[No. 128] Yutaka Kazoe

It has already been 15 years since I entered the Faculty of Science and Technology, and I am now a faculty member at a university. I would like to introduce my student life and what came after as much as possible.

Since childhood, I was the kind of kid who loved catching living creatures to look them up in encyclopedias and enjoyed arts and crafts, so as an extension of that, I naturally gravitated toward the sciences through high school. I learned that university science and engineering fields had various departments, including chemistry, physics, and mechanics, and I wanted to choose my major after seeing what they were actually like. Therefore, I aimed for a university where I could select my department after enrolling. Although I had to study for an extra year after high school, I managed to pass the entrance exam for School 4 of the Faculty of Science and Technology at Keio University.

After enrolling, I enjoyed the freedom of university life, with its two-month summer and winter vacations, and lived my student life at my own pace. For my club activities, I wanted to try something new, so I joined the Mandolin Club. It was my first time with both music and a stringed instrument like the mandolin, but I had a wonderful time, from concerts and training camps to club management and casual conversations in the club room. I made many friends with whom I am still in touch. On the other hand, when it came to choosing my department in my second year, I was attracted to the idea of learning various disciplines such as electricity, mechanics, control, and information technology, which are all elements of highly complex systems, so I chose to enter the Department of System Design Engineering. However, perhaps because I was relieved after choosing my department, I turned into a lazy student from my second year onward. (Now that I am a faculty member, I regret not studying more seriously...)

Looking back, the turning point was my assignment to a laboratory in my fourth year. Due to my poor grades up to that point, I was assigned to a thermal-fluid engineering laboratory, which was not at all what I had hoped for. There, under the guidance of the newly appointed Professor Yohei Sato, I began to engage in research on the flow of liquids in channels just a few tens of micrometers wide—thinner than a human hair. This research was part of a new academic field called micro-chemical systems, which aims to integrate various chemical operations like mixing, reaction, and separation onto a chip a few centimeters square to enable things like health checkups with less than a single drop of blood and highly efficient synthesis of pharmaceuticals. My actual research life consisted of fabricating these tens-of-micrometer channels myself, assembling optical systems using lasers, lenses, and microscopes, building analysis programs, and developing a measurement system to measure the flow within these microchannels day after day. At the time, I was a self-indulgent student who was often late for meetings, but Professor Sato gave me strict yet warm guidance on everything from the basic work process of prioritizing tasks to writing papers and giving presentations. Thanks to him, I was able to produce results and, upon advancing to graduate school, had many opportunities to present at academic conferences and publish papers.

During my graduate school life, I found it interesting and rewarding to think for myself, clarify and solve unknown phenomena and problems through trial and error, and advance my research while discussing it with various researchers at academic conferences. This led me to aspire to become a researcher. It was also appealing to be able to experience different cultures in various countries, including Europe and the United States, through conference presentations. I cleared research challenges while sharing the joys and sorrows with my seniors, peers, and juniors in my daily life. In the doctoral program, I struggled to compile my research into a single dissertation, but I was able to complete the normally three-year program in two and a half years.

After completing my doctoral program, through an introduction from Professor Koichi Hishida of my laboratory, I stayed at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US as a research fellow. There, under Professor Minami Yoda, I further honed my skills in measuring flow in microchannels, which was my specialty. While there are pros and cons compared to Japan, the US offered an environment with no rigid hierarchy and active exchange between laboratories and departments, allowing me to fully immerse myself in my research. Living with people from Taiwan, Turkey, and China was also a fresh experience, and I had interactions with the local Japanese community, enjoying my life in the US while maintaining a good balance between research and leisure. Later, I received an invitation from Professor Takehiko Kitamori of the Major in Applied Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering at The University of Tokyo. I began to work on research related to micro-chemical systems in general, in addition to my previous research on flow in micro-spaces. Currently, I am engaged in research on flow in extremely small spaces of several hundred nanometers—1/100th the size of the tens-of-micrometer channels and an academically unexplored territory—and on analytical devices that use this technology. I spend my days struggling alongside my students to pioneer new fields of science and engineering, discussing ideas with researchers from various fields such as chemistry, biology, and materials engineering.

Looking back on my journey so far, it seems that both in my university life and in my research, I started by just trying something even when I didn't fully understand it, and gradually my own ideas and the originality of my research took shape. A university is a place that offers a wide variety of opportunities, and I feel that Keio University, in particular, has a strong culture of respecting the independence of individual students. The above is my personal experience, but I hope it will be of some help to those who are aspiring to enter the Faculty of Science and Technology.