D. degree, he joined the Electrical Communication Laboratory of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Public Corporation in 1980.
[1] Currently, he is a director of Kanazawa University (part time) and a specially appointed professor/ distinguished professor at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University[1] He introduced erbium ions into optical communication in 1984, when he constructed the first erbium (Er3+): glass laser operating at 1.55 μm,[2] and then used it as an optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR).
This enabled a fault to be located in a 130 km-long single-mode fiber, which remains the world record distance.
[15] Nakazawa’s work spans diverse areas of photonics including optical communication, various fiber lasers,[16][17] and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) coherent transmission with the highest multiplicity of 4096.
During his 40-year career he has received 5 paper awards and three centennial milestone certificates of commendation[22] from the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE).