Professor Yusuke Yamauchi

Professor Yusuke Yamauchi specialises in the design of functional nanospaces in inorganic materials with controlled compositions and morphologies toward practical applications

Professor Yamauchi focuses on the design of novel nanocrystals and nanoporous materials toward various applications including batteries, fuel cells, solar cells, chemical sensors, field emitters, and photonic devices. Specifically, nanoporous metals can be produced through surfactant-based synthesis assisted by electrochemical methods. Owing to their metallic frameworks, nanoporous metals possess high electroconductivity and high surface areas, holding promise for a wide range of electrochemical applications. Furthermore, he has developed several approaches towards controlling the orientation of tubular nanochannels. The controlling the geometry of nanochannels at a macroscopic-scale is important for innovative applications such as chemical devices and electrodes with enhanced diffusions of guest species.

Professor Yusuke Yamauchi received his Bachelor degree (2003), Master degree (2004), and Ph.D. (2007) from the Waseda University, Japan. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS), Japan, to start his own research group. At the same time, he started to serve as a professor to supervise PhD students at Waseda University. He led a team of more than 40 members including senior scientists, postdocs, technical staffs, and PhD students. After being granted the ARC Future Fellowship, in May 2016, he joined the Institute for Superconducting & Electronic Materials (ISEM), Australian Institute for Innovative Materials (AIIM), The University of Wollongong (UOW) as a full professor. In 2017, he moved to The University of Queensland (UQ). Presently, he is a senior group leader at the AIBN and a full professor at School of Chemical Engineering. He concurrently serves as an honorary group leader at NIMS, a visiting/adjunct/honorary professor at over 50 universities in the world (UOW, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Tianjin University, NanJing Tech University, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Kyung Hee University, National Taiwan University, King Saud University, King Abdulaziz University, and Waseda University, etc), and an associate editor of the Journal of Materials Chemistry A published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

He has published more than 900 papers in international refereed journals with with >70,000 Times Cited (h-index >137, Google Scholar; h-index >128, Web-of-Science). He was selected as one of the Highly-Cited Researchers in Chemistry in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 and in Materials Science in 2020, 2021, and 2022..He has received many outstanding awards, such as the NISTEP Award by National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (2016), the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ) Award for Young Chemists (2014), the Young Scientists' Prize of the Commendation for Science and Technology by MEXT (2013), the PCCP Prize by the Royal Society of Chemistry (2013), the Tsukuba Encouragement Prize (2012), the Ceramic Society of Japan (CerSJ) Award (2010), and the Inoue Research Award for Young Scientists (2010). Recently, he was selected as one of Australia's Top 40 Researchers in a special Stars of Research Report published by The Australian.

Industry engagement and collaborations

With a view towards the practical applications of our nanomaterials, Professor Yamauchi has established many industrial collaborations with Toyota Motor Corporation, NBC Meshtec Inc., TPR Co., Ltd., Canon Inc., Advanced Ricoh Company Ltd., The Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), etc.

Professor Yamauchi has established scientific collaborations with world-leading researchers at NIMS (Japan), Waseda University (Japan), University of Tokyo (Japan), University of Kyoto (Japan), Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), National Taiwan University (Taiwan), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Korea), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China), East China Normal University (China), Chinese Academy of Science (China), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA), University of Cambridge (UK), Stockholm University (Sweden), King Saud University (Saudi Arabia) etc.

Key publications

For a complete list, click here.

Yamauchi Y. (2019) Nano-architect. Nature 567, S12.

Wang J, Tang J, Ding B, Malgras V, Chang Z, Hao X, Wang Y, Dou H, Zhang X, Yamauchi Y. (2017) Hierarchical porous carbons with layer-by-layer motif architectures from confined soft-template self-assembly in layered materials. Nature Communications 8, 15717.

Jiang B, Li C, Dag Ö, Abe H, Takei T, Imai T, Hossain MSA, Islam M, Wood K, Henzie J, Yamauchi Y. (2017) Mesoporous metallic rhodium nanoparticles. Nature Communications 8, 15581.

Tang J, Yamauchi Y. (2016) Carbon materials: MOF morphologies in control. Nature Chemistry 8, 638.

Li C, Dag Ö, Dao TD, Nagao T, Sakamoto Y, Kimura T, Terasaki O, Yamauchi Y. (2015) Electrochemical synthesis of mesoporous gold films toward mesospace-stimulated optical properties. Nature Communications 6, 6608.

 Geng F, Ma R, Nakamura A, Akatsuka K, Ebina Y, Yamauchi Y, Miyamoto N, Tateyama Y, Sasaki T. (2013) Unusually stable ~100-fold reversible and instantaneous swelling of inorganic layered materials. Nature Communications, 4, 1632.