ASTRA 2025

Kazu Kikuchi

Invited Speaker, The University of Tokyo

Dr. Kazu Kikuchi earned his medical degree and Ph.D. from Tohoku University School of Medicine in Japan, completing his doctorate in 2003. He pursued postdoctoral training at Duke University, first in Motonari Kondo’s laboratory, where he studied lymphocyte development, and later in Ken Poss’ lab, focusing on organ regeneration. In 2011, he joined the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, as Head of the Cardiac Regeneration Laboratory within the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology Division. In 2019, Dr. Kikuchi returned to Japan to become Director of the Cardiac Regeneration Biology Department at the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center. His laboratory is dedicated to uncovering the cellular and molecular mechanisms that drive myocardial regeneration. Using zebrafish as a model system, his team investigates how heart muscle repairs itself, with the ultimate goal of translating these insights into strategies for repairing damaged myocardium in humans.