Stuart Parkin wins Millennium Technology Prize for data storage
Technology Academy Finland (TAF) awarded Stuart Parkin as winner of the 2014 Millennium Technology Prize.
He was honoured for technological discoveries which have enabled a thousand-fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives. His innovations paved the way for streaming movies and other media via the Internet.
Parkin's specialisation is in spintronics, in which the magnetic spin of electrons is used to save data. This technology has contributed to an explosion in memory capacity globally, allowing information to be stored in magnetic disk drives accessed online via the 'Cloud'.
His discovery of oscillatory interlayer coupling in magnetic multilayers led to IBM's development of the GMR head. He also proposed using spintronic magnetic tunnel junction elements in MRAM. Parkin's group has unique capabilities for rapidly preparing a wide variety of magnetic thin-film materials.
"I am extremely happy and excited to have won the Millennium Technology Prize because of course it's one of the most important prizes in the scientific community," Parkin said. "I am very humbled and proud to have been awarded the prize, which is a tremendous validation by the scientific community of my work and its impact on the world as a whole."
Parkin is an IBM Fellow based at the Almaden Research Centre in California and director of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics.
The winner, who follows in the footsteps of past winners such as World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee and LED pioneer, Shuji Nakamura, will be honoured at a ceremony in Helsinki, Finland, on Wednesday 7th May 2014.
The prize is worth one million Euros ($1.38 million).
