Dr Masahiro Ono graduated the Medical School of Kyoto University, receiving MD in 1999. Subsequently he was trained as a dermatologist, and joined the Graduate School of Medicine at Kyoto University in 2002, when he started his career in immunology. He obtained his PhD in 2006 by a study on regulatory T cells (Treg), and later identified the interaction of the Treg-specific transcription factor Foxp3 and the transcription factor Runx1.

In 2009, he obtained a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Fellowship, and joined University College London (UCL), when he established a new genomic analysis tool using a multidimensional method, Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA). In 2012, he was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship, and established his lab in UCL. In 2015, he moved in the Department of Life Sciences, Imperial. He was appointed as Senior Lecturer in 2018.

Recently, the Ono group has established a novel tool for analysing temporal dynamics of cellular differentiation and activation in vivo, Timer-of-Cell-Kinetics-and-Activity (Tocky とき), and his group is using this tool to investigate mechanisms underlying T cell differentiation and T cell-mediated immune response.

Research Breakthrough and Novel Technology

• Tocky technology (Bending et al, bioRxiv, 2017)

• Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) and Single Cell Combinatory CCA (SC4A) for transcriptome analysis (Ono et al, PLOS One, 2013; Ono et al, BMC Genomics 2014; Bradley et al, bioRxiv, 2018);

• Discovery of the Foxp3-Runx1 interaction in regulatory T-cells (Ono et al, Nature, 2007).

Teaching and Education Responsibilities

• Lectures at Year 2 Immunology (Biology), Advanced Topics for Immunology (Year 3), Advanced Topics for Infection and Immunity (Year 3), MRes Systems and Synthetic Biology, Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College

• Supervision of PhD, MRes/MSc, and Undergraduate projects.