Kazunori Matsuda is a Laboratory Manager at the Food Research Department, Yakult Central Institute in Tokyo, Japan. He started his career at Yakult in 2003, working in the research on the gut microbiota and its roles in human health and disease.

He was assigned to Yakult Honsha European Research Center for Microbiology (YHER) in Belgium as Senior Researcher from 2013 until 2018. There he worked on the research to evaluate the effects of probiotics on the regulation of gut function, and conducted clinical trials intended to substantiate health claims on probiotics in the EU countries.

He received a Master of Science degree in Agriculture from Kobe University Graduate School of Science and Technology, and obtained his PhD degree in Veterinary Science from The University of Tokyo.

His main research interest today is how the gut microbiota and probiotics affect mood, sleep and stress levels of the host through the gut–brain interaction. His research includes clinical trials to test the efficacy and wider applicability of probiotics intervention to promote human mental health, as well as the small-scale experimentations to determine the possible mechanisms of its action.