Full Circle in Itoshima
December 17, 2025
In November 2025, Professor Moungi G. Bawendi of MIT, recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, visited Shoei Chemical’s Itoshima quantum dot fab and the nearby Ito Campus of Kyushu University. For those of us connected to Nanosys from the early days, the visit felt like a true full-circle moment.
Professor Bawendi was an early technical advisor at Nanosys, just after our founding. The quantum dot synthesis concepts he helped pioneer, work recognized by the Nobel Prize, are still in use today. Since Shoei acquired Nanosys in 2023, the same core ideas have been engineered and scaled into high volume manufacturing at the Itoshima site. Seeing the origin story and the industrial reality side by side made the week memorable.
From a test tube to massive scale
During his visit to Shoei Chemical’s Itoshima QD fab, Professor Bawendi toured the facility with our team, spending time on the factory floor and walking through the production areas where quantum dots are made at scale. While we cannot show the installed equipment in photos for proprietary reasons, the visit provided a concrete view of how an approach that began in the lab has been translated into a repeatable manufacturing process with industrial throughput.
A fitting highlight came when Professor Bawendi signed the mass production equipment on the factory floor, a small but meaningful marker of continuity between the foundational chemistry and the systems now built to execute it at production scale.
Kyushu University: “Quantum Dots: From Curiosity to Technology”
Following the plant visit, Kyushu University hosted Professor Bawendi for a special lecture at Shiiki Hall on the Ito Campus on Wednesday, November 12, 2025. The lecture, titled “Quantum Dots: From Curiosity to Technology,” drew approximately 700 attendees, including students, faculty, staff, and representatives from Shoei Chemical.
In addition to reflecting on his own research journey, he encouraged students and researchers to stay flexible, stay curious, and persist through setbacks. The Q and A was especially lively, with many thoughtful questions from the audience. Afterward, Professor Bawendi joined a roundtable discussion with chemistry students from the Graduate School of Science, the Faculty of Science, and the Graduate School of Engineering, with candid conversation about research choices and career paths.
The event was made possible through coordination between Kyushu University and Shoei Chemical, aligned with Professor Bawendi’s visit to the Itoshima Plant.
