Stuart Parkin

In March 2016, Parkin was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters.

He 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. For these discoveries, he was awarded the 2014 Millennium Technology Prize. Since 1 April 2014, Parkin is a director at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and a professor at the Institute of Physics at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg.

In April 2014, Parkin was awarded the Millennium Technology Prize for his work on spintronic materials, "leading to a prodigious growth in the capacity to store digital information".

Parkin is the recipient of numerous honours, including the Gutenberg Research Award (2008), a Humboldt Research Award (2004), the 1999–2000 American Institute of Physics Prize for Industrial Applications of Physics, the European Physical Society's Europhysics Prize (1997), the American Physical Society's International New Materials Prize (1994), the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award (1991) and the Charles Vernon Boys Prize from the Institute of Physics, London (1991). In 2001, he was named the first "Innovator of the Year" by R&D Magazine and in October 2007 was received the "No Boundaries" Award for Innovation from The Economist.

In 2007 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, The United Kingdom. In 2008, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The Materials Research Network Dresden granted him the Dresden Barkhausen Award in 2009. Parkin has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Aachen, Germany and the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.

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. Parkin found that the sign of the exchange coupling oscillates from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic with an oscillation period of just a few atomic layers. Remarkably, Parkin discovered this phenomenon in thin film magnetic heterostructures that he prepared in a simple home-made sputtering system. Parkin, moreover, showed that this phenomenon is displayed by almost all metalllic transition elements. In what is often referred to as "Parkin's Periodic Table", Parkin showed that the strength of this oscillatory interlayer exchange interaction varied systematically across the Periodic Table of the elements. Parkin made numerous other fundamental discoveries which continued the development of the field of "spintronics" of which he is recognised as a prolific scientist.

A native of Watford, England, Parkin received his B.A. (1977) and was elected a Research Fellow (1979) at Trinity College, Cambridge, England, and was awarded his PhD (1980) at the Cavendish Laboratory, also in Cambridge. He joined IBM in 1982 as a World Trade Post-doctoral Fellow, becoming a permanent member of the staff the following year. In 1999 he was named an IBM Fellow, IBM's highest technical honour.

Later Parkin improved magnetic tunnelling junctions, a device invented in the 1970s by julliere, and revolutionized by Jagadeesh Moodera of MIT. This element can create a high performance magnetic random access memory in 1995. MRAM promises unique attributes of high speed, high density and non-volatility. The development by Parkin in 2001 of giant tunnelling magnetoresistance in magnetic tunnel junctions using highly textured MgO tunnel barriers has made MRAM even more promising. IBM developed the first MRAM prototype in 1999 and is currently developing a 16 Mbit chip.

Stuart Stephen Papworth Parkin (born 9 December 1955) is an experimental physicist, IBM Fellow and manager of the magnetoelectronics group at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He is also 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.