As an undergraduate studying biology in Japan, Junko Tsuji suspected there were quicker ways to do research. For her capstone project at Soka University, she had been helping to develop a device that could separate individual cells for experiments, a project that required her to visit the lab daily to keep the cells alive. She wondered if a computational approach could make these experiments go faster, so she began learning about the emerging field of bioinformatics by enrolling in one of the university’s first classes in the field. “I was so impressed that a computer could do biological analysis so quickly,” she recalled. The experience inspired Tsuji to later pursue graduate studies in the newly launched computational biology department at the University of Tokyo, where she explored the role of mitochondrial DNA in the nuclear genome.
After earning her Ph.D., Tsuji moved to the U.S. for a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, where she analyzed large-scale sequencing datasets to understand how the genome is regulated. When she arrived, Tsuji could only understand a third of what was spoken to her. And the first traffic jam she encountered was a flock of geese crossing the road, a much slower pace than the busy cities of her youth.
