Susumu Tonegawa received his B. Sc. from Kyoto University and his Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He then undertook postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute in San Diego, before working at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland, where he performed his landmark immunology experiments. Tonegawa was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for “his discovery of the genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity.” Tonegawa switched his field of research to brain science and founded MIT’s Center for Learning and Memory in 1994, which was renamed The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in 2002. Using advanced techniques of gene manipulation, Tonegawa is now unraveling the molecular, cellular and neural circuit mechanisms that underlie learning and memory. His studies have broad implications for psychiatric and neurologic diseases. Tonegawa is currently the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Principal Investigator of the RIKEN-MIT Laboratory for Neural Circuit Genetics at MIT, as well as a RIKEN Fellow. He is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Tonegawa’s other numerous honors include: the Order of Culture (Bunkakunsho) bestowed by Japan’s Emperor, the Lasker Award granted by the Lasker Foundation in the US, the Gairdner Foundation International Award granted by the Gairdner Foundation of Canada, and the Robert Koch Prize granted by the Koch Foundation of Germany.