Kaoru Minoshima
About Optica
Kaoru Minoshima
The University of Electro-Communications (UEC)
Kaoru Minoshima is Professor, Vice-President, and Deputy Member of the Board of Directors at the University of Electro-Communications (UEC). She is also an Outside Director of Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. She received her B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Tokyo in 1987, 1989, and 1993, respectively. Her doctoral research focused on ultrafast spectroscopy of mesoscopic materials. In 1993, she joined the National Research Laboratory of Metrology (NRLM), Japan, where she worked on precision metrology using femtosecond technology. In 2007, she became group leader of the National Metrology Institute of Japan (NMIJ, formerly NRLM) at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). She also served as Bureau Manager at the headquarter of AIST (2011—2013). In 2013, she moved to UEC as a full Professor and also became the research director of ERATO Minoshima Intelligent Optical Synthesizer Project, supported by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) (2013—2020). She has also served as Director of Institute for Advanced (quantum) Science at UEC, a Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, where she worked on micromachining of photonic devices using a femtosecond laser oscillator (2000—2001), and Guest Professors at the University of Bordeaux I, France (1996), the Tokyo University of Science (2007—2013), and Tokushima University (2018—present). Her areas of research are ultrafast optical science and technology, generation and applications of optical frequency combs, and optical metrology. She is known for her pioneering work on ultrahigh-accuracy absolute distance measurement using frequency combs.
She received several awards including 2019 MIT Hermann Anton Haus Lecturer, Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Japan, the first Women Scientists Award from the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP), and Optical Engineering Awards from the JSAP. She is a Fellow of Optica, SPIE, JSAP and the Laser Society of Japan (LSJ).
Minoshima has enjoyed being an active Optica volunteer. She started a series of committee roles at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) as a Technical Subcommittee Chair (2004—2005), where she built a new subcommittee for Optical Metrology, and continued as Subcommittee member (2006—2008), Program Co-Chair (2009), General Co-Chair (2011), and Steering Committee Member (2021—present). She has also served on technical and organizing committees for numerous international conferences, including Program Chair of FTS (2023), Sub-committee Chairs of FiO/Laser Science (2020) and CLEO-PacificRim (2013, 2020, 2022, 2024). She has served as a member of several selection committees for the Townes Award, Hopkins Leadership, Ives Medal, and Optica Fellow. She is currently an Associate Editor of Optica.
Minoshima has served as Vice-President of ICO (2021—present), member of the Science Council of Japan (2011—present), Vice-President and Director of LSJ (present), and Director of JSAP (2019—2021). She is currently Photonics West LASE Symposium Chair. She has served as editor of Japanese Journal of Applied Physics (JJAP), General Chair of Optics Photonics Japan (OPJ2024, the Optical Society of Japan), and many other government, academic and society activities.
