The Fulrath Awards promote technical and personal friendships between professional Japanese and U.S. ceramic engineers and scientists and encourage a greater understanding among the diverse cultures surrounding the Pacific Rim. The awards recognize individuals for their excellence in research and development of ceramic sciences and materials. Each of the awardees receives a certificate at the ACerS Annual Meeting banquet, which epitomizes the “Bridge Across the Pacific” theme that the award has come to symbolize since its inception in 1978.
Nomination Process
Completion of the nomination form that includes a letter of nomination and a copy of the nominee’s resume. Nominees must be 45 or younger at the time of award presentation (October). Nominations remain active for 5 years or until the nominee reaches 45 years.
There are 5 awardees total: 1 U.S. Academic; 1 Japanese Academic; 1 U.S. Industrial; 2 Japanese Industrial.
All awardees shall each receive complimentary registration to attend the ACerS Annual Meeting and banquet and a $2,000 award, contingent upon sufficient funds being available in the Fulrath Award Endowment Fund. Each awardee is expected to participate in the Fulrath Symposium and to present a 20- or 40-minute technical paper addressing the topical area for which they were recognized.
The U.S. academic awardee will attend the annual meeting of the Ceramic Society of Japan the following year and present a paper at that meeting. While in Japan, the U.S. awardee is also expected to visit universities and industrial laboratories and present seminars as arranged by members of the Japanese Fulrath Memorial Association Committee.
Contact
Erica Zimmerman
ezimmerman@ceramics.org
Award Winners
Kazuyoshi Izawa
Kazuyoshi Izawa is a researcher at the Institute for Fundamental Technology in Kyocera Corporation, Japan. He received his B.S. in Applied Chemistry Engineering (2004) and Ph.D in Engineering (2008) from Kumamoto University. He joined Kyocera in 2008.
His work focuses on the reliability of Ni inner-electrode multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) under high-temperature loading, particularly by identifying and evaluating localized areas of low resistance in MLCCs just before electrical breakdown. Notably, he has succeeded in visualizing the conduction path formed only in the local region of a single dielectric layer from the cross section in the stacking direction. His research captures the essential behavior of the insulation degradation according to the weakest link model, and the series of evaluation techniques is expected to contribute to both industry and academia in the field of insulation degradation of electronic components.
Dr. Izawa has authored 7 technical articles, including one accepted in 2020 that was selected as an APL Editor’s Pick. He has received the 74th Technical Encouragement Award (The Ceramic Society of Japan) and the 2019 Technology Promotion Award (Japan Fine Ceramics Association).
Shuichi Funahashi
Shuichi Funahashi is Senior Manager R&D Department of Frontier Technology, New Technology R&D Center, Corporate Technology & Business Development Unit at Murata Mfg. Co., Ltd. In March 2004, he graduated from the Faculty of Science, Kyoto University and in 2006, he graduated from Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies. He joined Murata Manufacturing in April 2006 and left as a researcher at Randall Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University in 2015. He returned to the Murata plant in November 2017.
Ichiro Fujii
Ichiro Fujii is an Associate Professor of Graduate Faculty of Interdisciplinary Research at University of Yamanashi, Japan. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Materials Science from Tohoku University, Japan in 2003 and 2005, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2010. He joined University of Yamanashi as a researcher in 2010, and he joined Ryukoku University, Japan as an Assistant Professor in 2012. He moved back to University of Yamanashi as an Assistant Professor in 2017 and became an Associate Professor in 2022.
He has studied dielectric, ferroelectric, and piezoelectric materials, since he joined Penn State University. His major research achievements include (1) the development of the structure-property relationship in lead-free BaTiO3-Bi(Mg1/2Ti1/2)O3-BiFeO3 piezoelectric ceramics and (2) the fabrication of the electro-optic transparent ceramics by a conventional pressureless sintering technique. Recently, he has studied the solid-state crystal growth of lead-free piezoelectric single crystals.
He has been a member of ACerS since 2019. He received the Edward C. Henry Award from the Electronics Division in 2020.
Jennifer L.M. Rupp
Professor Jennifer L.M. Rupp FRSC is the professor for electrochemical materials at TU Munich researching materials for next energy conversion and storage and until recently was affiliated as faculty to MIT, she is also Co-Founder and CSO of Qkera GmbH a battery material producer.
She earned her PhD degree at ETH Zurich Switzerland and was affiliated as a visiting and senior scientist at MIT (2012-2011) and the National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan (2011). She was a non-tenure track Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich (2012-2016). In 2017, she joined as faculty MIT, where she was promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT) until 2023.
She has published more than 130 papers, holds more 25 patents, and being a frequent speaker and panel member of the World Economic Forum, enjoys discussing material tech trends on the theme of energy with the public, economists and policy makers. Rupp also enjoys engaging with companies all around the world through both consultancy and collaborations focused on material processing, business, and electrochemical device & product engineering (e.g. battery, sustainable fuel processing, sensing, electronic companies). Recently she Co-Founded the battery material manufacture company Qkera to translate CO2 reduced solid state battery manufacture to energy storage products and serves as the chief strategy officer (CSO). Through her career she has won numerous awards and received honors from academies and industry including being an elected member since of 2024 National Academy Leopoldina and since 2021 of the Royal Chemical Society, the 2018 Merck Displaying Future Awards for novel energy conversion devices, the 2017 BASF and Volkswagen Science Award for her battery research, 2018 Merck Award, and many others. In 2019, she founded the LILA Mentorship program for Minorities in Engineering and Sciences.
Valerie Wiesner
Dr. Valerie Wiesner is a Senior Materials Research Engineer in the Advanced Materials and Processing Branch at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) in Hampton, Virginia. She began her NASA career as a Materials Research Engineer in the Ceramic and Polymer Composites Branch at NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) in Cleveland, Ohio, after completing a Pathways Internship as a Ph.D. student. Her research has spanned evaluating environmental degradation of ceramic coatings and composites for extreme environment applications ranging from reusable hypersonic and gas turbine engines to lunar and planetary exploration and surface operations.
Dr. Wiesner investigates materials and related technologies for lunar dust tolerant applications. Additionally, she is developing testing methods to evaluate material and device performance under lunar-like conditions in a laboratory environment to expedite the advancement of technology solutions to enable a sustainable human presence on the lunar surface. Her recent work has included evaluating degradation of lunar dust tolerant materials after exposure to the low Earth orbit (LEO) space environment on the 2022-2023 Materials on the International Space Station Experiment (MISSE-16), as well as to two additional materials experimental payloads planned for MISSE-20 with launch expected later in 2024. She has contributed to two materials experiments slated for flight and subsequent exposure on the lunar surface via Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 in 2024. She has also contributed to advancing ceramic matrix composite (CMCs) for reusable hypersonic applications and environmental barrier coatings designed to protect CMC components for gas turbine engines caused by particulates, such as sand and volcanic ash, when ingested by aircraft engines.
She is a past chair of The American Ceramic Society (ACerS) Engineering Ceramics Division (ECD) and symposium organizer at conferences, including the International Conference on Advanced Ceramics and Composites (ICACC). She actively supports and leads STEM engagement and mentoring efforts at all education levels. She has received awards, including the NASA Early Career Achievement Medal and ACerS Robert L. Coble Award for Young Scholars. She holds a Ph.D. in materials engineering from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, B.A. in physics with certificate in Japanese language from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and certificate in Japanese language and culture from Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Prior to graduate school, she spent one year working as a primary and junior high school teacher and translator for the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education in Japan.