Logo

23 Facts About Stuart Parkin

1.

Stuart Stephen Papworth Parkin was born on 9 December 1955 and is an experimental physicist, Managing Director at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the Institute of Physics of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg.

2.

Stuart Parkin is a pioneer in the science and application of spintronic materials, and has made discoveries into the behaviour of thin-film magnetic structures that were critical in enabling recent increases in the data density and capacity of computer hard-disk drives.

3.

Stuart Parkin is commonly referred to as the "spin doctor".

4.

Stuart Parkin was a consulting professor in the department of applied physics at Stanford University and director of the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center, which was formed in 2004.

5.

Stuart Parkin joined IBM in 1982 as a World Trade Post-doctoral Fellow, becoming a permanent member of the staff the following year.

6.

In 2007 Stuart Parkin was named a distinguished visiting professor at the National University of Singapore, a visiting chair professor at the National Taiwan University, and an honorary visiting professor at University College London.

7.

Stuart Parkin has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Aachen, Germany and the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.

Related searches
Max Planck
8.

In 1989 Stuart Parkin discovered the phenomenon of oscillatory interlayer coupling in magnetic multilayers, by which magnetic layers are magnetically coupled via an intervening non-magnetic metallic spacer layer.

9.

Stuart Parkin found that the sign of the exchange coupling oscillates from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic with an oscillation period of just a few atomic layers.

10.

Remarkably, Stuart Parkin discovered this phenomenon in thin film magnetic heterostructures that he prepared in a simple home-made sputtering system.

11.

Stuart Parkin, moreover, showed that this phenomenon is displayed by almost all metallic transition elements.

12.

Stuart Parkin made numerous other fundamental discoveries which continued the development of the field of "spintronics" of which he is recognised as a prolific scientist.

13.

Later Stuart Parkin improved magnetic tunnelling junctions, a device invented in the 1970s by Julliere, and revolutionized by Jagadeesh Moodera of MIT.

14.

Stuart Parkin has received two ERC Advanced Grants: The first was awarded in 2014 and focused on spin-orbitronics for electronic technologies.

15.

Stuart Parkin has authored over 670 papers and has more than 123 issued patents.

16.

Stuart Parkin is the chief editor of Spin, one of World Scientific's newest journals, which publishes articles in spin electronics.

17.

In 2009, Stuart Parkin received the IUPAP Magnetism Award and Neel Medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

18.

In 2012, Stuart Parkin was awarded the Von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society.

19.

In 2023, Stuart Parkin was named a Clarivate Citation Laureate in Physics, an award given out to scientists considered likely to receive a Nobel Prize in the future.

20.

Stuart Parkin received the 2024 APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research for contributions to spintronics and data storage.

21.

Stuart Parkin is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Gutenberg Research College.

22.

In 2008, Stuart Parkin was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

23.

Since March 2016, Stuart Parkin is an International Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters.