Kota Banzai is a post-doctoral fellow in the Cellular Biology Department, University of Georgia. He received his undergraduate and a Ph. D from Kanagawa University, Japan. He studied the expression mechanism of cholinergic gene locus in the silkworm, Bombyx mori, mentored by Dr. Susumu Izumi. As a post-doctoral fellow (2016 to 2018) in Takashi Nishimura’s lab at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology, Japan, he studied the effect of nutrition in development using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. He then moved to Daichi Kamiyama’s lab at the University of Georgia. Here he learned to expand imaging tools based on fluorescent proteins to advance his research focus on neuronal development.
