Kazuhiro Hono
President, National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS)
 Fellow, Research Center for Magnetic and Spintronic Materials, NIMS
 Professor, Graduate School of Science and Technology, University of Tsukuba
 e-mail: kazuhiro.hono@nims.go.jp
Dr. Kazuhiro Hono is President of the National Institute of Materials Science (NIMB), Japan. Before he was appointed as the president in 2022, he had 27 year research career at NIMS, mainly worked on structure-property relationships of metallic materials, including aluminum alloy, magnesium alloy, steels and magnetic materials. In the past 20 years, he has led magnetic and spintronic materials research at NIMS, including rare-earth permanent magnets, nanocrystalline soft magnets, FePt-based heat-assisted recording media, and half-metallic Heusler alloys and their devices.

He received BS and MS degrees in materials science and engineering from Tohoku University in 1982 and 1984, respectively, and a Ph.D. from Penn State in 1988. After working as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, he joined the Institute for Materials Research at Tohoku University as a research associate in 2000, where he built an atom probe facility. He then moved to NIMS in 1995, where he built an atom probe lab and later shifted to materials research using nanochacterization techiniques. At NIMS, he served as director of the Metallic Nanostructure Group, Director of the Research Center for Magnetic and Spintronic Materials, NIMS Fellow, and Executive Vice President until his appointment as President in 2022. Since 2003, he has also been a professor of materials science and engineering at the Graduate School of Science and Technology, University of Tsukuba, and has supervised 34 Ph.D. students.

Early in his career, he pioneered atom probe field ion microscopy (APFIM) and later three-dimensional atom probe (3DAP) characterization of metallic nanostructures to elucidate structure-property relationships of various alloys with potential industrial applications. He also contributed to the early development of laser-assisted 3D atom probe and demonstrated successful 3DAP analysis of insulator materials using UV lasers. His atomistic characterizations of solute clusters and GP zones in aluminum alloys were pioneering at the time for the study of precipitation sequences at the atomic scale. Extending this research to magnesium alloys, his group developed high-strength heat treatable wrought magnesium alloys with excellent formability. He also pioneered the atomistic characterization of amorphous alloys and their crystallization processes, and the research that elucidated the crystallization mechanism of the amorphous Fe-Si-B-Nb-Cu alloy served as a guiding principle for the subsequent development of nanocrystalline soft magnetic materials.

In the past 20 years, he has vigorously pursued the multi-scale analysis of the microstructure of rare-earth permanent magnets through the complementary use of SEM/TEM/3DAP, and established a coercivity mechanism that overturns the conventional view. Based on this, Dr. Hono's group developed a grain boundary infiltration method using eutectic alloys that dramatically improves the coercivity of neodymium magnets without using Dy. In addition, systematic TEM studies of the nanostructures of FePt thin films led to the development of FePt-C nanogranular perpendicular thin films, which proved to be the prototype of industrialized FePt-X heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media. His group has also made remarkable achievements in the search for half-metallic Heusler alloys and unprecedented high magnetoresistive performance has been demonstrated in CPP-GMR devices by atomic control of the Heusler FM/NM interfaces, which have attracted interest as potential magnetic sensor applications.

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