Kozo Kaibuchi graduated from Kobe University to become a medical doctor in 1980, and gained a PhD in Biochemstry from the same University working on protein kinase C in 1984. He then undertake postdoctoral work on molecular genetic analyses on Ras and protein kinase C at DNAX Research Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology in USA in 1985. He took up the junior faculty position at Kobe University in 1987, where he worked on the small GTPases including Rho and Rab. He then moved to take up the full professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology in 1994. There, he discovered several effectors of the Rho family GTPases including Rho-kinase, and found Rho regulates cell contractility acting through myosin phosphorylation. He moved to Nagoya University in 2000, where he found CRMP-2 as a neuronal substrate of Rho-kinase and CRMP-2 controls neuronal polarity. He analyzed how extracellular and intracellular signals regulate neuronal polarity both in vitro and in vivo. He has recently developed a novel phospho-proteomic approach to comprehensively screen for substrates of protein kinases including Rho-kinase, PKA and MAPK, and to analyze how dopamine and acetylcholine regulate neuronal excitability and reword- and aversion-related behaviors. He is acting as an editor in chief of Cell Structures and Functions, and an associate editor of J. Neuroscience, Molecular Biology of Cells, Developmental Neurobiology, and Genes to Cells. He is a visiting professor of Kobe University