The National Academy of Engineering in the USA has honored Prof. Dr. Stuart Parkin with the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize. The physics professor at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Director of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics receives the award for the development of modern hard disk technology. The prize is endowed with 500,000 US dollars and is considered an important award for outstanding technological innovations. Past winners include the inventors of the World Wide Web, GPS technology and the lithium-ion battery. Parkin will receive the award on February 21, 2024 in Washington.
With his research over 20 years ago, Stuart Parkin ushered in a new era of storage technology: His work and patents in the field of spintronics enabled companies to increase the data density on hard disks by a factor of 1,000. This is what made modern storage technologies, such as cloud storage and streaming services, possible in the first place. Even today, most hard disks are based on Parkin's work.
"The rapid development of storage technology would be unthinkable without Stuart Parkin. With his groundbreaking research, he laid the foundation for our modern media world. For this pioneering work, Stuart Parkin is being honored with the coveted Draper Prize and thus joins the list of the most renowned inventors of our time. The fact that such a world-class researcher has been working in Saxony-Anhalt for many years and finds the best conditions here is a strong testament to our excellent scientific landscape," says Saxony-Anhalt Science Minister Prof. Dr. Armin Willingmann.
"Stuart Parkin is a unique innovator. The Draper Prize underlines this once again. On behalf of the entire university, I would like to congratulate our professor on this special award. His groundbreaking inventions laid the foundation for modern information and media technology, i.e. computer clouds, streaming services and other services that we use today as a matter of course. Parkin now quite rightly stands in a row with people whose work shapes the lives of almost everyone," says MLU Rector Prof. Dr. Claudia Becker.
Parkin heads the "NISE - Nano-Systems from Ions, Spins and Electrons" department at the MPI in Halle and is a professor at the Institute of Physics at MLU. In 2014, the top physicist moved to MLU and the MPI as a joint professor as part of an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, Germany's most highly endowed international research award. He previously worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center and Stanford University in the USA. Parkin has received several prestigious awards for his research, including the Millennium Technology Prize of the Finnish Academy of Technology, endowed with one million euros, and the King Faisal Prize. The European Research Council has already funded the physicist twice as part of the coveted ERC Grants. Parkin has published more than 680 specialist articles and registered over 120 patents.
The Draper Prize is the third high-profile award that Parkin has received in recent weeks: In December, the American Physical Society (APS) awarded him the "APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research". In November, Parkin was included in Clarivate's "Citation Laureates 2023" list, which only includes researchers with specialist articles that have been cited more than 2,000 times. This applies to just 0.01 percent of all scientific papers published since 1970.