a new director to lead our Center’s research activities under RIKEN’s new Fifth Mid- to Long-term Plan. Dr. Ryoichiro Kageyama, formerly the Director of RIKEN Center for Brain Science, was appointed Director of RIKEN BDR as of April 1, 2025.

At BDR, he will also be running his own lab—Laboratory for Neural Stem Cell Research—which will be conducting research on clarifying the genetic-level differences between embryonic neural stem cells (NSCs), which can proliferate and differentiate into different neuronal cell types, and adult NSCs, which have lost the proliferative and differentiation capacity seen in embryonic ones, with the aim to establish a technical basis for brain regeneration.