Hideo Ohno (born 1954) is a Japanese researcher specializing in semiconductor physics, semiconductor engineering, and spintronics. He graduated from the University of Tokyo and completed his doctorate in engineering there in 1982. After working at Hokkaido University, he became a professor at Tohoku University in 1994 and served as its president from 2018 to 2024. His research uses the electron’s spin, the property underlying magnetism, alongside its electric charge. He developed ferromagnetic semiconductors and demonstrated electrical control of their magnetic properties. In the Japanese technical book “Handotai Kessho Seicho” (Semiconductor Crystal Growth), which he edited and coauthored, atomic and molecular processes at crystal surfaces provide the starting point for explaining growth techniques and the properties of the resulting materials. This concern with how materials are formed also informs his work on introducing magnetic functionality into semiconductors. As a coeditor of “Spintronics,” he helped bring together research on electronic devices that exploit spin and coauthored its chapter on the properties of ferromagnetic semiconductors. His work subsequently extended to magnetic tunnel junctions for fast, low-power nonvolatile memory, contributing to integrated circuits that retain information when power is switched off. He received the Japan Academy Prize in 2005 and the Leo Esaki Prize and C&C Prize in 2016. In April 2026, he became president of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).
