The student seminar held in December 2022 was the third student seminar I attended during my studies, and at the same time, my first as a doctoral student. To be honest, much like first-year master’s students, first-year doctoral students are generally not expected to have many concrete results. The reason is simple: they are still considered to be in an adaptation phase—especially those who did not complete their master’s program at the University of Tsukuba.

My situation, however, was slightly different. Since I had already completed my master’s program and conducted research in the same laboratory, I could be said to have a certain “privilege” compared to new students who truly started from scratch in April 2022. Because of this, I felt an additional sense of responsibility—at the very least, to demonstrate that my two years of prior experience gave me some advantage.

That said, the research topic I worked on as a doctoral student was not directly related to my master’s research. This meant that I still had to start over, although fortunately not entirely from zero. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I started from ten rather than zero.

This may sound like an excuse, but during the first half of 2022, I spent a significant amount of time writing my first journal paper as a first author. The process was long and demanding: drafting the manuscript, conducting additional experiments to strengthen the arguments, and running simulations to demonstrate consistency between the experimental results and both numerical and analytical models. All of this required a considerable amount of time and effort.

As the student seminar approached, I was fortunate enough to discover a new method that enables the simultaneous measurement of thermal conductivity and the thermo-optic coefficient (the change in refractive index with temperature) by heating a transparent substrate using a laser. This method was particularly interesting and showed strong potential for future research.

However, to keep this page light and accessible, I will not go into the technical details of the method here. I will write about the technical aspects separately in a dedicated section that focuses on my past research projects.