Setsuhisa Tanabe is a Professor of Material Chemistry at Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Japan.  He received his PhD in 1993 at Department of Industrial Chemistry, Kyoto University, where he earned B.S. and M.S degrees also.  After working as an assistant professor, he became an Associate Professor in 2001 and was promoted to a full Professor in 2008.  He was a visiting scientist at Rutgers University, NJ during 1996-1997, an invited professor at University of Rennes I, France in 2010 and 2016, and at University of Gdansk, Poland in 2019.

He is the author of >270 original papers, >25 book chapters, and >40 review papers on rare-earth doped luminescent materials for upconversion lasers, optical fiber amplifier for telecommunication, LED phosphors and persistent phosphors.  He has served as a plenary, keynote or invited speaker at >140 international conferences and at >200 domestic meetings & seminars.  He was the Chair of Technical Committee on Optoelectronic Glasses (TC20) of International Commission on Glass (ICG) during 2003~2011 and was a member of Steering Committee of ICG during 2013~2020.  He was awarded W.E.S. Turner Award from ICG in 2012 as well as several Academic Awards from The Ceramic Society of Japan, The Chemical Society of Japan, The Rare-Earth Society of Japan and so on.  He is also a Fellow of SPIE.  He now serves as an Editor of Journal of Luminescence.

He joined ACerS in 1996, has been active in Glass and Optical Material Division and served as an organizer at many Meetings including GOMD.  He is the recipient of Darshana and Arun Varshneya Frontier of Glass Science Award of ACerS and gave its Lecture at GOMD Meeting in 2018.