Hirotaka Sugawara

Since 2012, he has been serving Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) as a Distinguished Professor and also as a Special Advisor to the President.

After serving as the Director General of KEK for 14 years, he became a Professor Emeritus at KEK and a professor at University of Hawaii, Manoa, in 2003. Concurrently he also served on the Mombusho Council for Research, and for other science councils in Japan. In 2004, he held an Executive Director position at Sokendai Graduate University for Advanced Studies. He became a Director (Washington DC Office) of Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) in 2008.

In 1975, he was promoted to a full professor at the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics (today known as High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)), where he served as the Director General from 1989 to 2003. While serving as the Director General at KEK, he concurrently held positions (professor, councilor, Dean, and steering committee member) at various organizations such as the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), National Institute for Physiological Science (NIPS), National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR), National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), Okazaki National Research Institutes, and Institutes of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS). He also served as a Chair of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) from 1999 to 2002. KEKB, also called a B-factory for its copious production of B-mesons, is a particle accelerator used in the Belle experiment to study CP violation. He contributed significantly to the B-factory project as the Director General of KEK (the Japanese National Laboratory for High Energy Physics). He also provided strong leadership in setting up the long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment connecting the proton synchrotron at KEK (the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization) and Super-Kamiokande (Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detection Experiment, abbreviated to Super-K or SK) in Kamioka, Gifu. He led the launch of J-PARC (Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex) that was jointly developed between KEK and JAEA (the Japan Atomic Energy Agency).

When Sugawara was still a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, he derived a relation for non-leptonic hyperon decay amplitudes called "Lee-Sugawara relation" while studying the symmetry of weak interactions. He received his doctorate from the University of Tokyo in 1966, and has held postdoctoral research positions at Cornell University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Chicago. Upon his return to Japan in 1968, he became a research associate at Tokyo University of Education, and he joined the University of Tokyo as an assistant professor in 1971. "A Field Theory of Currents" is known as the ""Sugawara model," a dynamical model of local currents, in which the energy momentum tensor was expressed as a product of currents," which opened the door to the algebraic formulation of field theories.

Hirotaka Sugawara (菅原 寛孝, Sugawara Hirotaka, born March 15, 1938) is a Japanese physicist, specializing in the theoretical study of particle physics. He is known for the "Lee-Sugawara relation" and "A Field Theory of Currents" aka "Sugawara Construction" of the energy-momentum tensor.

Sugawara was born in 1938 as a son of a Zen Buddhist in Miyagi, Japan. He obtained his BSc in Physics (1961), MSc in Physics (1963), and PhD in Physics (1966), from the University of Tokyo.