Kenji Fuchigami, pictured in the laboratory of Jian Shen at ORNL, has an unusual path to the Ph.D.  He attended Nagoya University in Japan and received a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Physics and then continued at Nagoya to earn a Master of Engineering Degree in Quantum Engineering.  After graduation he went to work at the Research Laboratory in IHI (Ishikawajiama-Harima Heavy Industries) Corporation. After eight years he received a scholarship to study abroad from the Japan Cooperation Center, Petroleum via IHI. In the Fall of 2005 he entered graduate school at UTK. After several trips back to Japan and IHI he completed his thesis in 2008.  His thesis is titled “Atomically Resolved STM Studies of the Perovskite Manganite Thin-Film Surfaces.”   In a seminal experiment Kenji demonstrated that you could tune the sutructure-funtionaliity relationship at the surface of a transition-metal oxide by controlling the oxygen content.  He was able to reversibly go from a metallic to insulating surface.  The Figure on the left below shows his results.

• “Tunable Metalicity at La5/8Ca3/8MnO3(001) Surface by Oxygen Overlayer,”  K. Fuchigami, Z. Gai, T. Z. Ward, L. F. Yin, P.C. Snijders, E. W. Plummer, and J. Shen, submitted Phys. Rev Letters, 102, 66104 (2009).
  
  
• “Reemergent Metal-Insulator Transitions in Manganites Exposed with Spatial Confinement,” T. Z. Ward, S. H. Liang, K. Fuchigami, L. F. Yin, E. Dagotto, E. W. Plummer, and J. Shen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 247204 (2008).