Dr Tomoyki (Tomo) Tanaka starts as principal investigator in June after being awarded a prestigious career development fellowship by the Wellcome Trust in London. Once there he will recruit a new team of six to work in his own laboratory, studying how the chromosomes duplicate when cells divide - a process which often goes wrong in diseases such as cancer.
Director of the Wellcome Trust Biocentre Professor Sir Philip Cohen said: "This is a further coup for Dundee to have attracted yet another international scientist of such potential. The arrival of Dr Tanaka makes the biocentre even more international. We now have scientists from no less than 39 different countries working here."
Dr Tanaka trained in medicine at the University of Tokyo, graduating in 1987. He then spent two years at Tokyo University Hospital before concentrating on research at Jichi Medical School and the University of Tokyo. For the past four years he has been working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna./ends