Professor Yoshikuni Mizuno is a graduate of University of Tokyo School of Medicine in 1965 and the former Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Juntendo School of Medicine in Tokyo. Now he is the Director of the Research Institute for Diseases of the Old Age and the Director of an affiliated hospital of the same medical school. He has always been interested in pathogenesis and treatment of Parkinson's disease and his group found the parkin gene in 1998.