Sumio Iijima

Sumio Iijima is a Japanese physicist, born in 1939 in Koshigaya, Saitama, credited with the 1991 discovery of carbon nanotubes, cylindrical structures of rolled graphitic carbon only nanometers in diameter. Working at NEC Corporation, which he joined in 1987, he used electron microscopy to identify and image these structures, publishing his findings in the paper Helical microtubules of graphitic carbon, which generated immediate and widespread scientific interest and helped catalyze nanotechnology as a major research field. Earlier in his career he earned a PhD in solid-state physics from Tohoku University in 1968 and spent more than a decade researching crystalline materials and electron microscopy at Arizona State University before returning to Japan. He later became a University Professor at Meijo University in 1999, was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2007, and received the inaugural Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2008 along with the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research the same year.