Minoru Mizuhata

Professor Minoru Mizuhata, Director of the Europe and Africa Division, is Professor in the Department of Chemical Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Kobe University. He was born in 1964.  He graduated from Department of Industrial Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering, Kobe University in 1987, and Department of Materials Science, Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Kobe University and earned a PhD in Science in 1992.  He joined the Government Industrial Research Institute, Osaka of Industrial Technology of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) (now the Kansai Centre of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)) immediately afterwards. He was involved in research and development of polymer electrolyte fuel cells from 1992 to 1996. In 1996, he joined the Faculty of Engineering, Kobe University, as Research Associate, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005 at Faculty of Engineering, and Associate Professor in 2007 and Professor in 2011 at the Graduate School of Engineering, Kobe University. In the meantime, he was appointed visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (Stuttgart, Germany) in 1997 and visiting professor at the Jagiellonian University, Poland, in 2019. He was appointed the director of the Europe-Africa Division of Institute for Promoting International Partnerships on April 2023.

His research interests are inorganic materials chemistry, electrochemistry and interface science, and he has conducted research on the physical properties of electrolytes and molten salts in solid-liquid coexisting systems, the synthesis and applications of oxide thin films by liquid phase deposition methods, and materials chemistry for energy transfer.  He has published about 200 articles and granted 20 patents. He has been a Director of the Electrochemical Society of Japan, Chair of the Molten Salts Committee, Japan, the organizer of the International Symposium of Molten salts and Ionic Liquids of The Electrochemical Society (USA) during 2008-2016 and is a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

He has received awards such as the Notable Invention Selection of Science and Technology Agency, Japan (1997), Excellent Paper Award of the Electrochemical Society of Japan (2005, 2023), the Molten Salt Prize of Molten Salt Committee of Japan (2015), and CerSJ Awards for academic achievements in ceramic science and technology of Ceramics Society of Japan (2017).