Keiko U. Torii

Biosketch

Keiko U. Torii, PhD is Professor and Johnson & Johnson Centennial Chair in Plant Cell Biology at the Department of Molecular Biosciences, The University of Texas at Austin. She is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. Dr. Torii ran her second lab at the Institute of Transformative Biomolecules (WPI-ITbM) at Nagoya University, Japan as an Oversea Principal Investigator. She currently holds Visiting Professorship at Nagoya University. In prior to relocating to the UT Austin, She was Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Washington, where she currently holds an Affiliate Professor status. Dr. Torii earned her BS in MS, and PhD in Biological Sciences, majoring in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) and the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), Corresponding Member of the Australian Society of Plant Scientists (ASPS), Member Emeritus of Washington State Academy of Sciences (WSAS), Member of the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Sciences, (TAMEST), and International Member of the NAS. Her Awards include Saruhashi Prize, Inoue Prize for Science, Asahi Prize, and Stephen Hales Prize from the ASPB. She is a recipient of the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon, conferred by the Emperor of Japan.

Research Interests

Dr. Torii investigates how positional cues influence cell-fate decisions, translating into functional tissue patterning during the development of multicellular organisms. Specifically, using plant stomatal development as a model, Dr. Torii's group studies how plant cells interpret multiple, often conflicting signals to decide whether to proliferate or differentiate into specific cell types: stomatal guard cells, which facilitate gas exchange and transpiration, and epidermal pavement cells, which protect plants from environmental insults. Her team has discovered how peptide-receptor signal transduction pathways and master-regulatory transcription factors of stomatal development fine-tune the spatiotemporal dynamics of cell division and differentiation through interplay with cell cycle machinery and epigenomic regulators. Dr. Torii recently expanded her study to amphibious model plants to understand how these regulatory pathways are re-wired to enable adaptation of land plants to extreme underwater environments. Finally, through collaboration with organic chemists and structural biologists, Dr. Torii has developed artificial and orthogonal ligand-receptor systems with novel activities to understand and manipulate signaling pathways controlling plant development. Her research provides fundamental insights into developmental logic and provides tools to manipulate plant growth and productivity.