People
We are a small, multinational team based in Kobe, Japan — bridging basic neuroscience, AI, clinical research, and device development. Our alumni span ten countries and continue to lead memory and sleep research worldwide.
Principal Investigator
Masanori Sakaguchi received his medical degree from the University of Tsukuba in 2001 and completed his PhD in Medicine at the Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, in 2005. He then served as a research associate in the Department of Physiology at Keio University School of Medicine (2005–2007), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Paul Frankland’s laboratory at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute (SickKids), Toronto (2007–2009).
From 2013 to 2025, he was Associate Professor at the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine (IIIS), University of Tsukuba — initially co-leading a research group with Professor Takeshi Sakurai (2013–2018), and from October 2018 leading his own laboratory. From 2022 he held a tenured Associate Professorship in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tsukuba. In January 2026 he was appointed Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurophysiology at Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine. Since May 2026 he has also held a Visiting Professorship at the University of Tsukuba, and he concurrently holds a visiting researcher position at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS).
Researcher ID: 60407088 (KAKEN) · ORCID: 0000-0002-7211-9452
Selected funding: JSPS Kiban-A (PI 2026–), Grant-in-Aid for Transformative Research Areas (B) (PI 2024–2026), AMED translational research grants, AMED Translational Research Program Seeds S1 (PI 2026–), Moonshot R&D Goal 7 (Co-PI), JST CREST (Co-PI 2026–).
Current members — Kobe campus
Mukhamad Sunardi is a physician by training. He received his MD from the Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and then worked as a general practitioner in the emergency department of Bhayangkara Hospital while serving as a clinical research assistant in paediatric surgery at UGM.
He came to Kobe in 2017 as a Japanese Government (MEXT) scholarship student and completed his PhD in Medical Sciences at Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine in 2021. He continued at Kobe University as a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow for Research in Japan, and joined this department in 2026.
His research concerns RET–GDNF signalling, the development of the enteric nervous system, and Hirschsprung disease, using CRISPR-Cas9 knock-in mouse models.
Current members — Tsukuba campus
Members based at the University of Tsukuba who collaborate with the Kobe lab and participate in our research and lab meetings remotely. The PI holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Tsukuba (from May 2026).
Visiting & Affiliated Members
Visiting professors and external collaborators affiliated with the lab, who contribute to specific projects and join our meetings and research remotely. Each member's individual title is shown below.
A specialist in databases, data engineering, and large-scale data analysis, Hiroyuki Kitagawa has long applied machine learning to sleep science — including automated sleep-stage scoring. He works with us on the data-science side of our sleep and memory research.
A third-year Neuroscience major at Colorado College (USA), Makoh works with us as an external collaborator on Project Commonsound — part of our Sound Exposure during Sleep (SES) research — contributing to the design and curation of the sound library.