Masaru Shibata is awarded Japan’s Medal of Honor (“Shiju-houshou”)
The director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam is honored with the Medal with Purple Ribbon.
The Japanese government awards six different types of medals, depending on the field in which the recipient has excelled. The Medal with Purple Ribbon is reserved for academic and artistic accomplishments. Masaru Shibata is being honored for his outstanding scientific achievements in astrophysics. The Emperor of Japan will award the Medal to the Max Planck Director in Tokyo on 21 May 2025.
“I am very pleased to receive this great recognition of my scientific work,” says Masaru Shibata, Director of the Computational Relativistic Astrophysics department at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in the Potsdam Science Park. “And it is a special honor to receive the Medal with Purple Ribbon and have an audience with the Emperor of Japan in his palace in Tokyo. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to the Max Planck Society for continuously supporting my research.”
Research into extreme astrophysical events
Masaru Shibata and his team study numerical relativity, relativistic astrophysics, gravitational waves and multi-messenger astronomy. Their work includes neutron star mergers and the collapse of a variety of massive stars, giving rise to neutron stars, black holes, supermassive black holes and high-energy events such as gamma-ray bursts and kilonovae. Members of the department study the process of these events and their gravitational waves and electromagnetic signals. They investigate how neutron star mergers and a variety of stellar explosions produce heavy elements, laying the theoretical foundations for interpreting the signals from these relativistic phenomena. To do this, the department's researchers run very sophisticated simulations on high-performance computers in Germany and Japan.
Masaru Shibata is director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in the Potsdam Science Park and Professor at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University. He earned his PhD in physics from Kyoto University in Japan. During his time at Osaka University (1993-2000), he became visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States. In 2000, he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo. He joined the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University as a full professor in 2009. Since 2018 he is director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. Shibata is a Fellow of the International Society for General Relativity and Gravitation. He received the Nishinomiya-Yukawa Memorial Prize in 2003 and an Outstanding Paper Award from the Physical Society of Japan in 2008. In 2010, Shibata received one of the Excellent Young Researcher Prizes of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. In 2018, Shibata was awarded the Nishina Memorial Prize, the oldest and most prestigious physics prize in Japan.