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Dr. Richard Yanagihara, formerly a tenured intramural NIH investigator, was recruited through an interagency personnel agreement in 1995 to assist in building capacity for a laboratory-based retrovirology research program in the Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). He served as the UHM RCMI Program Director in 2000–2011, has been the principal investigator of the Pacific Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Research since 2003, and the director of the Research Coordinating Center of the former RCMI Translational Research Network (RTRN) in 2008–2019. Currently, he is one of the multiple principal investigators of the RCMI Coordinating Center. As such, he has played a critical role in coordinating the development of much-needed infrastructure for bioscience research at the university and across the RCMI community. In particular, he has been deeply involved in mentoring junior faculty, as well as developing programs that provide grant support for pilot projects and bridging funds. His extensive knowledge about the biomedical research portfolio and research resources at the RCMI grantee institutions, as well as his long-standing personal relationships with RCMI investigators, makes him eminently qualified to take a leadership role in the RCMI Coordinating Center.
Dr. Yanagihara's own research has been conducted largely in the context of exploiting naturally occurring paradigms of high-incidence ‘place diseases’ in populations isolated by virtue of genetics, culture and/or geography. Notable among these scientific explorations, chronicled in more than 300 publications, have been the demonstration of a cohort effect in the high-incidence focus of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and parkinsonism-dementia among Chamorros on Guam and the discovery and characterization of genetically distinct variants of human T-cell lymphotropic virus type I in remote Melanesian populations in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. In addition, his decades-long research effort on the molecular phylogeny and phylogeography of rodent-borne hantaviruses has led to the realization that shrews and moles (Order Eulipotyphla) and bats (Order Chiroptera) may have served as the original reservoirs of ancestral hantaviruses. New knowledge and insights from this research has required the rewriting of textbook chapters on hantaviruses and changes to their taxonomic classification.
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