Professor Piero Carninci is a Team and Unit Leader and a Deputy Project Director at the RIKEN Omics Science Center in Yokohama. Born and Educated in Italy, Dr. Carninci obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Trieste in 1989. From 1990 to 1995 he developed technologies for DNA extraction and DNA sequencing at Talent, a spin-off biotech company. He moved to Japan in 1995 at RIKEN, Tsukuba Life Science center and became a tenured researcher in 1997. He has been developing technologies to capture full-length cDNAs, which were used for the construction of the Fantom projects. He moved into his present role at RIKEN in 2008. Dr. Carninci has developed technologies to analyze the transcriptome, such as the cap-trapper and CAGE. These technologies have been broadly used in the RIKEN Fantom projects and allowed identification of non-coding RNAs as the major output of the mammalian genome and providing comprehensive maps of mammalian promoters. He has published more than 180 papers and book chapters, edited books and is a member of editorial boards of various scientific journals.