Kaoru Minoshima

Profile

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. 

Election Statement

Optica offers high-quality academic information and networking opportunities through its highly rated journals and worldwide optics and photonics conferences. Over the past 30 years, I have enjoyed participating in and contributing to these important Optica activities including various committee roles such as a General Chair of CLEO and Associate Editor of Optica. Now I am honored to stand as a candidate for Director at Large. If elected, by leveraging my experiences particularly in diverse organizational managements in international societies, academia, government, and industry, I would like to further serve Optica and its members by making the following my priorities:

Strengthening collaboration among international optics and photonics community and related societies
The world is currently facing many challenges and problems. Recent pandemic and global conflicts have revealed to each of us that none of these problems are local, as they spread worldwide with an incredibly high speed and impact. To resolve such global issues, international and interdisciplinary collaboration between academic communities is essential.

Optics and photonics can play an important role in linking and integrating diverse areas of science and technology due to the nature of the field. To make this role work efficiently, efforts to facilitate collaboration between related communities and academic societies worldwide are necessary, and Optica should play a key role in this regard. Optica has a high potential to combine people from different backgrounds regardless of their specific technical areas, countries, gender, and careers. We will be able to work on providing more opportunities to diverse communities to participate and ensure that every organizational area is accessible.

Providing attractive opportunities for young scientists and women scientists
It is highly important to make optics and photonics an appealing career choice for young scientists and students by offering attractive services, such as opportunities for networking and organizing informative events. Such services can include activities organized by students, where they network among themselves, or networking opportunities between people new to the field and veterans. Enhancing opportunities for female students and scientists is also very important to further the growth of the field and to society. Enhancing international collaboration for such activities is necessary to establish attractive career options for students, young scientists and women in this field, as well as for the sustainable development of the Society.

Building new roles of optics and photonics
COVID-19 has created many challenges for academic activities. Our real connections were suddenly lost. Instead, convenient online tools have rapidly spread, making international communication more accessible than ever before. So now is the time to build a new normal with a good balance between the real and virtual and create various formats that provide fruitful opportunities to diverse communities. Here, the role of optics and photonics becomes important for technology development to establish a new society more than ever.

Based on my experiences working in broad areas of optics and phonics, and my volunteer works in international academic activities, I would like to make contributions to Optica to create new possibilities for optics and photonics in this new era.