Dr. Tetsuro Hirose is Group leader at The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) at Tokyo in Japan. After completing his PhD at Nagoya University with Professor Masahiro Sugiura in 1995, Tets continued his research on RNA editing in plant chloroplast with Professor Sugiura as a research assistant Professor in Nagoya University until 1999. He then moved to the US as a Human Frontier Science program Long-Term fellow to the laboratory of Professor Joan A Steitz (Yale University) and switched his research field from plant chloroplast RNA to mammalian nuclear RNA. He moved back to Japan in 2004 as a PRESTO researcher and adjunct Associate Professor in Tokyo Medical and Dental University. In 2005 he took up a faculty position at the Biomedicinal Information Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Tets’ research focuses on the functional characterization of long noncoding RNAs as well as introns in mammalian cells.