Most important technology award for honorary doctor of the University of Kaiserslautern
Improving the quality of people’s lives with groundbreaking technological innovations in a sustainable manner: These are the principles of the prestigious Millennium Technology Prize, which for applied technologies almost corresponds to a Nobel Prize. Those principles apply to Prof. Dr. Stuart Parkin, Honorary Doctor of the University of Kaiserslautern who is awarded the Millennium Technology Prize 2014. The jury of the Technology Academy of Finland honors his innovations, which, among others, have resulted in a 1000-fold increase in storage densities in hard drives and provide an important basis for the Internet.
Prof. Dr. Stuart Parkin is a longtime cooperation partner of the University of Kaiserslautern, and since 2013 holds an honorary doctorate from the Department of Physics at TU Kaiserslautern. Since 2008 he is closely cooperating with materials scientists and PhD students of the State Research Center Optimas at the University of Kaiserslautern. "Professor Parkin has changed the world with his work for decades, and we are proud of collaborating with him and thus to pass his ingenuity to our students," states Prof. Dr. Helmut J. Schmidt, President of the University of Kaiserslautern, congratulating the award winner.
Stuart S. P. Parkin (born 1955), American-British experimental physicist, is as IBM Fellow holding the highest technical and scientific position at IBM. Since 1982 he heads the magneto-electronics group of the Research Center IBM Almaden Research Laboratory, which is essentially the centerpiece of the success of the Silicon Valley in California. He is also director of the joint Spintronic Science and Applications Center of IBM and Stanford University, and since April 2014 Director at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany. Stuart Parkin does research in the field of spintronics, which is now part of daily life in the form of powerful computer hard drives or sensors for anti-blocking systems in cars. The two Nobel Prize winners Albert Fert, also honorary doctor of the Department of Physics at the University of Kaiserslautern, and Peter Grünberg as well as Stuart Parkin are regarded the principal founders of spintronics.
The Millennium Technology Prize, endowed with 1,000,000 Euros, is the world's most important award for technological innovation and is granted by the Finnish Millennium Prize Foundation every two years since 2004.