Kazuto Kato

Kazuto Kato, PhD is Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Public Policy at the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, Japan. He is also a Project Professor of the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) at Kyoto University. He has a PhD degree in developmental biology from Kyoto University. After finishing postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge with Sir John Gurdon, he started to work in the interface between bioscience and society, particularly focusing on ethical and social issues of genomics and stem cell research.

He has been serving as a member of various international projects/academic societies such as Ethics Committee of Human Genome Organization (HUGO) (currently, HUGO Committee on Ethics, Law and Society), ELSI group of the International HapMap Project, Ethics and Policy Committee of the ICGC (International Cancer Genome Consortium), and Ethics and Public Policy Committee of the ISSCR (International Society for Stem Cell Research). In 2010, he was appointed as a member of the Expert Panel on Bioethics of the Council for Science and Technology Policy (CSTP) of the Cabinet Office, Japan. He is a visiting researcher at the Research Institute of the Japanese National Cancer Center. In 2013, Professor Kato was also appointed as the chairperson of Research Ethics Committee, RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB). Professor Kato is currently specializing in biomedical ethics, science communication, and public policy of life sciences.

Since 2010 Professor Kato has been directing a new research group, the Research Unit for the ELSI of Genomics to carry out analysis of ethical, legal and social implications of human genome research, particularly focusing on the whole genome and exome analysis. The Research Unit actively collaborates with leading genomics researchers, including HeLEX, as well as ELSI scholars in Japan and other countries including those in Asia.