Physicist Stuart Parkin, who gave us the ability to store gigabytes and terabytes of data more efficiently, is the recipient of the latest $1.3 million Millennium Technology Prize.
Parkin won the prestigious award for his research into spintronics as an IBM Fellow working at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California and director of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics.
His work uses nanotechnology which allows an electron's magnetic spin to store data instead of the electron's electric charge. This has equated to a thousand-fold increase in storage capacity on a single device and making storage devices more cost efficient and powerful.
While this may not sound important, without Parkin's innovation today's data centers would not be able to hold vast quantities of content and the explosion of cloud storage, video streaming, music downloads would not be possible.
"It's enabled us, essentially, to store all information that we have - in digital form. And this wasn't possible before," said Parkin. "What this little sensing device enabled was a 1,000-fold improvement in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives without changing their cost."
The amount of data storage now possible due to Parkin's research and others is staggering. Parkin estimates a single month's worth of hard disk drive production could easily hold all the information created by mankind since humans first started writing on cave walls.
"I am extremely happy and excited to have won the Millennium Technology Prize because, of course, it's one of the most important prizes in the scientific community. It has been awarded to some really great scientists over the past decade," said Parkin, "The previous winners have proven to be fantastic scientists whose research has had tremendous impact. I am very humbled and proud to have been awarded the prize, which is a tremendous validation by the scientific community of my work and its impact on the world as a whole."
The Millennium Technology Prize has been previously awarded to World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, a stem-cell research pioneer. The biennial award was created by the Finnish government in 2004 to reward those whose innovations improve the quality of people's lives.
