On March 12, RIKEN announced the winners of a set of prizes, the RIKEN EIHO Award (RIKEN Significant Achievement Award), and the RIKEN BAIHO Award (RIKEN Excellent Achievement Award), which are given to celebrate personnel who have made significant research or other achievements.
The EIHO Awards go to work that has strong scientific or societal impact. This year, they went to Kenta Itahashi and Takahiro Nishi for “Precision missing-mass spectroscopy of pionic tin atoms,” Chikashi Terao for “Genetic and epidemiological analyses of immune diseases and loss of chromosome Y toward clinical application of genetic findings,” Haobing Wang, Yang Yang, Masayoshi Nishiura, and Zhaomin Hou for “Creation of novel self-healing and shape-memory polymers,” Tetsuo Hanaguri for “Emergent phenomena in iron-based superconductors revealed by spectroscopic-imaging scanning tunneling microscopy,” and to Hideo Yokota, Satoko Takemoto, and Yoshimasa Sakai for “AI-assisted high-precision automatic detection and segmentation of early gastric cancer in endoscopic images.”
The BAIHO Awards, which go to work that is unique and has an impact both inside and outside RIKEN, went to Bo Han for “Development of robust deep learning technologies for heavily noisy data,” Yosuke Kubota for “Equivariant KK-theory and the Atiyah-Segal completion,” Hirotaka Ito for “Theoretical study on the origin of the correlation between spectrum and brightness of gamma-ray bursts,” Shigeki Hirabayashi “Development of a novel method, ‘NET-CAGE’ to identify functional enhancer,” Kazuhiro Kashiwagi for “Structural basis for eIF2B inhibition in integrated stress response,” for Haruhiko Ehara “Molecular mechanism of the facilitated nucleosome transcription mediated by transcription elongation factors,” Hisashi Miura for “Study of the principles of 3-dimensional organization of mammalian chromosomes using next-generation sequencing,” Takamitsu Watanabe for “Discovery of small peptide that modulates stomatal control via abscisic acid in long-distance signaling,” Hiroshi Tsugawa for “Informatics-based comprehensive elucidation of plant metabolome,” Naoki Kato for “Discovery of enzymes catalyzing a stereoselective [4+2] cycloaddition in enantiomeric biosynthetic pathways of natural products,” Masao Nakamura for “Experimental demonstration of topological characters of shift current in ferroelectrics,” Chieko Terakura for “Contributions to technical development and research environment maintenance for solid-state physics,” Akiko Kikkawa for “Synthesis of high-quality single crystals of energy-functional materials,” Kazuo Kurokawa for “Study of the cargo protein transport mechanism in the Golgi apparatus by visualization using high-speed and super-resolution live imaging microscopy SCLIM,” Pieter Doornenbal for “In-beam gamma-ray spectroscopy of the neutron-rich doubly-magic nucleus Ni-78,” Deuk Soon Ahn for “Discovery of 60Ca and implications for the stability of 70Ca,” and Tomoyuki Dantsuka for “Stable supply of liquid helium to researchers on low temperature physics.”