Shinya Yamanaka

Who is Shinya Yamanaka?

Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese Nobel Prize-winning stem cell researcher. He serves as the director of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application and a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University; as a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated J. David Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California; and as a professor of anatomy at University of California, San Francisco. Yamanaka is also the current president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

He received the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2011 with Rudolf Jaenisch; the Millennium Technology Prize in 2012 together with Linus Torvalds. In 2012 he and John Gurdon were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells can be converted to stem cells. In 2013 he was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his work.