Dr. Ryu Watanabe earned both his MD and PhD at Tohoku University, Japan. His PhD thesis was focused on the role of autophagy in human primary CD4 T cells (Eur J Immunol. 2014). After that, he studied large vessel vasculitis at Stanford University School of Medicine as a Visiting Assistant Professor, and published several papers on reputational journals (J Clin Invest 2017, Circulation 2018, Circulation Research 2018). He is currently working as a senior lecturer at Osaka Metropolitan University, and mainly studying vasculitis and rheumatoid arthritis.