Kentaro Hanada National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Tokyo, Japan

Kentaro Hanada is the Director of the Department of Biochemistry & Cell Biology, National Institute of Infectious Diseases in Japan. Hanada earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1988. He was a Research Scientist (1988-1993), Senior Research Scientist (1993-1998), Chief of Laboratory of Cell Function (1998-2006) in Department of Biochemistry & Cell Biology in National Institute of Infectious Diseases (former National Institute of Health) in Japan, and the Director of the department (2006-present). In 1993-1995, he visited the laboratory of Dr. Richard Pagano under the long-term fellowship of Human Frontier Science Program. Hanada is an editor of the Japanese Journal of Infectious Diseases since 2006, and an editorial board member of Traffic since 2010.

From his undergraduate student era, Hanada has been interested in membrane biology. In his professional research career, Hanada has been focusing on sphingolipids. Since the discovery of the ceramide transport protein CERT in 2003, he has been very interested in mechanisms underlying CERT-mediated transport of ceramide from the endoplasmic reticulum to the Golgi apparatus via membrane contact sites in a regulatory manner. He is also interested in how intracellular pathogens such as viruses exploit host-derived sphingolipids.