2022 Tokyo Tech Challenging Research Award

I'm very honored to receive this award. I am most grateful to the department for giving me a chance. I greatly appreciate the support of many professors, staffs, students, and my family. We have studied the robotics and AI using human bio-signal. In this research, we developed the interface realizing the intuitive operation of the tele-robot. The tele-robotics is necessary in a lot of fields such as the infrastructure, medical and services. These robots have the unique structure because the working environment is complex. Hence, the robot's structure is different from the human body. The function is called as "the Embodiment Difference". Since it is difficult to operate the robot intuitively, we need to devise the interface connecting between robot and human whose structures are different. In this study, we developed the novel structured interface and the intelligent control to achieve the intuitive operability. I hope I can continue to live up to your expectations and contribute to the further success of the Tokyo Tech. Thank you very much.

Rigid polymers such as polyimide and polythiophene, which have a rigid rod-like structure composed of aromatic rings, are used in a variety of applications ranging from insulating layers in electronic circuits to semiconductor layers in organic thin-film solar cells, because of not only their flexibility but also the excellent heat resistance beyond other flexible polymers. If these rigid polymers could be aligned perpendicularly to the film, extremely useful properties would be realized, such as high thermal and electrical conductivity in the film thickness direction. However, this is very challenging due to thermodynamic limitations. In this research, we focused on the properties of smectic liquid crystals that spontaneously form layered structures, as found in soap bubbles and cell membranes, to challenge the control of the vertical alignment of rigid polymers. Before now, we successfully fabricated unique polyimide films containing more than 70% of vertically aligned components. Finally, I am very honored to receive the prestigious Tokyo Tech Challenging Research Award and the Suematsu Challenging Research Award. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Shinji Ando for supporting this research, Mr. Shohei Hara (M.S., 2020) for collaborating this research, and all the students and graduates of our laboratory. I also would like to express my deep appreciation for the great support of Tokyo Tech for young researchers.

I am very honored to receive the prestigious Tokyo Tech Challenging Research Award and the Suematsu Challenging Research Award. I greatly appreciate the support of Professor Kimihisa Yamamoto, Associate Professor Takane Imaoka, the many other professors and all of the project staff and laboratory members. Superatoms are special metal particles composed of several atoms, and have been studied as promising building blocks for new materials due to the feature of having unique periodicity like atoms. In particular, it is attractive for superatoms to be able to control the electronic properties depending on the number of valence electrons, which has drawn wide attention as new materials that researchers are capable of designing the properties. However, research on superatom synthesis has been limited to either detection under high vacuum or synthesis of stable clusters using organic ligands. The aim of this research is to develop superatom synthesis with finely controlled atomicity and metallic ratios by making full use of template polymers and interfacial reactions, and eventually, to be able to synthesize various superatoms in a solution phase. Such superatoms are expected not only to replace scarce elements such as precious metals and rare earths, but also to perform as unknown elements which have new electronic state.