Mainz University's Gutenberg Research College (GRC) awarded a fellowship to the British-American scientist Professor Stuart Parkin. "There is no doubt that Stuart Parkin is a leading scientist in his field," is how Professor Claudia Felser, Director of the Graduate School of Excellence "Materials Science in Mainz" (MAINZ) commented on the award. Parkin is an IBM Fellow, IBM's highest technical honor, and Manager of the Magnetoelectronics Group at IBM Research – Almaden. He is also a consulting professor at Stanford.
His exceptional scientific contributions are demonstrated by the numerous awards and appointments he has received. Stuart Parkin is a member of four national academies: He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences of the USA. He received the "Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize" of the European Physical Society and the "International New Materials Prize" of the American Physical Society. RWTH Aachen University has conferred an honorary doctorate on Parkin, as has the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. He is also a distinguished visiting professor at five other universities, spanning Europe, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea. His seminal scientific achievements are also reflected in the numerous published papers and the more than 85 patents issued in the USA.
In 2008, Stuart Parkin received the Gutenberg Research Award from the Graduate School of Excellence MAINZ. Since then he has worked closely with academics and postgraduates in Mainz and has been mentoring, together with Claudia Felser, Professor of Chemistry in Mainz, MAINZ scholarship student Tanja Graf. Tanja Graf is currently spending her final doctoral studies year in San José, California, where IBM Research – Almaden is based. "We would like to intensify and expand these areas of cooperation on behalf of the Graduate School of Excellence and the University of Mainz", commented Professor Felser.
Stuart Parkin's work is devoted to spintronics, which is also a focal area of the MAINZ Graduate School. Spintronics makes use of the intrinsic spin angular momentum of electrons rather than their electrical charge, as has been the case up to now in conventional micro-electronics and silicon chips. Many important discoveries and developments in this field have been made by Parkin and his team of researchers.
This fellowship will facilitate closer future cooperation between Mainz scientists and Parkin. It will be supplemented by a contribution from the Graduate School MAINZ in the form of two postgraduate scholarships as well as the additional costs needed to fund regular foreign study opportunities for postgraduates. IBM will provide the needed research facilities and infrastructure for the postgraduates in Almaden. The postgraduates will receive their doctorates from Mainz, but Parkin will be their main mentor. Their studies will be split evenly between IBM Research – Almaden in California and Mainz and/or Kaiserslautern.
The MAINZ Graduate School was awarded sponsorship as part of the Excellence Initiative in 2007 and is currently applying for further funding during the second phase of the initiative. MAINZ consists of teams working at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Kaiserslautern Technical University, and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. Outstanding postgraduates in the field of natural sciences from Germany and abroad receive an excellent level of training in the field of materials science at the graduate school.