Prof. Norikazu Ichihashi received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo in 2005. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow, obtaining an ERATO fellowship from the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) under the Kaneko Complex Systems Project. In 2008, he moved to Osaka University to take on a position as Special Appointed Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, and in 2010, was appointed as Group Leader of the JST ERATO Yomo Dynamical Micro-scale Reaction Environment Project. He was promoted to his current position as Professor at the Department of Life Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo. His research interest lies in understanding the origin of life and evolution, and in particular, trying to reproduce evolution of life in the laboratory using in vitro synthetic biology approaches.