Honors: He has been the recipient of Morino Fellowship endowed by Morino Foundation (1987), Spectroscopical Society of Japan Award for High-Quality Papers (1989), Chemical Society of Japan Award for Young Scientists (1991),Japan IBM Prize (2000), Fellow of Institute of Physics (2004), The Best Paper Award of the Laser Society of Japan (2008), The 67th Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ) Award (2015), The 7th Japan Society for Molecular Science Award (2016), The Japanese Photochemistry Association Lectureship Award (2017), and Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon (2020).

Research Activities: For more than twenty years, Professor Kaoru Yamanouchi has pioneered the field of Molecular Science. Until 10 years ago, his major research area was that related with intramolecular dynamics of highly excited molecules and clusters. On the basis of the development of laser spectroscopic techniques, he elucidated how the information of ultrafast nuclear dynamics is encoded in high resolution frequency domain spectra. For example, by combination of dispersed fluorescence and stimulated emission pumping spectra of SO2 and acetylene, he was able to elucidate the existence of the stepwise vibrational energy redistribution process. Furthermore, on the basis of the development of tunable vacuum ultraviolet light sources, he elucidated ultrafast dissociation process of OCS on the mostly repulsive potential energy surface in the VUV region. The series of his studies has been known as that demonstrated clearly ultrafast dynamics of molecules in the time domain can be extracted from spectra in the frequency domain.