ALBERT FERT

ALBERT FERT

Birth: 7th March 1938

Albert Fert 

Albert Fert was born on March 7, 1938. He is a French physicist and one of the
discoverers of giant magneto-resistance which brought about
a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. He is currently professor
at University of Paris. He is also the scientific director of a joint laboratory between the National
Scientific Research Centre and Thales Group. Also, he is an Adjunct professor of physics at
Michigan State University. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grunberg.

Fert graduated in 1962 from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He received his master's degree in 1963 at the University of Paris,
and earmed his PhD in 1970 at the Universite Paris-Sud.

In 1988 Fert discovered the Giant magnetoresistance  effect (GMR) in multilayers of iron and chromium which is recognized as the
birth of spintronics; GMR was simultaneously and independently discovered by Peter Grunberg from
the Julich Research Centre. Since 1988, Albert Fert has made contributions to the field of spintronics.

He has won many awards and prizes. Some of them are American Physical Society International Prize for New Materials (1994), Grand prix de physique Jean Ricard of the French
Physical Society (1994), International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Magnetism Award
(1994), Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize (1997), Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique Gold Medal (2003), Wolf Prize in Physics (2006), Japan Prize (2007), Elected to the
French Academy of Sciences in 2004 and Nobel Prize in Physics (2007).