FRANK ROGOZIENSKI/WONDERFUL MACHINEIn his efforts to map the brain’s neural connections, Takaki Komiyama has scrutinized the antennal lobes of fruit flies and injected fluorescently labeled viruses into the tongues of mice. But his first scientific venture involved sitting in a small boat off a tropical island and collecting seawater samples. As a teenager, he served as an unofficial assistant on research expeditions with his father, a chemical engineer who was studying how coral reefs impacted atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“It was a bunch of students and postdocs working as a team,” Komiyama recalls. The experience “definitely made science and research quite approachable—something that I could imagine myself doing.”
Komiyama studied biochemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Tokyo, where he also conducted research with neuroscientist Hitoshi Sakano, contributing to the identification of a novel transmembrane protein in the mouse olfactory neural network.
Enticed by the question of how sensory circuits form, Komiyama headed to graduate school at Stanford University, where he delved into the fine-tuned regulation of neuron wiring in the Drosophila olfactory system. In work that began during his first-year rotation in Liqun Luo’s lab, the young PhD student examined the growth of olfactory projection neurons. Komiyama showed that distinct transcription factors ...
