The Nukiyama Memorial Award
Prof. Masahiro Nomura as the eighth recipient of the Nukiyama Memorial Award
The 8th Nukiyama Memorial Award for 2026 was awarded to Dr. Masahiro Nomura, Professor at The University of Tokyo, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the fields of nano and microscale thermal engineering.
He has boldly expanded his research domain from quantum electronics to thermal engineering, establishing new academic principles in nano/microscale heat transfer as a world-leading authority in phonon engineering. Through the conceptual proposal of “from photonics to phononics” and the demonstration of ballistic phonon transport, he achieved innovations in thermal control and made significant contributions to applied technologies such as semiconductor cooling and thermoelectric power generation. His academic and international influence has been recognized as exceptionally outstanding, and he was deemed most deserving of the Nukiyama Memorial Award 2026.
The award ceremony and the awardee’s lecture is scheduled at IHTC-18 (The 18th International Heat Transfer Conference) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on August 3rd, 2026. Dr. Nomura received a plaque, a certificate, and a prize of 500,000 JPY.
The Nukiyama Memorial Award honors the legacy of Shiro Nukiyama, a pioneering heat transfer scientist. Nukiyama addressed the challenges of boiling phenomena and published a groundbreaking paper that introduced the Nukiyama curve (boiling curve), which clarified the nature of these phenomena. This influential work was conducted in the 1930s when heat transfer research was still in its infancy, and Nukiyama himself was under forty years old. The award is given every two years to a scientist under the age of fifty for outstanding contributions to the field of Thermal Science and Engineering.
The call for nominations for the 8th award was open from June 1, 2025, to September 30, 2025. The Award Committee then evaluated all nominees impartially and rigorously to select the awardee.
| Chairperson | Taku Ohara | (Tohoku University, Japan) |
|---|---|---|
| Vice Chairperson | Mamoru Tanahashi | (Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan) |
| Ryo Shirakashi | (The University of Tokyo, Japan) | |
| Gang Chen | (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) | |
| Chang-Ying Zhao | (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China) | |
| Khellil Sefiane | (The University of Edinburgh, UK) | |
| Saša Kenjereš | (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands) |