I was born and grew up in Tokyo, Japan, and moved north to snowy Sapporo to study biology at Hokkaido University. For my bachelor’s project, supervised by Prof. Kazuhiro Wada, I studied the neural basis of species differences and individual variation in learned vocalisation (birdsong) in songbirds. Along the way, I spent an extra year on exchange at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
After graduating, I moved further north (though not as cold as Sapporo) to Kiel, Germany, where I joined the second cohort of the master’s programme in Molecular Biology and Evolution (MAMBE) at Kiel University. I then (barely) moved to Plön for my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. In Miriam Liedvogel’s lab, I used population genomics and epigenetics to study the microevolution of migratory behaviour in the Eurasian blackcap.
After my PhD, I finally moved south in 2024 to join the Pallares lab in Tübingen as a postdoc. Here I work on the theoretical population genetics of phenotypic stochasticity and run selection experiments on stochasticity loci in the fruit fly.
Outside work, I am a self-taught pianist, casual birder, and vinyl collector.
