iTHEMS Colloquium by Hiroki R. Ueda on October 10, 2025
On October 10, 2025, Dr. Hiroki Ueda, Professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Medicine and former Team Leader at RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR), delivered a splendid iTHEMS Colloquium talk on the Wako campus.
His lecture, titled “Why Do We Sleep? The Role of Calcium and Phosphorylation in Sleep,” attracted a wide audience—not only researchers from iTHEMS but also colleagues from other RIKEN centers, including the Pioneering Research Institute (PRI) and the Center for Brain Science (CBS), as well as administrative staff. The talk was highly engaging and accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike.
Dr. Ueda began with an overview of the long history of sleep research and the major unsolved questions that continue to inspire the field. He then presented his group’s recent discoveries on the role of calcium in sleep regulation. He also introduced a new theoretical framework—the WISE (Wake Inhibition Sleep Enhancement) mechanism—together with its mathematical modeling. Because sleep is closely connected to our daily lives, the audience had many questions from diverse perspectives, and Dr. Ueda kindly addressed each of them in detail. During and after the colloquium, including at the dinner that followed, we had stimulating discussions with him about his group’s model and potential new directions for sleep research and related areas of life science. We are deeply grateful to Dr. Ueda for his inspiring lecture and for sharing his broad expertise with our community.
(Photos: courtesy of Assistant Chikako Ota, RIKEN iTHEMS.)
Reported by Gen Kurosawa
