Piero Carninci is a geneticist, currently Team Leader for Laboratory for Transcriptome Technology and Deputy Centre Director at the RIKEN Centre for Integrative Medical Sciences in Yokohama (Japan). Piero is responsible for the creation and development of various new technologies for DNA and RNA sequencing and analysis. He has also been involved in leading many large scale national and international initiatives, such as FANTOM, ENCODE and more recently the Human Cell Atlas. He has been living in Japan for the past 20 years and will be bringing his expert advice to help build and develop the Centre for Genomics.