Minoru Watanabe conducted cell and molecular biology research at Kyushu University, where he received his Ph.D. He then did postdoctoral fellowships at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Harvard Medical School in the U.S. He is currently a professor at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Science and Technology at Tokushima University. His research interests include early development, cell differentiation, and organogenesis, using the Xenopus as the primary model organism.