[4] He graduated from Musashi Junior and Senior High School in 1979, and entered the University of Tsukuba to study medicine.

[3] Immediately after obtaining his PhD, Yanagisawa started his career as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Pharmacology of the University of Tsukuba.

[5] Yanagisawa stayed at Kyoto only for one year, after which Joseph L. Goldstein and Michael Stuart Brown, both 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureates and famous for their research in cholesterol, recruited him to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW).

[7] He returned to Japan in 2012 to found and direct the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine at the University of Tsukuba, which was established under the World Premier International Research Center Initiative by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

This study became his PhD thesis, and he published his finding it 1988, naming the substance "endothelin" and reporting its peptide sequence.

In 1998, again teaming up with Takeshi Sakurai, who has moved to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow at UTSW, Yanagisawa connected two orphan GPCRs with a family of neuropeptides as their ligands.

[24][25] His team also identified the phosphorylation and dephosphorylation of 80 proteins as a major regulation mechanism of the sleep cycle in mice.