Aya Takeoka Awarded the Kobe Young Investigator Prize

Aya has been awarded the Kobe Young Investigator Prize (神戸賞) by the Nakatani Foundation, one of Japan’s newly established prizes recognizing exceptional young researchers in Biomedical Engineering, the frontier between the life sciences and engineering. Learn more about the Kobe Prize: https://www.kobe-prize.jp/

The prize will fund an ambitious new research direction in the lab: developing a revolutionary microscope to study spinal physiology in awake, behaving mice at unprecedented resolution and over extended periods. These tools do not yet exist. The project represents a fundamental leap in our ability to observe the living spinal cord in its natural operational context: across time during real behavior, at rest, sleep, etc., and at a level of resolution that current methods cannot achieve. The spinal cord remains one of the most under explored organs in neuroscience, despite its central role in mediating movement, sensation, and autonomic function. A key barrier has been the limited tools available to capture its dynamic physiology. This award will enable the lab to build that missing toolkit from the ground up. We are grateful to the Nakatani Foundation for their vision in supporting high-risk, high-reward science at the interface of engineering and biology.