Dr. Yoshiaki Nakano graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo in 1982 and completed the doctoral course in Electronic Engineering in the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, in 1987, receiving a Ph.D. degree in engineering. The same year, he became an assistant professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering in Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. He was promoted to lecturer in 1988, associate professor in 1992, and has served as professor from 2000 up to the present. During this period, he was a visiting associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1992 to 1993, a professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo from 2002 to 2013, and the director general of the Center from 2010 to 2013. Since 2010, he has been co-chairing the "GS+I Global Solar Plus Initiative" endowed chair under the direct supervision of the Office of the President of the University of Tokyo.

His research achievements cover various research topics, including distributed feedback semiconductor lasers, semiconductor optical switches and digital optical devices, monolithic photonic integrated circuits, compound semiconductor epitaxial growth/process technology, high-efficiency solar cells, and solar fuels. Among others, he was one of the first to focus on the importance of technology for integrating many optical elements on III/V compound semiconductors to realize high-speed and low-power optical devices suitable for next-generation photonic networks. He has made significant contributions to establishing this fundamental technology.

He has elucidated the mechanism of selective-area metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy, which is essential for the integration of active and passive devices, and has demonstrated multi-wavelength optical circuits for wavelength-division multiplexed optical communications and has also proposed and demonstrated many innovative optical integrated circuits, including semiconductor digital optical processing devices such as optical logic gates, electro-absorptive optical switches, all-optical flip-flops, and semiconductor optical isolators based on the optical nonreciprocal principle. Furthermore, by using these technologies, he has made pioneering achievements, such as the world's first successful demonstration of a large-scale optical switch circuit monolithically integrating more than 100 semiconductor optical amplifiers and optical phase controllers.

He has demonstrated outstanding leadership not only in basic research at the university but also in industry-academia collaborative projects involving many leading Japanese companies. He has strongly led research and development in the field of next-generation optical communications, including successfully leading a system demonstration of an optical-label-processing-based packet router that demonstrated the usefulness of these novel optical devices.

In recognition of these achievements, he has received the IEICE's Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award, the IEICE's Electronics Society Award, the Japan Society of Applied Physics Optical Paper Award, the Ichimura Prize in Science, the Prime Minister's Award for Industry-Academia-Government Collaboration, the Kenjiro Sakurai Memorial Special Prize, and the IPRM Award, among others. In addition to being a Fellow of the IEICE, he is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of Optica, and a Fellow of the Japan Society of Applied Physics.

Within IEICE, he has served as Chairs of the Technical Committee on Laser and Quantum Electronics, of the Technical Committee on Photonic Network, of the Time-limited Technical Committee on Integrated Photonic Device Technology, Editor-in-Chief of the IEICE Transactions on Electronics, President of the Electronics Society, and Vice President of the IEICE. He has also served as Director of the Japan Society of Applied Physics, Editor-in-Chief of APEX/JJAP, Chair of IEEE Tokyo Section, Director of IEEE LEOS, Member of Section III of the Science Council of Japan, Chair of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Committee of the Science Council of Japan, and President of the Japan Institute of Electronics Packaging. He has long contributed to developing the research community in Japan and abroad.

As described above, his contributions to the development of the IEICE and related academic societies and industries, as well as to the progress of electronic information and communication technology and semiconductor photonic integration technology, have been outstanding. We recommend him as the IEICE's Honorary Member at this time.