Kennichi Kakudo, MD, PhD, is a consultant pathologist and director of the Thyroid Disease Center at Izumi City General Hospital (Izumi, Japan). He is an emeritus professor at Wakayama University Medical School. He started his pathologist career in 1973, specializing in electron microscopy and immunohistochemical studies on human diseases. His scientific contributions have been published in more than 300 peer‐reviewed papers covering breast cancer, pediatric disease, C‐cell carcinoma, calcitonin receptor, hereditary tumor syndrome, intrathyroidal thymic carcinoma, borderline thyroid tumors (low-risk neoplasms), epithelial-mesenchymal transition in high-grade thyroid carcinoma, prognostic risk classification of thyroid carcinoma using the Ki67 labeling index, and immunoglobulin G4 thyroiditis. He pointed out significant diversity in histopathological diagnoses, cytological interpretations, and clinical guidelines among countries due to substantial background differences. He is a founding member and the first president of the Asian Thyroid Working Group and has conducted many international group studies. He has published the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd editions of Thyroid FNA Cytology as an editor. He is an author of the fourth and fifth editions of the World Health Organization Classification of Thyroid Tumors, the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Bethesda System for Reporting Thyroid Cytopathology, the 5th and 6th editions of General Rules for the Description of Thyroid Cancer (in Japanese) and Clinical Guidelines of Thyroid Nodules by the Japanese Thyroid Association 2013 (in Japanese) including its reporting system for thyroid fine‐needle aspiration cytology (so-called Japanese reporting system).