Sumio Iijima is a Japanese physicist and inventor, often cited as the inventor of carbon nanotubes. Although carbon nanotubes had been observed prior to his "invention", Iijima's 1991 paper generated unprecedented interest in the carbon nanostructures and has since fueled intense research in the area of nanotechnology.
Riken is a national scientific research institute in Japan. Founded in 1917, it now has about 3,000 scientists on seven campuses across Japan, including the main site at Wakō, Saitama Prefecture, on the outskirts of Tokyo. Riken is a Designated National Research and Development Institute, and was formerly an Independent Administrative Institution.
The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, or AIST, is a Japanese research facility headquartered in Tokyo, and most of the workforce is located in Tsukuba Science City, Ibaraki, and in several cities throughout Japan. The institute is managed to integrate scientific and engineering knowledge to address socio-economic needs. It became a newly designed legal body of Independent Administrative Institution in 2001, remaining under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
Isamu Akasaki was a Japanese engineer and physicist, specializing in the field of semiconductor technology and Nobel Prize laureate, best known for inventing the bright gallium nitride (GaN) p-n junction blue LED in 1989 and subsequently the high-brightness GaN blue LED as well.
David Pines was the founding director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) and the International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (I2CAM), distinguished professor of physics, University of California, Davis, research professor of physics and professor emeritus of physics and electrical and computer engineering in the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), and a staff member in the office of the Materials, Physics, and Applications Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Satoshi Kawata is a scientist based in Japan who is active in nanotechnology, photonics, plasmonics, and other areas of applied physics. He is a Professor of Department of Applied Physics at Osaka University. He is also a Chief Scientist at RIKEN. Kawata was the 2022 president of Optica.
Takuzo Aida is a polymer chemist known for his work in the fields of supramolecular chemistry, materials chemistry and polymer chemistry. Aida, who is the Deputy Director for the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) and a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Tokyo, has made pioneering contributions to the initiation, fundamental progress, and conceptual expansion of supramolecular polymerization. Aida has also been a leader and advocate for addressing critical environmental issues caused by plastic waste and microplastics in the oceans, soil, and food supply, through the development of dynamic, responsive, healable, reorganizable, and adaptive supramolecular polymers and related soft materials.
Eiichi Nakamura is a Japanese chemist and professor of chemistry at University of Tokyo in Japan.
Noh Tae-won is a South Korean physicist and director of the Center for Correlated Electron Systems (CCES) in the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) at Seoul National University (SNU). He has published more 400 papers and been cited 15,000 times. He is a member of the Materials Research Society, Korean Optical Society, Korean Crystallographic Society, and Association of Asia Pacific Physical Societies and been on several editorial boards for journals. In 2017, he became president of the Korean Dielectrics Society.
Jaw-Shen Tsai is a Taiwanese physicist. He is a professor at the Tokyo University of Science and a team leader of the Superconducting Quantum Simulation Research Team at the Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) within RIKEN. He has contributed to the area of condensed matter physics in both its fundamental physical aspects and its technological applications. He has recently been working on experiments connected to quantum coherence in Josephson systems. In February 2014, he retired from NEC Corporation, after 31 years of employment. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society as well as the Japan Society of Applied Physics.
Takaaki Kajita is a Japanese physicist, known for neutrino experiments at the Kamioka Observatory – Kamiokande and its successor, Super-Kamiokande. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Canadian physicist Arthur B. McDonald. On 1 October 2020, he became the president of the Science Council of Japan.
Chikashi Toyoshima (豊島 近, Toyoshima Chikashi, born July 17, 1954) is a Japanese biophysicist. His research focuses on two proteins: the Ca2+-ATPase of muscle sarcoplasmic reticulum, and the Na+, K+-ATPase expressed in all animal cells. He is a professor at the University of Tokyo and the Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Toyoshima's research about the Ca2+-ATPase started in 1989. In the next few years, he and his colleagues obtained the world's first series of images of Ca2+-ATPase at the atomic level. Via x-ray crystallography, cryo-EM and other methods, he has determined the crystal structures of ten intermediates of Ca2+-ATPase. On September 10, 2015, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him and Poul Nissen the Gregori Aminoff Prize of 2016 for their fundamental contributions to understanding the structural basis for ATP-driven translocation of ions across membranes.
Yasunobu Nakamura (中村 泰信 Nakamura Yasunobu) is a Japanese physicist. He is a professor at the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) and the Principal Investigator of the Superconducting Quantum Electronics Research Group (SQERG) at the Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) within RIKEN. He has contributed primarily to the area of quantum information science, particularly in superconducting quantum computing and hybrid quantum systems.
Sadamichi Maekawa(前川禎通 Maekawa Sadamichi) is a Japanese researcher, who was born in Nara Prefecture, Japan in 1946. He obtained his B. Sc. (1969), M. Sc. (1971) degrees from Osaka University, and D. Sc. (1975) degree from Tohoku University. He was a research associate (1971–1982) and an associate professor (1982–1988) at Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, and a professor (1988–1997) at Faculty of Engineering, Nagoya University, and a professor (1997–2010) at Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University. After serving as a director of Advanced Science Research Center in Japan Atomic Energy Agency (2010-2018), he became a senior advisor at RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science from April 2018.
Kōsuke Morita is a Japanese experimental nuclear physicist, known as the leader of the Japanese team that discovered nihonium. He currently holds a joint appointment as a professor at Kyushu University’s Graduate School of Science and as director of the Super Heavy Element Research Group at Riken's Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science.
Maki Kawai is a Japanese chemist who developed spatially selective single-molecule spectroscopy. In 2018, she became the first woman to become president of the Chemical Society of Japan.
Julia Mundy is an American experimental condensed matter physicist. She was awarded the 2019 George E. Valley Jr. Prize by the American Physical Society (APS) for "the pico-engineering and synthesis of the first room-temperature magnetoelectric multi-ferroic material." This prize recognizes an "individual in the early stages of his or her career for an outstanding scientific contribution to physics that is deemed to have significant potential for a dramatic impact on the field." She is an assistant professor of physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kenichiro Itami is a Japanese chemist. He is a professor at Nagoya University in the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, director of Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM), Nagoya University and the Research Director of the Itami Molecular Nanocarbon Project (JST-ERATO). He received his Ph.D in Engineering from the Department of Synthetic Chemistry and Biological Chemistry from Kyoto University. Itami was held responsible, and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), which determine the allocation of government research funds, have stopped granting research funds as a penalty until the end of March 2025 from the university. Despite this, RIKEN, which is funded mainly by research fees from the government, hired Itami and obtained about 50 million yen in research funding. He pioneered a loophole that allowed him to obtain research funding by belonging to a national research corporation even if his research funding from the government was suspended due to research misconduct..
Harold Yoonsung Hwang is an American physicist, specializing in materials physics, condensed matter physics, nanoscience, and quantum engineering.
Takayuki Ito is a Japanese computer scientist who specialized in the fields of artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. He worked as assistant professor in the computer science department of Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology from 2001 until 2003, served as associate professor in the computer science department of Nagoya Institute of Technology (2006–2014), worked as full professor in the computer science department of Nagoya Institute of Technology (2014–2020). He also served as chair of the department (2016–2018)and also director the NITech Artificial Intelligence Research Center at Nagoya Institute of Technology.
