Note: I am no longer accepting Ph.D. students or postdoctoral researchers.

Kazuhiro Hono is President of Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS). He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in materials science and engineering from Tohoku University and his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1988. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University, he joined the Institute for Materials Research at Tohoku University before moving to NIMS in 1995. During his 27-year research career at NIMS, he served as Director of the Research Center for Magnetic and Spintronic Materials, NIMS Fellow, and Executive Vice President before becoming President in 2022.
Dr. Hono’s research has focused on micro- and nanostructure–property relationships in metallic materials using atom probe tomography (APT) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), with particular emphasis on rare-earth permanent magnets, nanocrystalline soft magnetic materials, FePt-based heat-assisted magnetic recording media, and spintronic materials. He also served as a professor at the University of Tsukuba until 2024, where he supervised 34 Ph.D. students.

Early work focused on nanoscale characterization of metallic materials using atom-probe field ion microscopy (APFIM) and three-dimensional atom probe (3DAP), including contributions to laser-assisted 3DAP, studies of solute clustering in aluminum and magnesium alloys, and atomic-scale characterization of amorphous and nanocrystalline soft magnetic materials.

Since 2008, research has focused on reducing Dy use in Nd–Fe–B permanent magnets. Multiscale analyses using electron microscopy and 3DAP advanced understanding of coercivity and contributed to grain-boundary diffusion processes that enhance coercivity without Dy. Other work included FePt–C nanogranular media for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), highly spin-polarized Heusler alloys, and atomic-scale interface control in spintronic devices.