Mickey Matsumoto, Ph.D. is the Chief Scientific Officer and scientific founder of Arialys Therapeutics, Inc. He joined from Astellas Pharma Inc. where he served as an Executive Director and head of the Neuroscience Research Unit and Virtual Venture Unit Psychiatry. During his tenure at Astellas, Mickey was responsible for leading neuroscience research from basic target identification and drug discovery through to enabling early clinical trials. The group delivered multiple new drug candidates to the clinic, including three candidates in neuropsychiatry under his leadership. Mickey led many international research collaborations to pursue his “precision medicine approach” based on genetics and pathophysiology and built an industry leading platform of gene-manipulated rodent models in the neuropsychiatry field. These novel drug discovery approaches were recognized by the neuropsychopharmacology society and supported his election as a member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) in 2013. This represented the first time that an industry scientist from Japan was given this honor, and he was promoted to Fellow in 2018. Mickey has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers (H-index over 40), and he is an author of over 25 patents. He has served as Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University and Adjunct Research Professor at University of Southern California and held a visiting scientist position at the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health. Mickey obtained his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical science, M.S., and B.S. from the University of Tokyo (Japan).