Masataka Nakazawa

Masataka Nakazawa (born 17 September 1952) is a Japanese researcher in optical communication engineering. He is a distinguished professor at Tohoku University in Japan. His pioneering work on erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) has made a significant contribution to the development of global long-distance, high-capacity optical fiber network. and then used it as an optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR). This enabled a fault to be located in a 130 km-long single-mode fiber, which remains the world record distance. He then began research on an erbium-doped fiber laser in 1987 and amplifier in 1989. After Dr. R. J. Mears of Prof. Payne’s group reported the first EDFA in 1987, Dr. Nakazawa used a 1.48 μm InGaAsP laser diode (LD) to pump the erbium fiber after employing the LD for Raman amplification at 1.55 μm in 1988. He invented the LD pumped erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), which remains in commercial use.

He subsequently undertook intensive work on high-speed optical transmission technology using ultrashort Gaussian pulses, optical solitons, optical Fourier transformation, and Nyquist pulses. Nakazawa’s work spans diverse areas of photonics including optical communication, various fiber lasers, and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) coherent transmission with the highest multiplicity of 4096. Recently, he has been concentrating on Mode locking technology for the generation of various optical pulses and a QAM quantum noise stream cipher with continuous variable quantum key distribution (QKD).

He has published more than 500 academic journal papers from the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE).

Professional society membership He is a Fellow and Honorary Member of the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE), a Fellow of the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP), a Life Fellow of IEEE, and a Fellow Emeritus, OPTICA (formerly OSA). He also served as a Director at Large of the Optical Society of America (OSA) in 2007, on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Photonics Society in 2013,

Awards and honors 1989 - Sakurai Kenjiro Memorial Award 1992 - OSA Fellow 2002 - Inoue Harushige Award from Japan Science and Technology Agency 2003 - Ichimura Industrial Award from Research Development Corporation of Japan 2005 - OSA Robert W. Wood Prize 2006 - Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates 2009 - Japan’s Prime Minister’s Award for Industry-Academia-Government Collaboration Meritorious Achievement 2010 - IEEE Quantum Electronics Award 2013 - Japan Academy Prize 2013 - C&C Prize 2014 - OSA Charles H. Townes Award 2023 - Japan Prize