Masato Sagawa

Masato Sagawa (born 1943 in Tokushima, Japan) is a Japanese scientist and entrepreneur who invented the sintered permanent neodymium magnet, made of neodymium, iron and boron. He conceived and developed the material at Fujitsu Laboratories, where he worked from 1972 to 1982. Lacking his supervisor's support for the new compound, he resigned in 1981 and joined Sumitomo Special Metals, where he soon produced the magnet. He presented the discovery at the Magnetism and Magnetic Materials Conference in Pittsburgh in November 1983, in the same period in which John Croat of General Motors independently discovered the same Nd2Fe14B compound. Sagawa founded the research company Intermetallics in 1988 and NDFEB Corporation in 2012, where he is president, and holds more than sixty patents related to these magnets. His honors include the Japan Prize in 2012, the IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies in 2022, the 2022 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and the European Inventor Award in 2024.