Ken-ichi Noma, Ph.D.

As an undergraduate, he studied electronics and computer engineering, developing skills that he puts to good use even now in the fields of genomics and biomedicine.  A growing interest in the improvement of human life led him to enroll in a biotechnology program where he successfully engineered a strain of carrot that could grow in high-salt conditions such as deserts.  His work on carrots involved spontaneous mutations generated during cell culture from whence he developed an interest in how genomes accumulate various mutations and, in particular, the role of mobile genetic elements referred to as transposons.

As a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, he identified novel retrotransposons and characterized the transposition mechanism in terms of epigenetic regulation.  His interest in epigenetics led him to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he pioneered a technique to map specific epigenetic changes over a large chromosomal region of the fission yeast genome.  In 2003, he was awarded the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s prestigious Newcomb Cleveland Prize for his work on how RNA interference (RNAi) machinery mediates transcriptional silencing (Best paper in Science Magazine).  In 2004, he became a staff scientist at the National Cancer Institute.

After joining The Wistar Institute as an assistant professor in 2007, he received the 2008 NIH Director’s New Innovators Award, which is recognized as the most prestigious award for young scientists.  The Noma laboratory was also supported by grants from the G. Harold & Leila Y. Mathers Foundation (2011), V Foundation for Cancer Research (2010), Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Foundation (2010), and W. W. Smith Charitable Trust (2014).  His work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM124195) and National Institute on Aging (P01AG031862).