Kei Igarashi, PhD

Dr. Kei Igarashi received his PhD in systems neuroscience from the University of Tokyo School of Medicine. Dr. Igarashi then moved to Norway in 2009 for his postdoctoral fellowship to work in the lab of Drs. Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. There, Dr. Igarashi published seminal works showing how two brain regions, the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus, interact to form memory. These works, published in prestigious scientific journals including Nature and Neuron (Igarashi et al., Nature 2014; Li, Igarashi et al., Neuron 2015), contributed to Drs. Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser’s Nobel prize in 2014. In 2016, Dr. Igarashi moved to University of California, Irvine, to lead a research group on AD and mechanisms of memory. His lab has a longstanding record of innovation. At UC Irvine, Dr. Igarashi is currently an assistant professor. In addition to the strong support from BrightFocus Foundation, Dr. Igarashi’s work is also supported by awards from Brain Research Foundation, Japanese Government, Donors Cure Foundation, and National Institute of Health.