Prof (MD, PhD) Takashi Yamamura

Prof Dr Takashi Yamamura is the director of the National Institute of Neuroscience (NCNP) in Tokyo, Japan. He was also appointed the director of Multiple Sclerosis Center and the head of the Department of Immunology at NCNP. Prof Yamamura graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Kyoto University. He was later trained at the Max-Planck Society Clinical Research Unit for multiple sclerosis (MS) in Germany. He also worked at Harvard Medical School as a research fellow and as a visiting scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His overall research is centred on the translational research of neuroimmunological disorders, autoimmune-mediated pathogenesis of MS and related disorders, natural killer T (NKT) cell targeting therapy of autoimmune diseases, as well as regulation of autoimmunity. Prof Yamamura's main interests are the immunological pathogenesis of MS and related disease (neuromyelitis optica) and the development of new treatment options for neuroimmunological disorders. He is the author of more than 150 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Nature Immunology, Nature Comm, JCI, Brain, PNAS, Trends Immunol, and of more than 200 review articles and book chapters, related to MS and neuroimmunology.