01 · Introduction
Academic journey
Yuki Tanaka works on solid-state ion conductors, a field with a long history of laboratory results that do not survive contact with a production line. Her laboratory is unusual in that it maintains a pilot-scale coating facility alongside its synthesis benches — an expensive decision she defends on the grounds that most of the interesting failures occur at that transition.
She trained in applied chemistry at Tokyo, took her doctorate on grain-boundary transport, and spent two years at a battery manufacturer before returning to academic research with a considerably revised sense of which problems mattered.
Her group holds four granted patents, three of them concerning process rather than composition.
