Evolution of diverse personality traits in human

Human adaptation and diseases as its evolutionary consequence are of quite interest. So far I have focused on the evolution of genetic variants related to psychiatric disorders or personality traits and conducted comparative genomic analyses by molecular evolutionary approaches. In our previous study (Sato & Kawata 2018, Evol. Lett.), we showed that natural selection have played an important role on the maintenance of psychiatric disease risk alleles of VMAT1 gene within populations, which could underlie our psychological diversity including psychiatric disorders and personality traits. Moreover, our recent experimental study (Sato et al. 2019, BMC Evol. Biol.) showed that the neurotransmitter uptake of VMAT1 had evolutionarily declined, possibly suggesting that higher levels of anxiety could have been favored during the early phase of human evolution. In my ongoing work, I am trying to evaluate the fitness effects of the genetic polymorphism in VMAT1 gene using large cohort dataset of Japanese population and reveal evolutionary mechanism behind human psychological diversity.

Adaptive evolution of domestic animals

• Molecular experiment (Cloning, PCR, Cell culture, Western Blotting)
• Behavioral experiment (in mice)
• Bioinformatics / Genome and transcriptome analyses
• Molecular evolution / Population genetics
• Statistics and programming (R, Perl, Python, Julia)

• Best Poster Award, The 80th Fujihara Seminar, 2021
• The Award for Education and Enlightenment, The Society of Evolutionary studies, Japan, 2021
• President's Award, Tohoku University, 2021
• Aoba Society for Promotion of Science Award, Tohoku University, 2021
• Excellent Poster Presentation Award, The Online Symposium of the Graduate Schools of Science and Life Sciences 2021, 2021
• Best Poster Presentation Award, The 5th Annual Meeting of the "Brain and Individuality", 2020
• Excellent Oral Presentation Award, The 20th Annual Meeting of the Society of Evolutionary studies, Japan, 2018
• Excellent Poster Award, The Informatics In Biology, Medicine and Pharmacology (IIBMP) 2017
• Excellent Poster Award, The 19th Annual Meeting of the Society of Evolutionary studies, Japan, 2017

• JSPS Research Fellow (DC2), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), 2020-2022
• Funding for travel stipends (for SMBE2019), Kato Memorial Bioscience Foundation, 2019
• Graduate Program in Data Science, Tohoku University, Scholarship term: 2017–2020