Terahertz Technology Prize
This prize is awarded to a person who contributed significantly to the promotion of terahertz science, terahertz technology, and their industrial applications.
Terahertz Technology Prize in FTT 2022 is awarded to Dr. Kodo Kawase and Dr. Ken Wood for their significant, unparalleled achievement in terahertz science and technology, especially the promotion of terahertz development.
The prize will be presented at a Prize Ceremony on Thursday, November 17th at Phoenix Plaza, Fukui, JAPAN.
Prize Winners
Dr. Kodo Kawase
Kodo Kawase received B.S. degree in electronic engineering from Kyoto University in 1989, and Ph. D degree in electronic engineering from Tohoku University in 1996. He became an Initiative Researcher at RIKEN in 2001. He became a Professor of Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University in 2005. He has been working in the field of applied THz research from the beginning of his career. His main motivation was the idea to realize a practical and useful tunable THz source for industrial applications. He consequently followed this idea and succeeded in the realization of an injection-seeded THz-parametric generator. This THz system was improved substantially in the following years by him in order to be ready for industrial applications. In the early stages of his career, he was supported by Prof. Ito, later he established his own group and came up with a large number of own ideas which led to innovative THz sources. His paper entitled “Non-destructive terahertz imaging of illicit drugs using spectral fingerprints” was well recognized and cited more than 1600 times. It is a fundamental paper with respect to real world applications of THz technology. He promoted the industrial application of THz technology also in a large number of seminars and invited talks at various conferences. He is very enthusiastic about his research and can motivate young researchers to follow this direction.
Dr. Ken Wood
Ken Wood graduated from Queen Mary College (University of London) in 1981 with a Batchelors Degree in Physics & Astrophysics. He then graduated from Sussex University in 1982 with an M.Sc in Astronomy. He joined QMC Instruments Limited (www.qmcinstruments.co.uk) in 1983 and became a director of the company in 1988. Since then he has developed a range of terahertz detection and signal processing technologies, ensuring their commercial availability to the global research community. He is also Chief Executive Officer and a co-founder of Sequestim Limited (www.sequestim.com) which was created to develop passive terahertz imaging cameras for security applications. The cameras are based on lumped element kinetic inductance detectors (LeKIDs), which offer extremely high sensitivity with a detection time constant of order microseconds, so that real time video imaging is possible while maintaining high spatial and temperature resolution. Sequestim technology is being prepared for a range of crowd screening scenarios. Since 2003 Ken has been an active member of the International Organising Committee of the IRMMWTHz conference series and was chair of the Local Organising Committee when the conference was held in Cardiff in 2007.