Kei Sakamoto was born and raised in Japan and studied English at Waseda University. After brief work experience at the Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company, he did his Masters degree in Exercise Physiology at the University of Tsukuba under Dr Shigeru Katsuta. Kei undertook his PhD research at the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School, Boston under the supervision of Dr Laurie Goodyear, where he studied how metabolic responses during exercise in muscle are regulated by complex signalling systems. In 2003, Kei moved to the University of Dundee and carried out his postdoctoral research at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit, working with Professor Dario Alessi. He generated muscle-specific LKB1 knockout mice and showed that the LKB1-AMPK pathway plays a critical role in balancing cellular energy levels in muscle during exercise. Kei set up his own laboratory in the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit in 2006 and was appointed Programme Leader and Head of Molecular Physiology in 2007.
His group currently studies the intracellular signalling network by which hormones and exercise regulate glucose and fat metabolism, and how deregulation of these signalling systems causes Type 2 diabetes. One of the Kei's major research programmes is directed towards understanding the relative importance of phosphorylation and allosteric control in the regulation of key metabolic enzymes. By generating knock-in mice in which the normal form of glycogen synthase is replaced by a glucose-6-phosphate-insensitive mutant, he has recently defined the role of this allosteric activator in the control of glycogen synthesis by insulin. Kei has received several young investigator awards over the past few years from the American Physiological Society, the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, and the American College of Sports Medicine.
Kei has recently moved to Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences in Lausanne, Switzerland where he is a Principal Investigator in the Diabetes division and also Professor at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).