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Dr. Itahana obtained his B.S. and Ph.D. degree at the Faculty of Science, Kyoto University in Japan. He subsequently received postdoctoral training at the laboratory of Dr. Judith Campisi, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to study the role for p53 in cellular senescence, and at the laboratory of Dr. Yanping Zhang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study the role for ARF-MDM2-p53 pathway in tumor suppression. After he started his own laboratory at Cancer & Stem Cell Biology Programme, Duke-NUS Medical School in Oct, 2009, he identified a number of targets and modulators in ARF-MDM2-p53 pathway to reveal several novel non-canonical functions of ARF-MDM2-p53 pathway in preventing tumorigenesis, including those involved in cancer metabolism. He is currently an Associate Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School, and he continues to work on the functions of ARF and p53 as well as cancer metabolism