Dr Okuda is an expert in zebrafish research, vascular biology, disease modeling, drug discovery and imaging. Dr Okuda has published 30+ peer-reviewed papers in leading journals such as Nature Cell Biology, eLife and Development with 1700+ total citations.

Dr Okuda was awarded his PhD at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 2014. During his PhD training, Dr Okuda generated zebrafish transgenic lines that fluorescently label lymphatic vessels. Characterisation of these transgenic lines resulted in the identification of new lymphatic networks, generation of the first embryonic atlas of vertebrate lymphatic vessels and revealed new mechanisms of lymphatic development. Dr Okuda's study revolutionised how zebrafish is used for studying lymphangiogenesis and the zebrafish transgenic lines he generated are now one of the most utilised transgenic models for live-imaging lymphangiogenesis globally (Okuda et al., Development 2012).

As a postdoctoral scientist in Cancer Research Malaysia, Dr Okuda screened for potential anti-cancer therapeutics from libraries of natural product-derived compounds/extracts using various zebrafish transgenic lines. This work has resulted in the identification of promising anti-cancer and anti-lymphangiogenic compounds. For his second postdoctoral training, Dr Okuda joined Professor Benjamin Hogan's laboratory at the University of Queensland and later at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. Here, Dr Okuda used the zebrafish model to visualise dynamic signalling events during development and regeneration, and identify and characterise novel genes involved in lymphatic development. One of Dr Okuda's major discovery as a postdoc was his identification of Ddx21 and ribosome biogenesis as novel selective regulators of embryonic lymphangiogenesis (Koltowska* and Okuda* et al., Nat Cell Biol 2021, co-first authors), This pioneered the concept of targeting Ddx21/ribosome biogenesis in diseases with excessive lymphatic proliferation.

Dr Okuda started his lab at the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science, Department of Biochemistry and Chemistry, La Trobe University in 2023. His lab is focused on identifying and characterising therapeutic leads/targets that modulate the vasculature (Ng et al., Pharmaceuticals 2024), as well as studying dynamic signalling mechanisms in endothelial cells using the zebrafish model (Malchow et al., Science Advances 2024).