Atsushi Miyawaki received his M.D. in medicine at Keio University School of Medicine in 1987 and his Ph.D. in signal transduction at Osaka University School of Medicine in 1991. He served as a researcher and then an assistant professor in the Institute of Medical Science, the University of Tokyo from 1991 to 1998. His main research was focused on calcium signaling. He also joined Department of Pharmacology, the University of California, San Diego as an HFSP long-term fellowship and a research pharmacologist from 1995 to 1998, to work on technological innovations in fluorescence imaging. In 1999, after returning to Japan, he set out a laboratory in RIKEN. He has been directing RIKEN Brain Science Institute as a vice director since 2004. He also launched a laboratory in the RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics in 2013.