Toshiko Yuasa

was a Japanese nuclear physicist who worked in the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). She was the first Japanese female physicist, and was known as the Japanese Marie Curie. She spent most of her career advancing nuclear physics and fostering scientific collaboration between Japan and France.

Biography

Early life and education Toshiko Yuasa was born in Taitō Ward, Tokyo, in 1909. Her father was an engineer who worked for the Japanese patent office. Her mother was from a traditional literary family – her mother's grandfather was a leading poet scholar in late Edo Japan. Toshiko was the second-youngest of seven children. She graduated in 1934.

Yuasa was inspired by the discovery of artificial radioactivity by Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute in Paris. Because of difficult research conditions in Tokyo, Yuasa moved to Paris in 1940, even though the Second World War had just begun in Europe. She continued her research in Christian Gerthsen's laboratory at the University of Berlin and developed her own beta-ray spectrometer. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 led to the surrender of the Japanese state in early September and foreign occupation. and she was posthumously conferred the Order of the Precious Crown of the Third Class in 1980. the Franco-Japanese partnership of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) opened the Toshiko Yuasa Laboratory in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, building on their international collaboration since 2006.

In 2026, Yuasa was announced as one of 72 historical women in STEM whose names have been proposed to be added to the 72 men already celebrated on the Eiffel Tower