Takunori Taira (M’93) was born in Fukui, Japan, in 1960. He received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Fukui University, Fukui, Japan, in 1983 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in communication engineering from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1996. From 1989 to 1998, he was a Research Associate at Fukui University, a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University, during 1993 to 1994. He is currently an Associate Professor with the National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Institute for Molecular Science (IMS), Okazaki, Japan, and an Invited Professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI), Paris, France, in 2006, and Universite Joseph Fourier, France, in 2011.
Prof. Taira was a member of the Program Committee of Advanced Solid-State Photonics (ASSP) OSA from 2005 to 2009 (Program Chair of ASSP 2008, General Chair of ASSP 2009), while serving as a member of the CLEO Subcommittee #4, of Application Nonlinear Optics (2006-2008), Program Committee of Nonlinear Optics (NLO) on OSA from 2006 to 2011 (Program Chair of NLO 2009, General Chair of NLO 2011), the board of Associate Editors for Optical Materials (OPTMAT), ELSEVIER, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the board of Senior Associate Editors of the Journal of Optical Materials Express, Optical Society of America (OSA), Washington D.C., USA. He received the “2004 Commendation” Award of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan, for scientific and technological research merits (Japan) in 2004, “OSA Fellow” in 2010 (USA), “IEEE Senior Member” in 2011 (USA), "SPIE Fellow" in 2012 (USA), and "IEEE Fellow" in 2014 (USA)..