Rippei Hayashi studied chemistry and biotechnology in the undergraduate (BSc, University of Tokyo, 2002). During his Masters/PhD, he studied the mechanism of orchestrated expression of nuclear-coded mitochondrial genes at transcriptional level, which led him to uncover the regulation of transcription factor's activity upon nuclear import (PhD, University of Tokyo, 2007). He was a Junior Research Fellow of Japan Society of Promotion of Science (JSPS, DC1). For his postdoc, he moved to Cancer Research UK (David Ish-Horowicz Group) in 2008 to study asymmetric mRNA localisation in developing Drosophila oocyte, mechanism of which was and still is largely unknown. This transition led him to get into RNA biology and Drosophila genetics, key combination for his current research. He developed and conducted live-cell imaging-based genetic screen for gurken mRNA localisation in Drosophila oocyte and identified a number of mutants related to transposon silencing, which affect the microtubule organisation thus the trafficking of gurken mRNA. He moved to the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna, Austria (IMBA, Julius Brennecke Group) in 2013 to study the mechanism of small RNA-guided transposon silencing and uncovered an unexpected link between splicing regulation and transposon regulation, and clarified the biogenesis pathways of Piwi-interacting RNA (piRNA) in Drosophila. He started his own group in Jan 2018 in the Genome Science Department at the John Curtin School of Medical Researh in the Australian National University. His research interests include transposon silencing, post-transcriptional RNA processing, and organogenesis.

PhD in life science, University of Tokyo (2007)

small RNA-guided gene silencing, pre-mRNA splicing, transposon defence, organogenesis