Professor Osamu Terasaki

Osamu Terasaki, born in Yamaguchi, Japan in 1943, earned his BSc on Physics from Tohoku University with an honour in 1965. He began his career there, focusing on electron charge and momentum distributions in metals and semiconductors, and later studied inter-metallic alloys. He received DSc in 1982 for work on ordered structures and incommensurability in Au-based alloys. He was influenced by his visits to Australia and Canada, and joined the University of Cambridge as a Guest Research Fellow of the Royal Society (1982-84) and Lund University as a Guest Professor (1988).

On returning to Japan, Terasaki pioneered research on quantum confined cluster-crystals in zeolites and led a Japanese National project on this topic (1994). He has since developed advanced electron microscopy techniques for studying zeolites and nanoporous crystals. He has been a professor at Stockholm University (2003-2010), an invited professor at KAIST (2009-2017) and UC Berkeley (2014-2017), and is currently Distinguished Adjunct Prof at School of Physical Science and Technology (SPST), ShanghaiTech University.

Terasaki has established major electron microscopy centers in Sweden (Stockholm Univ) and China (ShanghaiTech Univ), and has received several prestigious awards, including the Daiwa Adrian Prize (1996), the Humboldt Research Award (2008), the Donald W Breck Award (twice: 2007 & 2019) and IMMA Lifetime Achievement Award (2024), and memberships such as honorary membership in the Scandinavian Electron Microscopy Society (2010) and Foreign Member of Academia Europaea (2020).