Groundbreakers in the field of Nanotechnology worldwide, these scientists have created new, revolutionary materials and transcendental techniques for fighting diseases, such as those related to the brain and cancer, and for producing artificial tissues and organs. Their work also stands out for its contribution to the protection of the environment and energy saving via the use of new sources of clean energy that may be produced at a low cost.

All these technological innovations and scientific discoveries are of special importance in the fight against poverty, such as the inexpensive purification of drinking water in the planet´s more underprivileged areas. The possibility of using reduced-cost, low-energy consumption sources of light in this fight is likewise worthy of mention.

Sumio Iijima was born in Saitama Prefecture (Japan) in 1939. He discovered carbon nanotubes, materials made from carbon atoms, and their inherent potential in 1991. They constitute the stiffest and strongest fibres known to date, giving rise to a new generation of ultralight, ultrastrong materials. These versatile materials, excellent conductors of heat and electricity which can behave as metals or superconductors, could revolutionize the fields of electronics and computing, among many other applications. One of these has a direct influence on the field of renewable energies, as carbon nanotubes have been shown to be exceptional candidates for the safe storage of hydrogen, one of the fuels of the future.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo in 1963 and completed his Ph.D in solid-state physics at Tohoku University in Sendai in 1968. He is a Professor at Meijo University, Director of the Research Center for Advanced Carbon Materials at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Senior Research Fellow of NEC Corporation and Dean of Sungkyunkwan University Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology (Seoul, South Korea).

Iijima is a member of the main scientific societies in Japan, Europe and the USA and has received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (USA, 2002), the American Carbon Society Award (2004) and the John M. Cowley Medal from the International Federation of Societies for Microscopy (2006). Outstanding among the latest acknowledgements he has received are the Japan Society of Applied Physics Outstanding Achievement Award (2002), the Imperial Award (Japan, 2002), the J. C. McGroddy Prize from the American Physical Society (2002), the Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize from the European Physical Society (2002), the Physical Sciences Award of the Microscopy Society of America (2005), the Balzan Prize (Switzerland, 2007), the Fujiwara Award (Japan, 2007), the Gregori Aminoff Prize in Crystallography from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2007) and the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience (Norway, 2008).