Takaki Komiyama, Ph.D.

Takaki Komiyama is a professor of neurobiology and neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego. He is also a co-director of the Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior.

After completing a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Tokyo, Komiyama did his Ph.D. in neurosciences at Stanford in the lab of Liqun Luo, studying mechanisms of olfactory circuit assembly in the fruit fly. As a postdoc with Karel Svoboda, he pioneered the use of two-photon calcium imaging in task-performing, head-fixed mice.

Since starting his lab at UCSD in 2010, Komiyama has worked to uncover circuit mechanisms underlying motor skill learning, olfactory perceptual learning and decision-making. His group has revealed novel insights by combining modern neuroscience tools available in mice, including optogenetics for activity and plasticity manipulation, calcium imaging for ensemble recording from single or multiple brain regions, mathematical modeling of behavior, and data science approaches for large-scale neural data analysis.