After graduating from the faculty of engineering at Keio University in 1983, Mutsuko Hatano joined the Central Research Laboratory of Hitachi, Ltd and engaged in research on nano-scale devices, mobile displays, and power electronics. Hatano received a PhD in engineering from Keio University in 1991. She was a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley from 1997 to 2000. Hatano was promoted to chief researcher at the Central Research Laboratory in 2005 and served as the project manager of environmental electronics.

In 2010, Hatano joined Tokyo Tech as a professor at the department of physical electronics, Graduate school of science and engineering. From 2020 to 2022, she was representative director and president of the Japan Society of Applied Physics. She was research director at the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology from 2019 to 2024. Hatano has been a member of the Science Council of Japan since 2014 and an executive member of the Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, Cabinet Office since 2022.

Hatano’s main research fields are quantum sensing and power electronics based on wide-gap semiconductors, and semiconductor physics and devices. She is a fellow of the Japan Society of Applied Physics and a senior member of IEEE, and was general chair of Quantum Innovation 2023.