For students and applicants who are to join Matsumoto Laboratory

Japanese

Education & Research Policy

Over 10 years have passed since Matsumoto Laboratory was launched at Tohoku University in April 2013, and it is over 20 years old in total including the period when Matsumoto Laboratory was in Tokyo Institute of Technology (2003-2012). For all the period, it is all thanks to the students in the laboratory that our laboratory has been keeping its high research activity. The laboratory staffs try to supervise each student through academic discussion in not only the weekly seminar and monthly research meeting organized by the laboratory, but also the self-study meeting. Also, we put more emphasis on our daily individual talking with each student, looking over his/her raw data.


In the laboratory, from our own recognition of any experiments being as a sort of dialogue with nature, our students are highly encouraged to do experiments by selves more than anything. Recently, there seem some students who are not willing to report to us the experimental results which were not as expected, just because the experiments are failures. Nevertheless, whatever the result is, the student can take some valuable messages from nature in any experiment. Our daily individual talking with our students, as mentioned above, leads to the dialog with nature and is indispensable for our listening to one-by-one message from nature together with each student. In my opinion, scientific research is what we cannot think of as interesting to us until we come to be able to communicate with nature through responding to any trivial questions from nature. In these days, there has been a growing trend that the efficiency in learning anything is the best just because it seems useful in future. Consequently, what they have learned are just broad and thin knowledge of science and engineering that would not be as useful as expected. It is one’s true knowledge that can be obtained from one’s daily experiences of “I’ve got it!” through studying by oneself because it is anyhow necessary in understanding such a message from nature.


From not only Japan, but also foreign countries are welcome any students who are to develop their abilities with high aspirations to challenge and overcome unsolved problems, motivated by their-own feeling interested or excited, in science and engineering research fields.


Students may contact Prof. Yuji Matsumoto with education & research policy related questions and laboratory visit at any time. He can be reached by e-mailing to: y-matsumoto@tohoku.ac.jp. Also one can access to more information as to the entrance examination on the web site of School of Engineering, Tohoku University.


In the laboratory, since most of experimental apparatuses and facilities are shared by the laboratory members, the so-called “machine time” that is distributed to each member for doing experiments is very limited. For example, the machine time for thin film deposition experiment with a vacuum chamber system is about one week per month, and in advance one should make reservation of the facilities that is planned to be used for its further characterizations. Thus, the students are highly required to self-manage to carry out his/her research plan in order to definitely obtain the results. If the capacity of a student does not meet this requirement, we are ready to individually provide the student, in addition to the core-time working restriction, special educational programs, such as setting his/her specific weekly research meeting to guide his/her research progress. Also, the students are desired not to hesitate to work with machinery and electronics, because we use mechanical apparatus such as vacuum deposition chambers, instead of test tubes and flasks. On the other hand, there is some fundamental knowledge about particular topics of science and engineering that are required for our students to carry out their own research. This includes not only “solid state chemistry” and “surface/electrochemistry” that are taught in the undergraduate and/or graduate curriculums, but also “vacuum engineering”, “semiconductor physics”, “crystal growth theory”, and “computational science”, most of which may not be so familiar to some students in the department, though it depends on his/her research theme. Hence, each student is also highly required to aggressively learn and absorb by oneself such science and engineering knowledge, through reading specialized text books, without relying on someone to teach everything.


Other Information about the laboratory

In the laboratory, the staffs and students, who have various research backgrounds such as chemistry, physics, material science, and electrical and electronic engineering, continuously work all together on education & research with a high sprit. We also collaborate with various research groups not only in domestic, but also from foreign countries such as US, Australia, Norway and South Korea.

Related academic societies and workshops:
The Chemical Society of Japan, The Japan Society of Applied Physics, The Electrochemistry of Japan, Catalysis Society of Japan, The Japan Society of Vacuum and Surface Science, the Japanese Association for Crystal Growth, Ionic Liquid Research Association, The Flux Growth Society of Japan, Material Research Society (MRS), The International Workshop on Oxide Electronics (WOE), International Workshop on Combinatorial Materials Science and Technology (COMBI)

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