Brandon I. Morinaka was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Anaheim, California. From an early age, he developed a strong interest in nature and outdoor activities. His high school chemistry teacher, Mrs. Wheeler, played a key role in sparking his interest in chemistry. He obtained his BSc in Chemistry from UC Santa Cruz. During his undergraduate studies, he developed an interest in both chemical reactivity and spectroscopy. He was especially fascinated by the problem-solving aspects of NMR spectroscopy in organic structure analysis. Under the mentorship of Professor Phil Crews, he conducted undergraduate research on the isolation and structure determination of sponge-derived natural products. He remained in the Crews laboratory for four years, including two years as a laboratory technician. He then pursued a PhD at the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Professor Ted Molinski. His doctoral research focused on the isolation of diverse classes of sponge natural products and the elucidation of their structures and stereochemistry using a combination of chemical synthesis and circular dichroism. Toward the end of his PhD, he developed an interest in genome mining and the biosynthetic origins of complex natural products. He pursued this line of research during his postdoctoral work with Professor Jörn Piel, first at the University of Bonn and later at ETH Zurich. During this time, he studied radical SAM enzymes, including work on the epimerase involved in polytheonamide biosynthesis and the discovery of spliceases. In 2017, he started his independent research group at the National University of Singapore.