I am deeply honored to receive the Tsukahara Memorial Award. This award bears the name of Prof. Nakaakira Tsukahara, who pioneered fundamental and innovative research in neuroscience, and I am profoundly aware of the significance and responsibility associated with this recognition.

This research could not have been accomplished by my efforts alone. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my mentors, my collaborators both in Japan and abroad, and the members of my laboratory, whose continual discussions and close cooperation have shaped this work. I am also deeply grateful to the professors who kindly nominated me for this award. Their thoughtful evaluation of my long-term research efforts has been a great encouragement to me as a scientist.

From an early age, I have been fascinated by how animals “communicate” with one another, and this curiosity has guided my research from my undergraduate studies to the present. As a student, under the supervision of Prof. Takeo Kubo (then Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo), I studied the neural mechanisms underlying social behavior in honeybees. After obtaining my Ph.D., I recognized the great potential of Drosophila melanogaster as a model system, owing to its experimentally accessible nervous system and the male courtship song used to attract females. Together with Prof. Kei Ito (then Assistant Professor at the National Institute for Basic Biology), I began investigating the auditory neural mechanisms underlying courtship communication.

Since then, I have continued to use Drosophila as my primary model to study the auditory neural mechanisms that support sound-based courtship behavior. The neural circuits and modes of information processing revealed in Drosophila are not unique to a single species, but are thought to encompass features of information-processing mechanisms shared across other insects and animal sensory systems. From this perspective, I have consistently pursued an understanding of sound-based courtship communication in insects and its underlying neural mechanisms.

In studies using Drosophila, we elucidated the wiring of auditory neural circuits and the functions of individual circuit modules involved in discriminating courtship songs. We further demonstrated that inhibitory circuits and experience-dependent plasticity play critical roles in shaping selectivity for sound patterns. These findings indicate that insect auditory circuits embody functional principles similar to those found in mammals, highlighting how studies in insects can contribute to uncovering universal principles of neuroscience.

More recently, I have expanded my research to mosquitoes, focusing on the neural and sensory mechanisms underlying auditory communication that supports mating behavior. By comparing different insect species based on conceptual frameworks established in Drosophila, I expect that both evolutionary diversity and common design principles of auditory systems will become clearer, further advancing the field of insect auditory neuroscience.

Neuroscience research using insects offers a unique opportunity to integrate ecology, behavior, neural circuits, and molecular mechanisms into a unified understanding, and in this sense represents one of the true pleasures of basic neuroscience. Encouraged by this award, I will continue to deepen our understanding of the neural mechanisms that enable animals to “communicate,” using Drosophila and mosquitoes as model organisms, while striving to convey the fascination and significance of this field to the next generation of researchers.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the members of the selection committee for the Tsukahara Memorial Award and to the Japanese Neuroscience Society for this great honor.