Travel guide

Christopher Marrows is Professor of Condensed Matter Physics, and was previously a Reader in the same subject, a lecturer, and before that an 1851 research fellow, funded by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. He was Wohlfarth lecturer in 2011. His research programme concerns materials and devices for future information technology, in particular devices based on electron spin – so-called spintronics. Current areas of interest are chiral magnetism and magnetic skyrmions, quantum spin Hall states, artificial frustrated systems, and magnetostructural phase transitions.

Guoqiang Yu received B.S. degree in physics from Jilin University, Changchun, China in 2007 and Ph.D. degree in condensed state physics from Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China in 2012. In 2012, he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, CA, as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2017, he joined in Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Science as an associate professor. His major research interests are spin-orbit coupling-related spin-orbit torque effect and magnetic skyrmion in room-temperature magnetic multilayers. He is coauthor of more than 70 research papers in the field of spintronics.

Dr. Kang L. Wang is currently Distinguished Professor and the Raytheon Chair Professor in Physical Science and Electronics in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is affiliated with the Departments of ECE, MSE and Physics/Astronomy. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.S. degree from National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan). He is a Guggenheim Fellow, Fellows of American Physical Society and IEEE, and a Laureate of Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan. He is an Academician of Academia Sinica. His awards include the IUPAP Magnetism Award and Néel Medal, the IEEE J.J. Ebers Award for electron devices, SRC Technical Excellence Award, the Pan Wen-Yuan Award, Chinese American History Makers Award, and others. He served as the editor-in-chief of IEEE TNANO, editor of Artech House, editors for J of Spins and for Science Advances and other publications. His research areas include topological insulators – condensed matters and physics; spintronics/magnetics and nonvolatile electronics; quantum information and computing; nanoscale physics and materials; molecular beam epitaxy.

Oleg Tretiakov is currently a Senior Lecturer at UNSW (Sydney, Australia). Oleg’s academic career began at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology where he received his B.S. in Physics and Math. He received his Ph.D. in Physics at Duke University (USA) in 2005. After his Ph.D. he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Johns Hopkins, New York, and Texas A&M Universities. Before his move to UNSW in 2019, he held an Assistant Professor position in the Institute for Materials Research at Tohoku University (Japan). His research is in diverse areas of condensed matter physics and materials science. In particular, he focuses on topics such as spintronics, nanomagnetism, topological materials, thermoelectrics, and dynamics of topological spin textures such as skyrmions and chiral domain walls. He co-authored over 50 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Andrei Slavin received PhD degree in Physics in 1977 from the St.Petersburg Technical University, St. Petersburg, Russia. Dr. Slavin developed a state-of-the-art theory of spin-torque oscillators, which has numerous applications in the theory of current-driven magnetization dynamics in magnetic nanostructures. His current research support includes multiple grants from the U.S. Army, DARPA, SRC and the National Science Foundation. This research involves international collaborations with leading scientists in many countries, including Germany, Ukraine, France, Italy, and the United States. Dr. Slavin is a frequently invited speaker at magnetism conferences around the world.
Andrei Slavin is Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the IEEE and Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Physics Department at the Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA.

Born in 1972, Sinova is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Physics at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. After completing his doctorate at Indiana University in 1999, he became a postdoc at the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas at Austin before becoming a professor of Physics at Texas A&M University in 2003. Among his honors, he has received the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship Award, the Johannes Gutenberg Research Fellowship, the ERC Advance Synergy Grant, National Science Foundation’s Career Award, the Cottrell Scholar Award, and was elected in 2011 a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Dr Lucian Prejbeanu, Spintec Executive Director, 44 years old, holds a Physics degree from Babes Bolyai University in Cluj (Romania) and a PhD in Physics from Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg where he pioneered the work on magnetic nanostructures (nanowires and vortex state magnetic dots). He then joined Spintec where he worked on the thermally assisted MRAM concept, on probe storage and on logic devices based upon domain wall motion under polarized currents. He joined Crocus Technology mid-2006 as R&D manager, where he made key contributions to the development and industrialization of thermally assisted MRAM for which he was awarded the SEE-IEEE Brillouin prize in 2012. He is actually involved in scalable and high speed MRAM concepts and in innovative sensor concepts. Dr. Prejbeanu holds 45 international patents on magnetic memories and magnetic sensors and has authored more than 90 scientific publications and book chapters on nanomagnetism and spintronics (h-index 30, more than 3500 citations).

After getting Ph. D. at Department of Physics, Keio University, Japan, YN moved to Kyushu University in 1998, where YN studied micromagnetics and magnetization dynamics of deep submicron scale ferromagnets under an application of strong microwave field until 2009. This technology has been widely developed for mirowave-assisted magnetic recording which will be commercialized within a few years. In 2010, YN established the group of Physics on Ferromagnetism and Spintronics at Keio University, where nonlinear and non-equilibrium spin transport and spin dynamics are mainly studied in micro-fabricated ferromagnets and those hybrid materials. Recently, YN has focus on the physics of the interconversion between macroscopic local angular momentum in solid, i.e. vorticity, and microscopic angular momentum in electrons, i.e. spin and orbital angular momentum. YN has experimentally demonstrated that a flow of spin angular momentum, i.e. spin current, can be generated using a vorticity of elliptical lattice motion in surface acoustic wave. Moreover, vorticity of electric current owing to a graded electric conductivity in partially oxidized copper film can be utilized to generate spin current. These findings improve the degree of freedom in material design of spintronics devices because we can generate the spin current without using specific materials having strong spin orbit interaction.

Shigemi Mizukami obtained a Ph. D degree from Department of Applied Physics, Tohoku University, Japan. After he worked at College of Engineering, Nihon University, he has joined the device/system group, WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University. He is currently a professor at Tohoku University. His major research interests are spintronic materials, tunnel junction devices, ns-ps magnetization dynamics, fs spin dynamics and THz physics. He has authored more than 150 journal articles in the field of spintronics and magnetism.

Luis Lopez Diaz is professor in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Salamanca. His field of expertise is micromagnetic modelling, in which he has been working on for more than twenty years. During his PhD (Univeristy of Salamanca, 1999), focused on simulating domain wall motion in systems with non-magnetic inclusions, he spent over a year at the Institute for Magnetics Research (The George Washington University). Later on he was postdoctoral Marie Curie fellow in the Thin Film Magnetism Group at the Cavendish Laboratory (University of Cambridge), were he investigated different nanostructured systems, such as nanorings and antidot arrays. Over the last years his work has been oriented towards the field of spintronics, namely current-induced spin-transfer phenomena, such as domain wall motion, self-sustained oscillations, spin wave excitation, etc. He has participated in more than twenty research projects funded by either European, national and regional institutions, being scientist in charge in some of them.

Andrei Kirilyuk obtained his degree in physics (cum laude) from the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology (State University) in 1988, and gained his doctorate at Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Université Paris-Sud in 1993. After postdoctoral stays at Max-Plank-Institut für Mikrostrukturphysik (Halle/Saale) and Radboud University he was appointed assistant and in 2012 full professor of physics in Nijmegen. Andrei Kirilyuk is an expert in the field of (nonlinear) magneto-optics and ultrafast magnetization dynamics, magnetic domain dynamics, magnetic surfaces, ultrathin films and nanomagnetism in general, down to the smallest dimensions.

Andrew Kent is a Professor of Physics and Founding Director of the Center for Quantum Phenomena at New York University. He received a B.Sc. with Distinction in Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University in 1982 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in Applied Physics in 1988. He conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. His research interests are in the physics of magnetic nanostructures, nanomagnetic devices and magnetic information storage. Kent has expertise in thin film growth and characterization, device nanofabrication and high frequency measurements including, ferromagnetic resonance, electron paramagnetic resonance and time-resolved studies of magnetization dynamics. In 2007 he founded Spin Memory (formerly named Spin Transfer Technology), a startup company developing spin torque magnetic random access memory devices he invented at NYU.

Kent is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), has served as chair of APS topical group on magnetism and its applications (GMAG) and is an advisory board member of the Committee of Concerned Scientists. He served on the executive committee of the APS Division of Condensed Matter Physics (DCMP) and Program Co-Chair of the 58th Annual Magnetism and Magnetic Materials conference (MMM 2013). Kent accomplishments were recognized by an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Lorraine (“Docteur Honoris Causa” de l’Universite de Lorraine), in September 2013. He received the French Jean d’Alembert Research Fellowship in 2017 and was named Professor at Lorraine in the 2018 Lorraine University Excellence Initiative.

Vincent Jacques (39 years old) is a CNRS research associate working at Laboratoire Charles Coulomb (Montpellier, France). His research is mainly focused on the study of deep, optically-active, defects in wide bandgap materials and their applications in various fields of research ranging from quantum optics and quantum information science, to nanoscale sensing and hybrid quantum systems. In the recent years, his research group has demonstrated how nanoscale magnetic sensing with a single nitrogen-vacancy defect in diamond can be used as a powerful tool to explore the physics of exotic spin textures in thin magnetic materials. He has published more than 75 articles in international peer-review journals. He is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation, and he was recipient of the Edouard Branly prize from the “Fédération française des sociétés scientifiques” (2013) and of an ERC starting grant (2014).

Prof. Dr. Hans J. Hug received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1993, and his Habilitation on Quantitative Magnetic Force Microscopy at Low Temperatures on Ferromagnetic Materials and High Temperature Superconductors in 2000. He and his team won the Swiss Technology Award for the Development of a High-Resolution Magnetic Force Microscope for the Hard-Disk Industry in 2003.
After rejecting a position as a full professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands in 2003, he was promoted to Titularprofessor at the Department of Physics of the University of Basel and took a position as a laboratory head at Empa – the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research in 2004.
Prof. Hug also served as the director of the ETH domain CCMX platform for Nano- and Micrometer Scale Materials Characterization and as a supervisory board member in two startup companies.

Axel Hoffmann has obtained his Diploma degree in physics from the RWTH Aachen in 1994 and his PhD degree in physics from the University of California – San Diego in 1999.  Subsequently he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow.  In 2001 he joined the Argonne National Laboratory as a staff scientist, and became in 2014 the Senior Group Leader of the Magnetic Thin Film Group within the Materials Science Division.  In 2019 he joined the Department of Materials Science an Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Full Professor.  His research interests encompass a wide variety of magnetism related subjects, including basic properties of magnetic heterostructures, spin-transport in novel geometries, and biomedical applications of magnetism.  His main research focus has recently been on pure spin currents investigated by magnetotransport and magnetization dynamic measurements.  He has more than 200 publications, five book chapters, three magnetism-related U.S. patents, and edited two books.  He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Physics and a fellow of the American Physical Society, American Vacuum Society, and IEEE.  His awards include Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Magnetics Society in 2011, Outstanding Researcher Award by the Prairie Section of the American Vacuum Society 2015, President’s International Fellowship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2016, and the Distinguished Performance Award of the University of Chicago in 2017.

Burkard Hillebrands is full professor of experimental physics at the University of Kaiserslautern. After studies at the University of Cologne and a postdoctoral stay at the Optical Sciences Center in Tucson, Arizona he was associate professor at the University of Karlsruhe in 1994. Since 1995 he is full professor at the University of Kaiserslautern. From 2006 to 2014 he was Vice President for Research, Technology and Innovation of University of Kaiserslautern. From 2016 to 2017 he served as Scientific Director of the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden. His research field is experimental magnetism, in particular magnonics. He is particularly interested in nonlinear magnonic phenomena, magnonic crystals, magnon gases, magnon condensates and magnonic supercurrent phenomena in view of applications in novel information technologies such as magnon logics.
He serves as president of the European Magnetism Association, and as Chair of the of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), Commission C9: Magnetism. He is member, Chair of the Class of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, and Vice President of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz. He is member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech). He is IEEE Fellow, APS Fellow and Fellow of the Institute of Physics, London. In 2005 he was Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Magnetics Society. In 2016 he received an ERC Advanced Grant of the European Commission. He served on the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Magnetics Society and was Honors&Awards Chair. Since 2018, he is Chair and Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), and also Member of the HZDR Supervisory Board.
He has published more than 400 refereed articles, book contributions, and several patents.

Pietro Gambardella graduated summa cum laude in Physics from the University of Genova and obtained his PhD degree from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), with a thesis on the growth, electronic, and magnetic properties of metallic nanowires. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institut for Solid State Physics in Stuttgart, Germany and a research assistant at EPFL until 2005. In 2006, he was appointed ICREA Research Professor at the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology in Barcelona. Since 2013 he is Full Professor in the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich. His research interests are in the areas of magnetism, spintronics, and interface physics.

Eric Fullerton is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and NanoEngineering and is an Endowed Chair and Director of the Center for Memory and Recording Research. He received his B.Sc. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College in 1984 and his Ph.D. in Physics from UC San Diego in 1991. Previous to joining UC San Diego he held research positions at Argonne National Laboratory, the IBM Almaden Research Center and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. His current research focuses the synthesis and characterization of magnetic nanostructures, both as a probe of materials in reduced dimensions and for the development of novel information technologies. He has co-authored >350 journal articles, been issued 51 US patents, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the IEEE and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Olivier Boulle is a CNRS researcher in spintronics in Spintec, Grenoble, France. He did his phd thesis in the unité mixte de physique CNRS/Thales in Palaiseau, France and received his PhD degree in physics from University Paris 6 in 2007. He is an expert in nanomagnetism and magnetization dynamics induced by spin currents. His current research interest lies in magnetic topological spin textures, such as  magnetic skyrmions, and their manipulation using electrical current. He is currently the principal investigator of a project on topological excitations founded by the US research agency DARPA, as well as a young researcher French research agency ANR project on  magnetic skyrmions. He co-authored 48 publications in peer-reviewed journals as well as 3 international patents.

Prof. Johan Åkerman received his Ph.D. in Materials Physics from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2000. After a post-doc at University of California, San Diego, he joined Motorola, for four years, to be responsible for MRAM reliability. The MRAM technology he helped to launch remains the most commercially successfully MRAM to date. In 2005, he returned to Sweden to start his own research group at the Department of Materials and Nanophysics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. In 2008 he was recruited as Full Professor to the Physics Department at University of Gothenburg, while remaining a Guest Professor at KTH. Prof. Åkerman has been working with spintronic technology for the last 20 years and has authored over 240 scientific papers, cited about 9500 times, and has given over 100 invited talks. He is also the founder and CEO of two start-up companies, NanOsc AB, commercializing spintronic devices, and NanOsc Instruments AB, designing and manufacturing spectrometers for ferromagnetic resonance measurements at cryogenic and room temperatures. His main projects are related to spin torque and spin Hall nano-oscillators, with particular focus on mutual synchronization, magnetodynamical solitons, and oscillator networks for neuromorphic computing.

Jacqueline M. Cole is Head of Molecular Engineering at the University of Cambridge. She concurrently holds the BASF/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship in Data-Driven Molecular Engineering of Functional Materials, where she is engaged in data science and computational methods that predict and thence experimentally validate materials for photovoltaic, magnetic, and catalytic applications. She holds a joint appointment between the Physics Department (Cavendish Laboratory) and the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at Cambridge. She is 50% seconded by the ISIS neutron and muon facility, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK. Her research is highly interdisciplinary. Accordingly, she holds two Ph.D. degrees: one in physics from the University of Cambridge and one in chemistry from the University of Durham. She has received a number of awards and honours including the following: the Royal Society Clifford Patterson Medal and Lecture (2020), the 1851 Royal Commission 2014 Fellowship in Design (2015–18), a Fulbright Award (all disciplines Scholar, 2013–14), and an ICAM Senior Scientist Fellowship (2013–14) for the smart material design of dye-sensitized solar cells; The Vice-Chancellor’s Research Chair, University of New Brunswick, Canada (2008–2013); a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (2001–11); a Senior Research Fellowship (2002–2009) and Junior Research Fellowship (1999–2002) from St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, UK, for the development and application of in situ light-induced single-crystal X-ray diffraction; the Royal Society of Chemistry SAC Silver Medal and Lecture (2009) for her contributions to the development of photocrystallography and advanced methods in neutron diffraction; the Brian Mercer Feasibility Award (2007) for innovation in nanotechnology; the 18th Franco-British Science prize (2006) for collaborative research and cooperation between France and Britain; and the first British Crystallographic Association Chemical Crystallography Prize (2000) for her research on nonlinear optical materials. Before moving to Cambridge, she held a postdoctoral position in physics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Prior to this, she undertook a Ph.D. in chemistry through an international studentship between the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France, and Durham University. Her university studies began at Durham University where she graduated with first class honours in chemistry in 1994. In her spare time, she has also obtained a B.Sc. Hons. degree in mathematics (2000–4), a diploma in statistics (2004–5), a certificate in astronomy and planetary science (2006–7), a diploma in physics (2007–8), and a B.Eng. Hons. degree in engineering (2010–14) all through the Open University.

Kerem Y. Camsari graduated in 2015 with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University and continued as a post-doctoral researcher with the Supriyo Datta group. His PhD established a “modular approach” to connect a growing set of materials and phenomena to circuits and systems, a framework that has also been adopted by others. In his own postdoctoral work, he used this approach to establish the concept of p-bits and p-circuits as a bridge between classical and quantum circuits.

Supriyo Bandyopadhyay is Commonwealth Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University where he directs the Quantum Device Laboratory. Research in the laboratory has been frequently featured in national and international media (newspapers, internet blogs, magazines, journals such as Nature and Nanotechnology, and internet news portals). The laboratory’s educational activities were featured in a pilot study conducted by the ASME. Prof. Bandyopadhyay was named Virginia’s Outstanding Scientist by Virginia’s Governor Terence R. McAuliffe in 2016. His alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India named him a distinguished alumnus in 2016. His current employer Virginia Commonwealth University bestowed upon him the Distinguished Scholarship Award (given annually to one faculty member in the University) and the University Award of Excellence (the highest honor the University can bestow on a faculty member). His department gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award for sustained contributions to scholarship, education and service (one of two given in the department’s history). His earlier employer, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, conferred on him the College of Engineering Research Award (1998), the College of Engineering Service Award (2000) and the Interdisciplinary Research Award (2001) given jointly by the College of Engineering, the College of Science, and the Institute for Agricultural and Natural Resources. In 2018, he received the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. This is the highest award for educators in private and public universities in the State of Virginia and recognizes outstanding scholarship, teaching and service. Prof. Bandyopadhyay has authored and co-authored over 400 research publications and presented over 150 invited talks and colloquia across four continents. He has also authored/co-authored three classic textbooks that have taught the field of spintronics and quantum device theory to students across the world. Prof. Bandyopadhyay is a Fellow of IEEE, APS, IoP, ECS and AAAS.

Massimiliano Di Ventra obtained his undergraduate degree in Physics summa cum laude from the University of Trieste (Italy) in 1991 and did his PhD studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne in 1993-1997. He has been Visiting Scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Research Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University before joining the Physics Department of Virginia Tech in 2000 as Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2003 and moved to the Physics Department of the University of California, San Diego, in 2004 where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2006.

Di Ventra’s research interests are in the theory of quantum transport in nanoscale and atomic systems, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, DNA sequencing/polymer dynamics in nanopores, and memory effects in nanostructures for applications in unconventional computing and biophysics.

He has been invited to deliver more than 300 talks worldwide on these topics including 14 plenary/keynote presentations and 10 talks at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society.

He has been Visiting Professor at the Technion, Israel (2017), Technical University of Dresden (2015), University Paris-Sud (2015), Technical University of Denmark (2014), Ben-Gurion University (2013), Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2012, 2011), and SISSA, Trieste (2012).

Di Ventra has published more than 200 papers in refereed journals (he was named 2018 Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics), has 4 granted patents, co-edited the textbook Introduction to Nanoscale Science and Technology (Springer, 2004) for undergraduate students, he is single author of the graduate-level textbook Electrical Transport in Nanoscale Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and of the trade book The Scientific Method: Reflections from a Practitioner (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is the co-founder of MemComputing, Inc.

Albert Fert is Emeritus Professor at Université Paris-Sud and Scientific Director at the UMR CNRS/Thales laboratory he co-founded in 1995.

In 2007, Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) in 1988. The GMR has led to important applications and, for example, has led to an increase of the capacity of information storage in the magnetic hard disks by a factor of about thousand. In addition, the discovery of GMR kicked off the development of a new type of electronics exploiting the spin of the electrons and called spintronic. Significant contributions to this development came from Fert’s team.

In the recent years, Albert Fert has been one of the pioneers of the research in the new field of the magnetic skyrmions. His research today is mainly on skyrmions and on spintronic phenomena exploiting topology and spin-orbit interactions in low dimension systems (from topological insulators to Rashba bi-dimensional electron gas).