Prof. MATSUDA Yudai (松田侑大)

Dr. Yudai Matsuda received his B.Sc. in 2010 and M.Sc. in 2012 from The University of Tokyo under the direction of Professor Ikuro Abe. After a short period of experience in industry, he moved back to The University of Tokyo as a Project Researcher (2012-2013) and was then appointed as an Assistant Professor at the same university (2013-2015). Meanwhile, he obtained his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2015 from The University of Tokyo. After obtaining his Ph.D. degree, he moved to the Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Technical University of Denmark to work with Professor Thomas O. Larsen as a Postdoc (2015-2017) and subsequently again worked as a Project Researcher at The University of Tokyo (2017-2018). He joined the City University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor in April 2018, and was then Promoted to Associate Professor in July 2024. His research interests include biosynthesis, genome mining-directed discovery, and biosynthetic engineering of natural products.

Research Interest:

Natural products exhibit a wide range of biological activities and have been an attractive and rich source of compounds for drug discovery, providing many important pharmaceuticals. Recent advances in genome sequencing technologies and the development of various molecular biological tools have allowed access to many microbial genomes and provided opportunities to “bioengineer” natural products. By utilizing these state-of-the-art technologies, the Matsuda lab aims to further expand the diversity of natural products and seek to design metabolic pathways to afford useful compounds, which could potentially serve as future drug leads. The group’s current research topics include:

1. Elucidation of the biosynthesis of complex/bioactive natural products

2. Genomics-driven discovery and derivatization of natural products

3. Generation and evolution of “unnatural” natural product pathways