Shinya Yamanaka

Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese stem cell researcher and Nobel Prize laureate who serves as Director Emeritus and Professor at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University, and as a Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. He is best known for his 2006 discovery that adult somatic cells can be reprogrammed into an embryonic-like pluripotent state through the introduction of specific transcription factors, creating what are known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. For this work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012, shared with John Gurdon.