Interview No.5　WANG WEICAN　物質理工学院

I have been doing research in the Tago Laboratory of the Department of Chemical Science and Engineering, Tokyo Tech from 2019 to 2022. I like watch football games, especially watch games in stadiums. I watch Kawasaki Frontale home game a lot due to the easy accessibility from my house. I really recommend you go to their home stadium once, fan atmosphere there is awesome. From the time I joined Tokyo Tech till now, many things have changed. New buildings, new scholarship projects, new equipment, etc. I feel very lucky to be a part of Tokyo Tech, and I hope you so.

Research Outline

My research title is “Study on Hydrodeoxygenation of Biomass-Derived Polyols to Value-Added Chemicals on Carbon-Supported Metal Catalyst”. The main target of this research is to develop a novel production process of chemicals from biomass using cheap & effective catalyst. To achieve this goal, the species of catalyst active metals, species catalyst supports, synthesis method of catalyst, reaction conditions, and reactor designs were investigated. In the case of diols production from biomass-derived polyols, the conversion increased from 10 to 30% using the newly developed process compared with the process using conventional catalyst.

Experiences of publishing research papers on peer-review journals

As a doctoral student, you may have to publish your research findings on some peer review journals to acquire graduation requirements. So, knowing the ABCs of the processes of publishing research papers will be essential to you. In this article I would like to share my experience about publishing research papers from preparation to the final print proof stages. Here I want to thank my supervisors, Prof. Tago and Dr. Fujitsuka, who helped me a lot during my doctoral course. It is without their valuable advice and kindly help.

The first thing sensei suggested me to do was to image a big picture of the story we want to deliver to our audiences. The editor, reviewer, and common readers. If you are a hardworking person like me, you may have tons of data in hand before you want to publish them. But maybe not all this data is attractive enough to our audiences. Just take what you need to complete your story, and you may add the rest when necessary.

Then, I can start to prepare the manuscript. In the last step I have taken a big picture of our story, then in this step I make it as an outline, about what I want to tell in each paragraph in manuscript. It is always easier to make and check the logic flow in a simple outline rather than in the formal manuscript. About the manuscript writing, I highly recommend you prepare it by separating different chapter as individual files. In this case, your supervisor can check the completed part while you are preparing the next chapter. It is very helpful to improve efficiency of the whole processes.

After finishing the nice manuscript, it is time to submit it to some journals. Notice that different journals may require different formats of manuscript or graphic art works. Check them out before your submission.

After submission, congregation! Honor yourself with some delicious food, alcohols, or anything that makes you happy, because there are more hard works waiting after receiving the comments from revisers. Whatever how strict these comments may look like, they can be very constructive to improve the quality of your work. Although I wrote these long words like an experienced research paper writer, I spent more than 1 year to get my first paper published. Rejection sometime happens, don’t need to worry, just go next. I believe you can do it much better than me (after reading this experience article).

Message

I think it is a privilege for me to have been study in Tokyo Tech as a doctoral student. In here, you can have an open and modern research atmosphere, state-of-the-art technologies, friendly people from all over the world, and sufficient financial support. Hope you also enjoy your campus life in Tokyo Tech.