WSMSN-2026

Vasudevanpillai Biju is a Professor and Director of the Promotion Office of International Alliance at the Research Institute for Electronic Science and the Division of Environmental Materials Science, Hokkaido University, Japan. He brings a distinguished international research career spanning over a quarter century in advanced materials science and nanotechnology. Before his current position, he served as a scientist and senior scientist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan (2004–2015), and in parallel, as a PRESTO researcher at the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) from 2010 to 2014. He has held research appointments as a visiting scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, a postdoctoral fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA, a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at AIST, and a research scientist at Angstrom Technology Partnership, Japan. Prof. Biju has held several academic positions globally, including Distinguished Professor at the University of Calicut, India, Adjunct Professor at IIT Hyderabad, India, and Visiting Professor at Nagoya University, Japan, Southern University, USA, Mahatma Gandhi University, India and Kerala University, India. He has actively contributed to academic and research evaluation panels for institutions and funding agencies across Japan, India, New Zealand, Chile, Taiwan, the European Union, Singapore, and Belgium. His research interests span semiconductor nanocrystals and quantum dots, photo-functional molecules, nanobiotechnology, and single-molecule spectroscopy. He has received numerous awards, including the 2025 Presidential Award for Research and Teaching, and awards and honors from the Chemical Society of Japan, the Japanese Photochemistry Association, the Asian and Oceanian Photochemistry Association, and the Ozaki Foundation (Gen-nai Prize and Gen-nai Award). He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2011. He serves as Deputy Editor of the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology C (Elsevier) and Associate Editor of NPG Asia Materials (Nature-Springer).