C9: News

“For pioneering contributions to the invention and development of rare-earth-iron-boron high-performance permanent magnets.”

Dr. Sagawa is the founder and president of NDFEB Corporation and an adviser to Daido Steel. He is best known as the inventor of the world’s strongest permanent magnet, the Nd-Fe-B sintered magnet. After the invention, he contributed to the mass production of these magnets, while contributing to basic research by creating single crystals of the main phase of the magnet. He received numerous awards and prizes including Osaka Science Prize (1984), APS James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials (1986), Asahi Prize (1990), Honda Memorial Prize (2003), the Japan Prize (2012), NIMS Award (2018), IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies (2022), the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2022) and Honda Prize (2023). At the age of 80, he is still highly active in the field of permanent magnets.

“For outstanding contributions to the understanding of ultrafast, current-driven magnetic domain wall motion and relativistic magnetization dynamics.”

Dr. Lucas Caretta is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering at Brown University. Caretta completed his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a GEM Consortium Fellow. Following his graduate work, he studied as a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and University of California (UC) President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. From atoms to devices, Caretta’s research focuses on discovering, designing, and developing novel materials physics in complex oxide thin films, with a focus on ferroic systems.

“For outstanding contributions to the discovery of magnetic quantum materials through advanced synthesis methods.”

Dr. Alannah Hallas is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a Principal Investigator at the Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute. She completed her BSc in Chemistry at the University of Winnipeg in 2011 and her PhD in Physics at McMaster University in 2017. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University before starting her faculty position at UBC in 2019. Alannah’s research centers on the design and discovery of new magnetic quantum materials, whose quantum properties she studies using x-rays, neutrons, and muons. Dr. Hallas is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and a Sloan Research Fellow.

“For fundamental contributions to the understanding, detection and control of spin dynamics and spin currents in magnetic oxides.”

Dr. Chunhui Du is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She received her B.S. in physics from East China Normal University in 2010, and Ph.D. in Physics from the Ohio State University in 2015. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University before joining UCSD in March, 2019. Du’s research focuses on developing state-of-the-art quantum metrology to investigate spin transport and dynamic behaviors in emergent condensed matter systems at the nanoscale. Du is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award, the Air Force Young Investigator Award, and the Harold and Suzy Ticho Endowed Faculty Fellowship (UCSD).

Dr. Barthélémy is a Professor at University Paris-Saclay and a researcher at Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS-Thales. After a PhD thesis on giant magnetoresistance and perpendicular anisotropy in magnetic metallic multilayers, she reoriented her research in 1998 and developed at Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/Thales a new direction of research on “multifunctional oxides”. This encompassed researches on magnetic tunnel junctions with record of tunnel magnetoresistance using half metallic manganite electrodes, ferroelectric tunnel junctions with demonstration of their potential for memory or neuromorphic computing, high mobility two-dimensional electron gases at oxide interfaces, multiferroic materials and heterostructures opening the way to electrical control of magnetic state. She was awarded the Louis Ancel prize of the French Physical Society in 2008, the Silver medal of CNRS in 2010, the Nikola Tesla prize of the Petrović Njegoš foundation in 2015 and the Lazare Carnot prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 2017.

Dr. Spaldin is a Professor of Materials Theory at ETH Zürich and a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is best known for her development of multiferroic materials, which combine simultaneous ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity, for which she received the APS McGroddy Prize for New Materials, the Koerber European Science Prize, the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award and the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist. She is a passionate science educator, coordinator of her department’s curriculum revision project “The Materials Scientist 2030, Who is She?”, and holder of the ETH Golden Owl Award for excellence in teaching. When not trying to make a room-temperature superconductor, she can be found playing her clarinet, or skiing or climbing in the Alps.

Dr. Can Onur Avci is a principal investigator at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC) since February 2021. He received his Ph.D. degree from ETH Zürich in 2015 and was awarded the ETH Medal for outstanding doctoral thesis. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2016-2018 and at ETH Zürich between 2018 and 2021. He recently received an ERC Starting Grant to develop spintronics devices based on magnetic insulators. His research focuses on spin-orbit-driven phenomena and spin currents in low dimensional systems, electrical control of magnetization, and spintronic memory and logic devices.