High Honor for Honorary RWTH Doctorate Recipient

The Technology Academy Finland has awarded Prof. Dr. Stuart Parkin the Millennium Prize 2014. The British-American scientist will receive the award, worth one million euros, on May 7, 2014, in Helsinki, for his work on optimizing magnetic fixed-disc storage.

Parkin has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Halle an der Saale since April 2014. He is also Humboldt Professor at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Before this he was a manager of the magenetoelectronics group at IBM Almaden Research Center in San José, California, and Director of Spintronic Science and Application Centers at Stanford University. In 2007 he received a honorary doctorate from RWTH at the suggestion of the Department of Physics.

The experimental physicist is originally from British Watford. He developed technology basics, for which he was later awarded the "small Nobel prize" in the early 1990s. This enabled the storage capacity of fixed-discs to increase by thousands. Parkin's scientific work builds on discoveries made by both Nobel Prize in Physics recipients from 2007, Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg.