7. Profile

• I am a science teacher at Kushiro Meiki Senior High School, in Hokkaido, Japan. Besides teaching natural science to students, I am working on making replicas of snow crystals and studying them. I have a doctoral degree in the study of snow crystals.

• About the new method for making replicas of snow crystals, I got "The Toray Science Education Prize (a fine work)" in 2005. I was given the "Best Paper Award" in 2015 by the Japanese Society of Snow and Ice. A paper on the study that used replicas to examine the surface structure of ice (curling rink) was published in Scientific Reports (Nature Research journal) in 2024.

•  I like to go out to the virgin forests of Hokkaido, especially, the snow fields.