I completed my BS, MS and Ph.D. in Biotechnology at the University of Tokyo, where I learned biochemical approaches and RNA mass spectrometry to study RNA modification under the supervision of Dr. Tsutomu Suzuki. After completion of the short postdoc training at the University of Tokyo, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and joined Dr. Matthew Waldor’s lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. During my postdoc training, I learned and developed high-throughput experimental approaches, including a pipeline to profile tRNA modifications in non-model organisms where tRNA modification is largely unexplored. I harness my expertise in biochemistry, bacteriology, and infection biology to discover new translation control mechanisms underlying bacterial pathogenesis and commensalism.