Yuki is an evolutionary biologist interested in why and how behavior evolves in nature. He completed his Bachelor in Agriculture at the University of Tokyo and moved to the US for his graduate studies. First at the Department Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology (E3B) in Columbia University, where he was a FUTI Global Leadership Award recipient, he worked with Prof. Dustin Rubenstein and Prof. Molly Przeworski on the genomic basis of local adaptation in a Taiwanese burying beetle. His Master’s thesis was awarded the Alfred Russel Wallace Prize for the best MA thesis of the year. He then moved onto a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Princeton University. In the McBride lab, he spearheaded a global population genomics project called PipPop, with an aim to understand the evolution of man-biting mosquitoes around the world. This international project involved more than 100 groups from ~50 countries. At Princeton, he has been a Centennial Fellow, Masason Foundation Scholar, and PIIRS Graduate Fellow. From 2023, Yuki will be at Harvard University/Howard Huges Medical Institute working with Prof. Hopi Hoekstra to understand the mechanistic basis of behavioral evolution in mice.
He is also passionate about connecting scholars, especially those who study/work outside Japan. He is one of the co-founders of XPLANE, an Non-Profit Organization funded by US Dept. of State and US Embassy Tokyo. He and co-founders designed and implemented a community-based knowledge platform for Japanese students who would like to apply for overseas graduate schools with limited resources. He is also a founder and the president of FUTI Alumni, an alumni network of previous awardees of FUTI fellowships and awards.
