On the 3rd of April, NBRJ held its first webinar. Our first guest speaker was Dr. Nazmul Ahsan of the University of Tokyo. Dr. Nazmul is a Research Associate Professor, Department of New Energy, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo. In 2020, he was named ‘Fellow of the International Association of Advanced Materials (FIAAM, Sweden)’ to contribute to the “Advancement of Materials”. The title of his talk was “Breeding my research life – facing the dilemmas.” I had the privilege to moderate this talk. Dr. Nazmul touched on several vital points in his speech, especially for the young and early career researchers. I am giving some highlights of his address below. 

Dr. Nazmul emphasized the importance of being part of your professional network to succeed in an academic career. Often, you enter your professional network through your supervisor. Conversely, your supervisor will naturally try to increase his influence in the network by establishing his students as much as possible. Therefore, Dr. Nazmul suggested using your supervisor to your advantage in a good way. Make good relationships with your supervisor and earn his trust. Make a good team and try to learn to make effective communication with him. 

Dr. Nazmul then suggested having a mentor who can guide us throughout our careers. Therefore, you should choose a mentor as early as possible. Your mentor needs not be your supervisor or someone from your research field. Instead, it is better to have a mentor from outside of your research area. This way, your mentor can give you feedbacks objectively. 

Dr. Nazmul then focused on the importance of obtaining competitive research funds, such as the JSPS research grants, to establish himself as an independent researcher. We need to know the rules and guidelines beforehand and write the proposal according to the guidelines. A crucial point for a proposal is to illustrate your ideas using visuals rather than texts. 

One fantastic story we got to learn is that Dr. Nazmul once quit his Ph.D. There were many reasons behind his decision. Among them, the one reason that got my attention was he found it difficult to make sense of the data from his experiments. After spending some years in his own company, he came to realize the meaning of the data, and then he thought of giving it another shot. He came back to resume his Ph.D. and successfully earned his Ph.D. This story should encourage many Ph.D. students and early career researchers to persevere with his research. If necessary, one may take some time off, but we learned that perseverance could give you excellent results in the end. Dr. Nazmul also demonstrated his prowess in not only experiment design but also in theoretically evaluating different materials. As a result of his excellency, he could develop a solution for increasing the efficiency of solar cells much higher than the existing ones. 

As you can guess, the whole talk and the following Q&A session were so vibrant and exciting that we had to extend the original time slot. In the end, we had to end the session forcefully, although we could have continued as long as we could without any sign of fatigue in the audience. Such was the depth and weight of this speech. We were mesmerized. 

Finally, on behalf of the NBRJ, I would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Nazmul for giving us an excellent and timely speech. We are looking forward to having Dr. Nazmul again in the future to hear his other stories. With this, I conclude this summary. I wish for the continuous development of NBRJ and all members. 

MAHFUZUL ISLAM
JUNIOR ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
KYOTO UNIVERSITY