Tomomi Kiyomitsu

Tomomi Kiyomitsu

Assistant Professor

PhD Kyoto University, Graduate School of Biostudies, Japan 2008
Master’s of Life Sciences, Kyoto University, Graduate School of Biostudies, Japan 2004
BAg Kyoto University, Department of Agriculture, Japan 2002

tomomi.kiyomitsu

Japan

Tomomi Kiyomitsu earned his BAg at Kyoto University, Japan. He then obtained his PhD at Kyoto University (supervised by Prof. Mitsuhiro Yanagida) in 2008. He continued his PhD studies of chromosome segregation as a postdoctoral fellow in Yanagida’s laboratory until 2010. From 2010-2013, Tomomi started his spindle positioning study as an HFSP long-term fellow in Prof. Iain M. Cheeseman’s laboratory at the Whitehead Institute, MIT, USA. He then moved back to Nagoya University, Japan (to Prof. Gohta Goshima’s laboratory) in 2013 and continued his postdoc work as an assistant professor and a JST PRESTO researcher. He was promoted to lecturer at Nagoya University in 2019 and then started his own unit at OIST in April 2020.

Professional Experience

• Postdoctoral fellow (HFSP long-term fellow), Whitehead Institute, MIT, USA, 2010-2013
• Assistant professor or lecturer, Nagoya University, Japan, 2013-2020
• JST PRESTO Researcher, JST, Japan, 2013-2017
• Assistant professor, OIST, Japan, 2020 - present

Awards

• HFSP Career Development Award, 2014
• The Young Scientists’ Prize in 2016 from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan

Select Publications

• Kiyomitsu, T. The cortical force-generating machinery: How cortical spindle-pulling forces are generated. Curr Opin Cell Biol. 2019 Apr 4;60:1-8. Review.
• Okumura, M. Natsume, T. Kanemaki, M.T. Kiyomitsu, T. Dynein-Dynactin-NuMA clusters generate cortical spindle-pulling forces as a multi-arm ensemble. eLife. 2018 May 31;7. pii: e36559.
• Kiyomitsu, T. and Cheeseman, I.M. Cortical dynein and asymmetric membrane elongation coordinately position the spindle in anaphase. Cell. 2013 Jul 18; 154(2):391-402.
• Kiyomitsu, T. and Cheeseman, I.M. Chromosome and spindle pole-derived signals generate an intrinsic code for spindle position and orientation. Nature Cell Biology. 2012 Feb 12;14(3):311-7.