He obtained his Ph.D. in Metallurgy from Kyushu University in 1996 and was a postdoctoral research associate at Lehigh until 1998. He was an Associate Professor at Research Laboratory for High Voltage Electron Microscopy (HVEM) in Kyushu in 1998 until he returned to Lehigh University as a Research Scientist in 2001. In March 2007, he joined to National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) as a Staff Scientist mainly assigned for analytical electron microscopy. At NCEM, he also participated in the TEAM project.