Yasuhiro Iijima was born in Tokyo, Japan on Dec. 27th, 1962. He received B. Eng. Degree in applied physics from the University of Tokyo in 1987. He joined Fujikura Ltd. and explored wire processing of high Tc cuprate superconductors especially using vapor phase deposition under the national program consigned by New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), MITI. In 1991, he first produced cube-textured thin template film on random polycrystalline substrate by using the Ion-Beam-Assisted Deposition (IBAD) process, and applied it for the first demonstration of biaxially textured high Jc RE-Ba-Cu-O coated conductors. He concentrated entirely on the industrialization of roll-to-roll large-area deposition process for high quality RE-Ba-Cu-O coated conductors using IBAD technique and finally achieved quite uniform and good throughput wire process even with artificial pinning centers, especially by the additional development of hot-wall Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) process. He published over 150 papers and gave over 20 invited lectures including updated results obtained in Fujikura, where he is currently the Executive Fellow. 

He received a Ph.D. degree in materials engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2005. He was the recipient of Award on Superconductivity Science and Technology from The Society of Non-Traditional Technology in 1998, Best Review Paper Award from Japanese Society of Applied Physics in 1999, both for the invention of IBAD process and proposal of biaxially aligned RE-Ba-Cu-O conductor, Technical Progress Award in 2014, and Achievement Award on Industrial Technology in 2017 from Cryogenics and Superconductivity Society of Japan, for industrialization of REBCO coated conductor applicable for magnetic field coils.