COLUMNS | People in MANA
Group Leader
I joined MANA in June 2022. I am also affiliated with Nagoya University as a cross-appointment for the rest of the fiscal year 2022, and I spend my days going back and forth between Nagoya and Tsukuba. I had originally thought that Tsukuba was close enough to make day trips work, but I began to worry that frequently commuting back and forth would be exhausting. However, now, I have gotten used to the Nagoya-Tsukuba double life, such as heading from Tsukuba to a meeting that starts at 9:00 am in Nagoya and having plenty of time to make it. Going forward, there is much to do, such as equipment relocation and environment construction, but with everyone’s support, we are proceeding with the establishment of a research group at NIMS. I would like to express my gratitude to MANA's administrative staff and MANA's top management for their support.
My research is focused on ultra-thin films (two-dimensional systems) with atomic-level thicknesses. At the start of my career, I was involved in research on carbon nanotubes, and it was through this research that I naturally became interested in low-dimensional systems (not low-level or elementary systems!). Since the discovery of graphene, which is a monoatomic film of carbon, in the early 2000s, various two-dimensional systems, including transition metal dichalcogenides, have been discovered. Motivated by such developments, I have expanded my research interests to include two-dimensional systems. MANA is home to leading researchers in a wide range of fields associated with the keyword “nano,” making it the perfect place to explore “low-dimensional systems.” I would like to leverage this environment to take on more challenging new topics, regardless of the field. 😀
[March 2023]
At the Hida Space Science Museum in Kamioka