Prof. Chihiro SATO is currently a director of integrated-Glyco-Biomedical Reserach Center (iGMED) at iGCORE and vice-director of iGCORE at Nagoya University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Science in 1997. Her research focuses on the structure-function relationship of sialic acid (Sia), oligosialic acid (oligoSia), and polysialic acid (polySia) from bacteria to human, based on the molecule-recognizing mechanisms from an evolutional point of view. In her earlier studies, she established original chemical and immunochemical methods for determining the precise structure of oligo/polySia in Sia species, the degree of polymerization, and the mode of linkage. It is especially a unique point that she determined specificities of tens of existing and newly developed anti-oligo/polySia antibodies. These methods allowed her to demonstrate the occurrence of diverse oligo/polySia structure in nature for the first time. In addition, she demonstrated that polySia forms an attractive field as a new function, regulating various physiologically important molecules through the specific binding, and enabled the functional evaluation of polySia quantitatively. She has also demonstrated the relationship between polySia and "genetic and environmental factors” in psychiatric diseases and cancer. Recently, her interest in the oligoSia structure has reach the first indication that Siglecs have the second Sia binding site in addition to the conventional site.