Osamu Terasaki - Biography#
Osamu Terasaki was born in Yamaguchi, Japan (1943) and graduated in Physics from Tohoku University with Honours (1965). He studied magnetism for his MSc degree (1967) and was immediately appointed, through competition, to a faculty position in Physics at Tohoku University where he worked for 37 years (assistant-, associate- and full-professor). Initially, he studied electron charge and momentum distributions in pure metals and semiconductors, establishing these properties through precise measurements of crystal structure factors by electrons, and anisotropy of Compton profiles by γ-rays. His interests moved to incommensurate structures of inter-metallic alloys and their stabilization mechanisms, receiving a DSc degree from Tohoku University in 1982 for "Studies of Ordered Structures and Incommensurability in Au-based Alloys".
Following invitations to visit Australia and Canada in the early 1980s, he became fascinated by the complicated structures of zeolites and their functions, and by electron dynamical scattering, subsequently accepting an invitation to join Sir John Meurig Thomas at the University of Cambridge as Guest Research Fellow of the Royal Society for 18 months (1982-84), and spending four months (1988) as Guest Professor of the Swedish Natural Science Research Council at Lund University invited by Profs Jan-Olov Bovin and Sten Andersson.
On returning to Japan, Terasaki initiated a dynamic research program to utilize the periodic spaces of zeolites to make novel arrangements of quantum confined cluster-crystals with properties that differ from bulk crystals. In 1994, he was selected as 1st Principal Investigator under the newly created Japanese National project scheme (CREST), supported by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, for the project "New Arrayed Clusters in Microporous Materials: Syntheses, Structures and Physical Properties".
More recently, Terasaki has developed electron microscopy (EM) techniques to characterize fine structures/defects in zeolites, and new methodologies for structural characterization of zeolites, mesoporous materials, metal-organic frameworks and covalent-organic frameworks through scattering, diffraction and imaging approaches. He has recently developed the new "Gas Adsorption Crystallography" strategy for structural characterization of nanoporous crystals, allowing the distribution of gaseous adsorbates at different locations on the pore-walls to be determined as a function of gas pressure by quantitative in-situ powder XRD.
He was Professor and Head of the Department of Structural Chemistry at Stockholm University, Sweden (2003-2010; now emeritus professor), Invited Guest Professor of the World Class University and Brain Korea 21st Century Plus programmes at KAIST, South Korea (2009-2017), and Visiting Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, U.S.A. (2014-2017). Since 2017, he is Professor and Director of the Centre for High-Resolution Electron Microscopy in ShanghaiTech University, China. He has set up and directed two world-leading centres for Electron Microscopy (at Stockholm University and at ShanghaiTech University), and he initiated another centre for Electron Microscopy at KAIST, South Korea. These centres have advanced the frontiers of the technique of Electron Microscopy by applying state-of-the-art instrumentation to tackle challenging and complex structural problems.
He has received several awards from organizations in Europe, including: (1) Daiwa Adrian Prize (Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, U.K.; 1996), (2) Humboldt Research Award (Humboldt Foundation, Germany, 2008), and (3) Honorary Member of the Scandinavian Electron Microscopy Society (2010).
