| L'OREAL-UNESCO Awards For Women in Science Japan Encouragement Award Recipient: Ms. Yoriko Tominaga  Yoriko Tominaga Third year doctoral student, Solid-state electronics laboratory The researcher's mission is to scientifically discover and prove things unknown to humankind. I will always have the courage to keep going no matter how impossible it may seem. Ms. Tominaga won the L'OREAL-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science Japan Encouragement Award for her achievement in research that she has worked on since she was a fourth-year undergraduate student. This award goes to two excellent young female researchers in the fields of material science and biological science respectively. Ms. Tominaga is the first winner from Kyoto Institute of Technology. She conducted the research in the material science field, on the theme of "Development of novel semiconductor lasers for optical telecommunication systems with optical wavelength independent of ambient temperature." Her achievement was highly evaluated as it pioneered a new possibility of a semiconductor material, which will be a key to introduce a high capacity optical communication system called the wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) to households. Ms. Tominaga, who is planning to go to the US after completing her doctorate, took her first step by "breaking into the dojo." Aware that every professor at a prestigious US university receives a bunch of promotional emails on a daily basis from researchers around the world, she travelled across the sea to visit the professor with her theses in hand. The professor, though surprised, acknowledged her achievement and enthusiasm and welcomed her as an apprentice. She said such boldness has naturally developed through her undergraduate years at Kyoto Institute of Technology. Every time she came across a question, she would summon up her courage and knock on the door of various professors. The professors never showed any reluctance and gave her private lectures, which sometimes lasted 2-3 hours straight. She is thankful to Kyoto Institute of Technology and feels very fortunate that she worked on her research there. When in junior high school, she had a dream of becoming an astronaut. That dream led her to become a researcher. When she told that story to astronaut Naoko Yamazaki at the awarding ceremony of the Japan Encouragement Award, Yamazaki encouraged her, saying, "Don't worry. There is no retirement age in space." "Yamazaki's words motivated me to work harder," she told with a smile. She will never lose her courage to keep going into a wider and deeper world as a researcher. (Republished from the 2012 Kyoto Institute of Technology Brochure) |