Yukari Minami-Ogawa

Yukari Minami-Ogawa, MD, PhD, is a neurosurgeon and physician-scientist at Kawasaki Medical University, Japan, with a particular interest in visualising neuronal pathways in the brain. During her doctoral research, she performed a systematic three-dimensional analysis of histaminergic neurons projecting from hypothalamic nuclei to the olfactory bulb (OB) in the mouse brain. By combining immunohistochemistry, advanced microscopy, and viral/retrograde tracing techniques, she demonstrated that the histaminergic pathway arising from the rostral ventral tuberomammillary nucleus projects to the OB. She believes that elucidating the anatomical architecture of neuronal circuits will uncover previously unknown functional interactions within the brain. These research interests led her to join Professor Zoltan Molnár’s laboratory at the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, as a Visiting Academic from August 2025. Her current project investigates orexinergic projections to the medial prefrontal cortex using anterograde and retrograde tracing approaches. She obtained her medical degree from Kawasaki Medical School, Japan. After completing her residency, she underwent clinical training in neurosurgery and became board-certified in neurosurgery and stroke medicine. In March 2025, she earned her PhD under the supervision of Professor Kazunori Toida at Kawasaki Medical School. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Structural Basis for Histaminergic Regulation of Neural Circuits in the Mouse Olfactory Bulb (Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2024), provided the first systematic anatomical characterisation of hypothalamic histaminergic inputs to the OB. This work indicated that histamine may contribute to olfactory processing, suggesting a functional link between hypothalamic activity and olfaction.