Miyako Kusano works at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba and specialises in metabolomic profiling of plants. She has a PhD in agriculture, and she worked for sometime at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science. Through her career she has developed a keen interest in understanding how metabolomics can help produce better crops, using plants such as soybean, rice, tomato and some fungi. She supervises and directs a number of projects using headspace analysis and mass spectrometry of secondary compounds and lipids. Her work involves associations between metabolites, transcription products and proteins to understand completely the development of a phenotype that explains a quality trait of the crop.