Dr. Komatsu is a senior scientist in the Johns Hopkins All Children's Research Institute, Department of Surgery and the Cancer & Blood Disorders Institute. He is an Associate Professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. He studies the malformation and malfunction of blood vessels and how these abnormalities impact medical conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and neurological disorders. He hopes to discover ways to restore normal function to those vessels, which would have a profound effect on the efficacy of treatments.

Dr. Komatsu earned an undergraduate degree in marine science/biology and a Ph.D. in cell biology at the University of Miami, where he also did post-doctoral training in immunology. He continued post-doctoral studies at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute under Dr. Erkki Ruoslahti who discovered fibronectin and integrins. In 2005, he became an Assistant Professor of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Pathology, where he began investigating the molecular mechanism of blood vessel maturation. He joined Sanford Burnham as a faculty member in 2008 before coming to Johns Hopkins All Children’s in 2018 to continue his research at JHU. He holds patents related to the vascular regulation by R-RAS and peptide-mediated vascular targeting of pulmonary hypertension.