Chief

The Chief (所長) is the unnamed research head for the Total Human Cyborg Replacement Project.

Appearance
He primarily wears an outfit consisting of a lab coat over a dress shirts and v-neck sweater. His hair is cut into a bowl shape.

Personality
His original intention was to save many lives as a doctor, but it gradually turned into an impure intention during the experiment. At the end of the experiment, he ignored the dignity of the doppelganger and became so self-indulgent that he even thought of using the Child Errors.

Background
At some point in the past, he sought to develop cyborg technology as a cheap method of saving the many lives known as medical refugees.

About a year prior to the present, as research chief at a certain institution, he was looking for applicants for an extreme cyborg experiment, the details of which he had previously discussed with Kuriba Ryouko, without success. Kuriba ended up volunteering for the experiment in order to gather the data needed to save her mother. The chief and his colleagues carried out the experiment, but did not tell Kuriba about the side-effect which they secretly hoped to observe.

After Kuriba was recombined into one person, the chief and the other researcher showed her the Doppelganger, made from the assembled cyborg components and believing herself to Kuriba Ryouko, on a monitor. Excited and absorbed in their apparent success in observing the creation of a soul, actually a product of their wishful thinking, he and the others ignored Kuriba's warnings about the potential risks, believing that the security and safety measures in place were sufficient and that the event of the Doppelganger realizing her true identity would merely be an opportunity to gather additional data.

While the Doppelganger was kept in the facility and still under the impression that she was Kuriba Ryouko, the chief claimed that they were keeping her there to observe for after-effects, given the unprecedented nature of the experiment.

Dream Ranker Arc
After the Doppelganger escaped from the lab, a female researcher reported the incident to the chief, along with news of damage to the facility resulting in the loss of research data. After checking that the damage was limited to the facility and on-site data, he ordered the researcher to retrieve the doppelganger.

Later, he received a call from the researcher informing him about the Doppelganger's "soul possession". He initially dismissed it as nonsense but then dropped his phone in shock on seeing the giant puppet which the Doppelganger had formed from debris in the distance. After that, as the Doppelganger reached the data storage airship, he talked to a sponsor and higher-up from the Academy City Board of Directors, assuring them that airship won't fall by itself due to its safeties. Worrying about the loss of all of their research data if the city's interception system activated against the airship, he then saw Scavenger descending nearby with Kuriba Ryouko.

The chief arrived with Kuriba Ryouko in the aftermath of Misaka Mikoto's battle with the Doppelganger. Seeing the wreckage of the airship and the Doppelganger, he attempted to salvage the remains despite the girls' pleas to let the Doppelganger rest, threatening Kuriba at gunpoint to force their cooperation and refusing to believe that the Doppelganger didn't have a soul.

After accidentally shooting Kuriba in the abdomen as she tried to convince him to stop, he fled the scene and intended to repeat the experiment, possibly using Child Errors. However he was apprehended by Shokuhou Misaki using Mental Out. Learning of his original goal before he strayed, Shokuhou decided to help him recall his original intentions and that if he wished to redo things, he would have to crawl back up from below where he started.