Obituary: Ken’ichi Shimizu (1928-2024)
Ken’ichi Shimizu, Professor Emeritus of Osaka University and Honorary member of Japan Institute for Metals, passed away at the age of 96 on November 12, 2024. We felt deep sorrow at his passing, since he was a sincere and friendly person, who was a regular attendee of ICOMAT conferences and established good rapport with members of the ICOMAT society.
Ken’ichi Shimizu, Professor Emeritus of Osaka University and Honorary member of Japan Institute for Metals, passed away at the age of 96 on November 12, 2024. We felt deep sorrow at his passing, since he was a sincere and friendly person, who was a regular attendee of ICOMAT conferences and established good rapport with members of the ICOMAT society.
Prof. Shimizu was born in Hokkaido in 1928. He graduated from the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Tohoku University in March 1951, and joined the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University in April of the same year as a research assistant. He was promoted to assistant professor and associate professor before being promoted to professor in 1966.
He retired from Osaka University in 1992 and was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus in April of the same year. He then continued to work as professor at Kanazawa Institute of Technology until 2008 (and as visiting professor since 2006).
Prof. Shimizu has made several world-leading achievements in the fundamentals and applications of martensitic transformations in metallic materials. Specifically, he has elucidated the crystallographic mechanism of formation and growth for martensitic transformation in ferrous and nonferrous alloys, the mechanisms of shape memory effect and superelasticity, closely related to the transformation, and the effects of stress, magnetic field, and hydrostatic pressure on the transformation.
He also devoted himself to the development of materials analysis techniques using electron microscopes, and was the first to develop and apply a five-lens ultra-high-voltage electron microscope capable of selected-area electron diffraction in the nano-area, and an analytical electron microscope with a field-emission electron gun capable of simultaneously performing high-resolution observations and compositional analysis.
For these research achievements, he received the Seto Award from the Japanese Society of Electron Microscopy in 1962, the title of Fellow from ASM International in 1985, the Honda Memorial Award in 1996, and the Japan Institute of Metals Award in 2002; his research achievements have been highly evaluated worldwide.
In international exchange, he played a leading role as the chairman of the organizing committee for the first and fifth International Conference on Martensitic Transformations and as a member or advisor of the International Committee of the same conference. In addition, as the first president of the Shape Memory Alloy Association (ASMA, Japan) from 1993 to 2006, he contributed greatly to the development of industrial applications of this alloy.
( By Tomoyuki Kakeshita; President of Fukui University of Technology, Professor Emeritus of Osaka University )
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