Faculty Staff
Materials Systems and Dynamics
Okabe, Toru H.
Professor
Ph. D.
Ph. D.
Rare Metals (Minor Metals), Materials Processing Engineering, Metal refining
Resource Recovery and Materials Process Engineering Laboratory
okabe [at] iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp
TEL: +81-3-5452-6312 FAX: +81-3-5452-6313
Educational background:
March 1988 Bachelor of Engineering, Metallurgy, Kyoto University
March 1990 Master of Engineering, Metallurgy, Kyoto University
March 1993 Doctor of Engineering, Metallurgy and Materials Science, Kyoto University
Profile
I was born in Kyoto in 1965. I received a Bachelor of Engineering degree, in metallurgy, from Kyoto University in 1988. I began my doctoral course in the same graduate school to research the processing of reactive metals, such as titanium and niobium, and completed the course in 1993. After earning the doctoral degree, I worked for 3 years as a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States. Then, I worked as a research associate at Tohoku University for five years. In 2001, I became an associate professor at the Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo. After my associate professorship at the same institute, I became a professor in 2009. Since 2019, I became a Vice President of the University of Tokyo.
Currently, I specialize in materials science, environmental science, resource circulation engineering and rare metal process engineering. For more than 30 years, I have consistently pursued research on smelting/recycling "rare metals" or "specialty metals" or "less-common metals". I have also been developing a new processing technology for future-materials such as titanium, with the ultimate goal of realizing processing technology that changes rare metal to common metals. Recently, in addition to the research on the innovative production technology, I have been working on new recycling and environmental technology of rare metals, such as niobium, tantalum, scandium, tungsten, rhenium, and precious metals.