Rate My Professor Takashi Kitamura

Takashi Kitamura, Ph.D., serves as Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, where he holds the Southwestern Medical Foundation Scholar in Biomedical Research endowed title. He earned a bachelor's degree in Biology from Kyushu University in Japan in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Biology from the same institution in 2007, with his doctoral research investigating the molecular mechanisms and functional role of adult hippocampal neurogenesis in the rodent brain. After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Kitamura conducted postdoctoral research at the Mitsubishi Kagaku Institute of Life Sciences in Tokyo and served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toyama in Japan. He then worked as a Research Scientist at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on neural circuits genetics for learning and memory. In May 2017, he joined the Department of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern, establishing his independent laboratory.

The Kitamura laboratory utilizes viral technology, transgenic strategies, histology, in vivo calcium imaging, in vivo electrophysiology, cell-type specific manipulation, behavioral assays, and computational programming to dissect cell-type specific neural circuits. Research interests include neural mechanisms of learning and memory, neural circuit mechanisms for observational learning and prosocial behavior, and neurobiological mechanisms underlying dysfunction of the entorhinal-cortical-hippocampus network in Alzheimer's disease. Key publications encompass 'Engrams and circuits crucial for systems consolidation of a memory' (Science, 2017), 'Island cells control temporal association memory' (Science, 2014), 'Adult neurogenesis modulates the hippocampus-dependent period of associative fear memory' (Cell, 2009), 'Visuotactile integration facilitates mirror-induced self-directed behavior through activation of hippocampal neuronal ensembles in mice' (Neuron, 2024), 'Systems consolidation induces multiple memory engrams for a flexible recall strategy in observational fear memory in male mice' (Nature Communications, 2023), and 'Hippocampal-amygdala memory circuits govern experience-dependent observational fear' (Neuron, 2022). Dr. Kitamura has received major awards such as the Award for Distinguished Investigator of the Japanese Society for Neurochemistry (2022), HFSP Young Investigator Grant Award (2018), NARSAD Young Investigator Grant Award (2018), UT System Rising STARs Award (2017), and the Young Scientists Prize for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (2017).