[No. 156] Yuichi Negishi

Hello to all prospective students. I am currently engaged in research and education at the Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Science Division I, Tokyo University of Science. Reading this, you might think I was a very serious student, but that wasn't actually the case when I first enrolled. However, even for someone like me, thanks to my studies and various experiences at Keio University, I am now involved in research and education at a university myself.

In junior high and high school, my life revolved around track and field. Because of this, when my club activities ended in the summer of my third year of high school, I suddenly found myself without anything to be passionate about. So, the main reason I decided to take the entrance exam for Keio University was simply that I wanted to try living in Tokyo (I apologize for the casual reason). During my university years, up until my third year, I spent my days searching for myself, always looking for the next thing to get excited about.

In my third year, I found a talk by Professor Koji Kaya, who was a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the time, to be fascinating, so I read a book he had written. The book was about "clusters," which are aggregates of atoms (what we now call nanomaterials), and it stated that clusters could become a key technology in nano-engineering. This was in the early 1990s, so the term "nanotech" was not as common as it is today, and research on nanomaterials was not as active as it is now. However, when I read that book, I felt that research on atomic aggregates would become incredibly important in the coming era. Therefore, from my fourth year, I joined Professor Koji Kaya's laboratory (see photo). Once I joined the lab, I found the actual research environment to be far more exciting than what I had read in books. In the laboratory, we used a custom-designed vacuum chamber (see photo) and multiple lasers simultaneously to uncover new facts that no one had ever known. At academic conferences, I would present these findings in front of distinguished professors whom I had only ever seen in books. I found this research life immensely thrilling and was immediately captivated by it. Thus, at Keio University, I discovered something I could be truly passionate about, and ever since, I have dedicated my life to the academic field.

I was at Keio University until I withdrew from the Doctoral Programs and resigned from my position as a Research Associate (now Assistant Professor). After that, I conducted research as a Research Associate/Assistant Professor at the Institute for Molecular Science. Since 2008, I have been conducting research while running my own laboratory at the Tokyo University of Science (see photo). During my time at Keio University and the Institute for Molecular Science, I conducted experiments myself every day, and on many occasions, I experienced the moving and thrilling sensation of my hands trembling as I became the first person in the world to witness a new result. However, at the time, I worried that if I had fewer opportunities to conduct experiments myself, I might not be able to derive the same kind of emotion and excitement from research. In reality, research is much more profound. Whether it's deciding on a research topic while considering what is important, planning the experiments to achieve it, realizing a new fact, confirming a prediction, or encountering an unforeseeable coincidence, research truly offers us great emotion and excitement in many different situations. I will probably be captivated by the allure of research for the rest of my life (laughs).

Last September, I received the Yagami Prize from the Keio University Faculty of Science and Technology and the Keio University Graduate School of Science and Technology. At the award ceremony (see photo) and lecture, I had the opportunity to interact with many people from Keio University for an extended period for the first time in a while, and I was struck by how truly cool people affiliated with Keio University are. If you ask me what's cool about them, I'm not sure I can explain it myself (laughs). But looking back, Professor Kaya was the kind of person who believed, "As Keio students, our year-end parties should be in Ginza," and I, too, as a student (despite coming from the countryside), wanted to be a little closer to the image people have of a Keio student. Perhaps it is this spirit among those associated with Keio that makes people affiliated with Keio University appear so smart and elegant. To the high school students who are about to take their entrance exams, if you are admitted to Keio University, I truly hope that you will continue to be the kind of Keio students that society and we, the Keio alumni, expect you to be.