Michinobu Kuwae studied Quaternary sciences, mainly concentrating on micropaleontological studies using lake sediments, at the faculty of Science, Osaka City University and received his PhD in biology and geosciences from the same university in 2002. After several research fellowships in Ehime University, he is currently an associate professor at the Ehime’s Center for Marine Environmental Studies. He has dedicated much of his work to reconstructing past changes in fish populations during the Holocene, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines paleoceanography, biogeochemistry, and micropaleontology. He is particularly interested in the factors driving changes in algal and zooplankton productivity in the western North Pacific, and the response of Japanese sardine and anchovy to past changes in oceanic and climatic conditions, from multi-decadal to millennial time scales. Most recently, Kuwae and his colleagues have been using sedimentary ancient DNA to detect long-term population dynamics of marine and lake organisms.