Hideki Shirakawa

Hideki Shirakawa (白川英樹, Hideki Shirakawa^?) (Tokyo, Japan, August 20, 1936) is a chemist and Japanese university professor awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in the year 2000.

Biography

PhD in Chemistry from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1966. That same year he held the position of associate professor at the Institute of Materials Sciences at the University of Tsukuba (Japan). Since 1982 he has been a tenured professor at that same institution, although currently with the chair of emeritus professor.

He is also related to Naoko Takahashi, the 2000 Sydney Olympics women's marathon gold medalist.

Scientific research

His research in the field of polymer fields, especially acetylene, led him to the discovery, while he was an associate researcher in the Chemistry Laboratory of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, of the conductive properties of this material when contaminated with traces of other substances.

Shirakawa's discoveries interested the New Zealand chemist Alan G. MacDiarmid and the American physicist Alan J. Heeger, with whom they began a fruitful scientific and research relationship that resulted in the joint publication of the article Synthesis of organic polymers conductors of electricity: halogen derivatives of polyacetylene (CH) n, in the prestigious Journal of Chemical Society in the summer of 1977, announcing the discovery of polyacetylene.

In 2000, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, an award he shared with his research colleagues Alan J. Heeger and Alan G. MacDiarmid, for the discovery and development of conducting polymers.