Central Lakes College welcomes Yoshinao "Yoshi" Hirai as a full-time physics instructor with the start of the Fall Semester 2010. Yoshi comes to CLC after a year at Rochester Community and Technical College and two years prior as an assistant professor (fixed term) at St. Cloud State University. He earned his PhD in Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007, specializing in experimental condensed matter physics. He has Bachelor's degrees from UW-Madison in both Physics and Engineering Mechanics with Astonautics Option (1996). He is from Kamakura, Japan. In 2007 he was presented with the Joseph Dillinger Teaching Excellence Award and was an honor student doing research and teaching assistantships at UW-Madison.