Sumio Iijima was educated at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. After completing his Ph.D. in physics at Tohoku University in Sendai, he moved to Arizona State University in Phoenix, Arizona. There, in postdoctoral research and later as a research scientist from 1970 to 1982, he worked on high-resolution electron microscopy. He is a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, and a Research Fellow at NEC Laboratories.
Iijima revealed the first electron micrograph showing atoms in a crystal. Iijima also worked as a visiting scholar at Cambridge University in 1979, where he carried out electron microscopy of graphite. He moved back to Japan in 1982 to join the ERATO ultra fine particles project, where he succeeded in a dynamic observation on metal clusters. Iijima has been a research fellow at NEC since 1987 and discovered carbon nanotubes in 1991. He is a recipient of the 1996 Asahi Award, the 2001 Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize, B. E. Warren Diffraction Physics Award, Seto Award, Nishina Memorial Award, Asahi Award, Tsukuba Prize, and the McGroddy Materials Prize for 2002 from the American Physical Society.
Information as of April 2002