Technology Academy Finland has named IBM Fellow Stuart Parkin to receive the 2014 Millennium Technology Prize in recognition of his discoveries, which have enabled a thousandfold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives. Parkin’s innovations have led to a significant expansion of data acquisition and storage capacities, which in turn have underpinned the evolution of large data centers and cloud services, social networks, and music and film distribution online. Parkin is a leading innovator in the field of spintronics, which relies on the magnetic spin of electrons rather than their charge to store bits. His discoveries rely on magnetoresistive thin-film structures and the development of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) spin-valve read head. Following the discovery of GMR in 1988, Parkin rapidly transformed this scientific observation into a practical data-storage technology. The prize recognizes technological innovation and is worth one million euros. Parkin is an IBM Fellow, consulting professor at Stanford University, director of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, and Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg.
