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Jun. 20, 2019

Awards for significant research achievements

On May 24, an awards ceremony was held in Wako for two internal RIKEN awards: the RIKEN EIHO Award (RIKEN Significant Achievement Award), and the RIKEN BAIHO Award (RIKEN Excellent Achievement Award). The awards, which take their names from famous RIKEN people—Jokichi Takamine, who proposed the establishment of RIKEN; Eiichi Shibusawa, who was the force behind its establishment; and Umetaro Suzuki, a famous chief scientist who did pioneering work on vitamins—celebrate personnel who have made significant research or other achievements.

Photo of the awardees and executive directors

The awardees with RIKEN's president and executive directors

The EIHO awards are given for major achievements that could lead to prizes or for achievements that could have a major impact on society. This year, four were awarded: to Kenjiro Fukuda, Takao Someya, Soo Won Heo and Keisuke Tajima for “Wearable electrocardiogram monitoring devices with ultra-thin, high-performance and highly-stable organic solar cells”; Saori Takahashi, Hisashi Miura and Ichiro Hiratani for “Development of a single-cell genome-wide DNA replication sequencing method, scRepli-seq”; Yasujiro Taguchi and Kosuke Karube for “Discovery of chiral magnets hosting skyrmions above room temperature and their topological properties”; and to Hideaki Otsu, Teiichiro Matsuzaki, and Hiroyoshi Sakurai for “Reduction and resource recycle of high-level radioactive waste with nuclear transmutation.”

The BAIHO awards are given for unique results that could receive attention at scientific society meetings or that made major contributions both inside and outside RIKEN. This year, awards went to Juan Pascual Anaya for “Inferring the Hox system in the last common ancestor of vertebrates,” Masahiko Iwasaki for “Observation of a strange nuclear bound state made of K meson and two protons,” Gang Niu for “Robust machine learning with less supervised information,” Yukihide Momozawa for “Development of pathogenic variant database in breast cancer,” Harumichi Ishigame for “Elucidation of differentiation mechanisms of multipotent memory CD8+ T cells,” Satomi Matsuoka for “Single-molecule imaging analysis for mutual inhibition between PTEN and PIP3 that generates polarity in motile cells,” Haruhiko Ehara for “Structural basis of nucleosome transcription by RNA polymerase II,” Hiroshi Shiozaki for “Development of a novel paradigm to study mechanisms of cognition in Drosophila,” Fuminori Takahashi for “Discovery of small peptide that modulates stomatal control via abscisic acid in long-distance signaling,” Naoki Ogawa for “Optical spectroscopy on topological electron/spin properties,” Keisuke Tajima for “Study on structure control by surface segregated monolayers in organic semiconductor thin films,” Yuxi Fu for “Development of ultra-strong infrared lasers and its application to generation of intense coherent soft x-ray lights,” Atsushi Hori for “Study on novel in-node parallel execution model,” and Masahiro Nakao for “Development of optimization algorithm for order/degree problem.”

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