Fukunaga Lab

About the PI (Principal Investigator)

Dr. Ryuya Fukunaga is an Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

He studies post-transcriptional gene regulation controled by small silencing RNAs and RNA-binding proteins.

Dr. Fukunaga received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry and biophysics from University of Tokyo (2002). He earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from University of Tokyo in Shigeyuki Yokoyama lab, working on aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases using X-ray crystallography and in vitro biochemistry (2002-2007). He completed postdoctoral training in RNA silencing mechanism at the University of California Berkeley in Jennifer Doudna lab working on an RNA-binding protein using biochemistry (2007-2009) and at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Phillip Zamore lab working on Dicer and Dicer-partner RNA-binding proteins using Drosophla genetics, biochemistry, tissue culture, and high-throughput sequencing (2009-2013). Dr. Fukunaga joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in September 2013 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in January 2019.

When he was a student and a postdoc, he received the Research fellowship of the Japan society for the promotion of science for young scientists (2004-2007), the Research Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Research Abroad (2007-2009), and the Research Fellowship of King Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship (2010-2012).

He is a faculty member of Program for microRNA Biology at Johns Hopkins University.

He is a member of the RNA Society and the American Heart Association.

He received American Heart Association National Scientist Development Award for 2015-2018 and Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award in 2019.

His research is supported by NIH (National Institute of General Medical Sciences, NIGMS) and by American Heart Association.

Interview article in Hopkins magazine

Complete list of his publication is here.