Kotaro Nakanishi received his B.S. degree from Tokyo University of Science in 2000, where he was involved in the research of the allosteric mechanism of lactate dehydrogenase. He received his M.S. degree from the University of Tokyo in 2003, where he studied the recognition mechanism of arginine tRNA-specific ribonuclease, colicin D. After working in industry, Kotaro returned to academic life, and obtained his D.Sc. in 2007 from Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he used X-ray crystallography and biochemistry to study aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase and tRNA modification enzyme with Osamu Nureki. In 2008, he joined the laboratory of Dinshaw Patel in the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. His work there resulted in the determination of the crystal structures of Argonaute and Dicer. He was awarded Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for Young Scientist, JSPS for Research Abroad, and Human Frontier Science Program for Long-term Fellow. In recognition of his works, Kotaro received the RNA Society/Scaringe Award in 2012 and the Young Scientists’ Prize of the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2013. He joined the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry of Ohio State University in August of 2013.