I grew up in Tokyo, Japan, where I received my PhD. After my degree, I moved to Ithaca, NY, for my post doctoral studies of "bottom" quarks. It was meant to be a three year stint in a foreign country to experience something different before I settled into Japanese society for the rest of my life. But life brings surprises. I ended up finding my wife, and established a family in the US.

Even though we were in love with the culture of Ithaca, NY, when I found an opportunity to start a teaching career in Minneapolis, which was described to us by one of our friends as "a big Ithaca," we jumped on it.

Here, I continued to study bottom quarks and also "charm" quark until 2005. When a chance to switch my focus to high-energy frontier was presented, I decided to take advantage of it.

When I started teaching at Minnesota, I knew nothing about class room culture of the US, but since then, the University has provided me with opportunities to learn about how to be a better teacher in American classrooms. My wife, Susan, is an excellent teacher, though not in physics, and artist, and has given me a lot of great ideas about teaching. This has been a great learning experience, and I hope to grow further as a teacher as well as as a mentor to graduate students.

Here are a list of my current and former graduate students.

Current:
* Justin Hietala, PhD. Waiting for data. Expected to finish in the fall 2007
* Seth Cooper, PhD. Started his involvement in CMS in the spring of 2007.

Former:
* Mark Lattery, PhD. finished July 1996. Professor at U. of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.
* Vladimir Savinov, PhD. finished December 1996. Associate professor at Pittsburgh.
* Rupak Mahapatra, PhD. finished in December 2000, Research Associate at UC Santa Barbara.
* Sang-Joon Lee, PhD. Finished in September 2001, Research Associate at Rice.
* Brian Lang, PhD. Finished in December 2006, Staff Scientist, Arete Associates, VA.

Energy Frontier: CMS

In 2005, I changed the focus of my research into the high-energy frontier, which allows us to investigate smaller-scale phenomena. At this scale, some of the symmetries which have been hidden at the larger scale observation are believe to be revealed. In addition, over the last decade, some physicists are speculating, in their effort to solve theoretical inconsistencies in the current theories, that there may be more than 3 spatial dimensions. And evidence for such speculation may be gleaned in the current research. Currently (2007) the experiment is still being constructed, and data will start coming out in 2008.

Heavy Quark and symmetry breaking

Until 2005, I worked on physics of "heavy flavor," studying properties of "bottom" and "charm" quarks. They give rise to systems similar to hydrogen atom, but consistingof quarks instead of a proton and an electron. In hydrogen atom, the proton and the electron are bound to each other by electric force, but in the heavy quark system, theyare bound by the so-called strong force or nuclear force which bind protons and neutrons in nuclei. As a result, my research was useful to study how the strong force behaves.