She is the designer and creator of Ni(tmdt)2, the world's first single-component molecular metal.
[1] "Over the course of my career, one of the major difficulties I've encountered has to do with advancing to a new position, and I think this was probably a general problem for women scientists in Japan."
She was a 2009 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science laureate,[1] "for her contribution to the development of molecular conductors and the design and synthesis of a single-component organic metal".
[7] The implications of Kobayashi's work is part of an emerging family of new materials with interesting and exploitable properties.
Since then variations based on zinc and copper have been created and studied.