Professor Yoshi-Hiko Ohtsuki, Japanese plasma physicist. Ohtsuki works at Waseda University. In 1990, he reported in Nature the first successful production of ball lightning in the laboratory. The portrait was taken in August 1991, when Ohtsuki visited England during his studies of crop formations. Ohtsuki was investigating whether these mysterious patterns of flattened plants in fields of wheat, barley and other crops might be caused by a phenomenon related to his work in plasma physics. Crop formations started to occur frequently in the mid-1980s in south-west England.