Morinobu Endo


Morinobu Endo is a Japanese physicist and chemist, often cited as one of the pioneers of carbon nanofibers and carbon nanotubes synthesis at the beginning of the 1970s. He demonstrated carbon fibers can be grown by gas pyrolysis and traveled to Orléans, France in 1974 working with Madame Agnès Oberlin at CNRS in her laboratory. He discovered carbon nanotubes in 1976 as part of his studies at University of Orleans in France. He has been awarded the Charles E. Pettinos Award from the American Carbon Society in 2001, "For his pioneering work and applications of carbon nanotubes", Medal of Achievement in Carbon Science and Technology from the American Carbon Society in 2004, "for the discovery of, and early synthesis work on, carbon nanotubes".
Born in Nagano Prefecture in 1946, he studied electrical engineering and received his Bachelor of Engineering and Master's degree in 1969 and 1971 from Shinshu University, Japan, respectively, and obtained "Docteur d`Universite" in 1975 from University of Orléans, France, then Ph.D. in 1978 from Nagoya University, Japan.
In his works, he developed the structural, synthetic research as well as physical properties analysis, mainly on multi-walled carbon nanotubes. He showed that they had a tubular structure of graphite layers grown by ultra-fine iron particle by catalytic process, and developed to mass production process for the first time. This catalytic CVD process has been used as an industrially available mass production method, both substrate and floating catalyst processes. Present CCVD process has been expecting to grow the wide range of carbon nanotubes by controlling the growth site as well as their nanostructure.
His main research interests are science and applications of "nanocarbons" such as carbon nanotubes, and he has contributed to development of new composites and high-performance energy storage devices such as lithium ion battery, electric double layer capacitor, and fuel cell, based on such structure controlled advanced carbons.
Since 1990, he is a professor of Education and training of electrical and electronics engineers, and now is also the Director of Institute of Carbon Science & Technology, both at Shinshu University.
He is one of the international advisory members of “CARBON” journal. He has been invited at many international conferences and symposium as a plenary lecturer/key-note speaker. In addition, he has joined many international conferences as a chairman, organizer and advisory board member.

Research fields